Help with deciding upon language!

This is pretty much your standard HTML layout. No need for any special languages at this point. For a layout with div's you'd have HTML something like this:

For a fly-out navigation menu like that, you can do it entirely with CSS as well. Check out the control panel here on the forums. The Drop-down menu there is done entirely with CSS. I belive I borrowed the code from A List Apart.

I'll be back in a minute with a different version of the above using tables. You really ought to learn about how to lay out pages in HTML. The prefferred version is with div's and CSS as I posted above. The "old" way is with tables as a layout framework which I'll show you in a minute.

Here's the tabled version:

Wait! You wanted the background showing? Put in:

body {margin: 50px;} (or however big you want it)

More complete code:

Thank you for the fast and very helpful replies

Megan, im having difficulty with the background though. We want an image for it, and have already got one set up (it looks amazing, my friends business is for her own modelling/photography business and shes incredibly arty) and I cant seem to get the code right. As I understand I want the tables/divs to sit on top of it, but when I do manage to get it appearing through the use of CSS its not shown in full. What would be the code for this?

Very sorry about the lack of knowledge ive got on this Would really appreciate any further help

Cheers

Try what steve has there and see how far that gets you. This is what that code is doing

Background: (obvious)
#? (this means the colour value to show up in behind. So you'd have #ffffff if you wanted white)
url(whatever.jpg) (link to your file)
no-repeat (if you want it to tile, change that to repeat; backgrounds always tile by default so if you don't want them to you have to put in the no-repeat)
fixed (this means that that the background won't scroll with the page. I personally don't really like this effect. It's a little weird)
center (this is the position of the background on the page; there are a range of values you can put here).

You can take a look at all of the background properties here. You can see that steve has combined them all into one rule. It's just more efficient to do it that way rather than listing them all separately. You can also have a background on the whole page (body) or on any div.

If you put up a link to what you've go so far we might be able to help find out what exactly you need to do.

Wow, thanks again for the help

I've managed to get the background working, and am slowly perfecting the positioning of the table (I had to use these in the end, couldnt get the div code to show it properly). Ive also placed an iFrame in the content cell, its shaping up very nicely. We should be getting the web space/domain name within the next couple of days, until then I cant show you anything As soon as I can, I will though.

Thanks again for the help! No doubt I'll be back soon enough in need of more lol

Cheers

Hey
I've finally got the webhosting sorted, and the address is vintageneedles.co.uk
Its very much a work in progress, as you can see. I've got to get a bigger background to stop it tiling on larger screens for one thing. The thing that concerns me the most however is that the table that holds the banner, content and nav bar isnt dead center. Could someone give me the code that would allow me to place it like this? Thanks

Edit: Could people also try 'The Girls' link? For some reason it doesnt work when I myself try to look at it from the net, though other people say it works fine