Starbright Illustrations (blog)

I’ve been working on the tutorials section – including GIMP, Photoshop, etc – at my Illustrations website. It’s going to be a great page when it’s done, with link after link to step-by-step tutorials telling how to paint and render all kinds of images, from sc-fi to children’s book.

But as I was editing it I noticed an ugly problem. When you look at the website on a computer with a wide screen, on an Apple Notebook for example, the title bar is stuck in the left corner and the dividing line below it extends on for an arbitrary number of pixels. It’s really quite untidy, and I’m going to have to fix it.

I’m using Kompozer to create the non-blog part of the site, with all the galleries and tutorials, and it is really quite limited, but I strongly hoped there would be a solution.

This tutorial on using Kompozer to create a site seemed to have the answer. Just put everything in a table that has the precisely attribute and is set to 100%. I quickly gave this a go.

And with a new page, following these instructions it would have been no problem, but this is the main page of my art portfolio website and I have been working on it for a year with more than one web editor, uploading illustrations, moving images and text around and doing a bit of direct poking about in the html as well.

It just wouldn’t work for me for a long time, and then I noticed that deep within the code of the page, its width was being defined. I deleted that line of code and almost everything started working. It only took an hour of trial and error too.

I say almost everything because there was still an annoying white border to the right of the site header. I couldn’t find any way to fix this using the Kompozer WYSIWYG interface, but when I edited the code to copy the same 0 margin value as at left and top, it finally started to look the way I wanted, a solid bar across the top of the screen.

So here is what the illustration site looks like now, oh and there are some nice illustrations to go with my hard won graphic design victory.