Tables / splices from PSD layout keep seperating

Kinda hard to give advice without a concrete example to look at. But a couple of ideas that may help:

1. Don't design for or rely on Dreamweaver's design view - no-one uses it to surf the 'Net anyway.
2. Design for one of the less buggy browsers first-- Safari or Firefox are good; IE decidedly not.
3. Make sure you are using the latest Dreamweaver-- Adobe has done a great job of bringing it out of the last century.
4. Try to wean yourself off tables for layout, and use modern, CSS-based layouts instead.

This last is a lot of work, but has huge benefits; to the designer, the site maintainer, non-visual agents (like Google), and the sighted visitor. There's also a lot of freely given expert help available.

Good luck.

My website is timimagery.com

The more modern CCS layout sounds great. Would you recommend any tutorials that can help me use CCS instead of the PS splices to get the same effect? As for the design view, I'm not too good at coding yet and dreamweaver does seem to give an optimistic interpretation of the final layout in the design view.

As for the site, I'm keeping the gaps at bay by severely limiting the text. I would like to add more text if I could.

If I place a CCS-P element box instead, I find that it won't anchor ontop of the layout, so when I resize my page it won't follow the main graphics and end up somewhere strange depending on window size.

Thanks again

I think that HTML Dog has some good tutorials. There are also two discussion groups I subscribe to: CSS-discuss and the Web Standards Group. Both have very capable folks who are very helpful. I suggest joining one and asking them for guidance. Don't be intimidated by some of the esoteric stuff - they love to help people get started.

There is also this board, of course.

I did not get far with your portfolio - it crashed my browser - but I see a lot of Flash. While Flash is very nice, not everyone has it available or turned on, and may be a barrier to search engines unless you know how to provide the "hooks".

Good luck. From what I did see, your photos deserve a good presentation.

Good advice David, thanks for helping potatomaker. Welcome to the forums, potatomaker!

Photoshop (or whatever image editor you may prefer) is a great place to do proofs/comps, but it isn't good at actually writing the code. You'll really need to learn CSS/HTML for that, as David pointed out. We should definitely write some 'getting started with CSS' articles, thanks for giving us the idea!

Wow thanks all, great message boards. I see Java is sometimes popular with making websites such as my own, but I have'nt poked around with java yet. The old version of my website did fully use css-p element boxes in the layout, but my gripe with using that method was that the elements did not seem to be able to remain centered in the middle of the page, so browser resizes would force users to scroll left or right to see everything.

Thanks again.

This use to happen to me, so I used the free trial of sitegrinder 2 instead. A plugin for photoshop.