CSS help, please

Morticia · Mar 13, 2009

swirt said:
Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.

swirt · Mar 13, 2009

Bree said:
swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.

Morticia · Mar 13, 2009

swirt said:
Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

swirt · Mar 13, 2009

Bree said:
swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Bree said:
But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>

Morticia · Mar 14, 2009

swirt said:
Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.

swirt · Mar 14, 2009

Bree said:
swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Morticia · Mar 14, 2009

swirt said:
Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

swirt said:
Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Which may be a long time from now!

EmptyNest · Mar 14, 2009

Bree said:
swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines

swirt · Mar 14, 2009

catlady said:
Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well
They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder
They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)

EmptyNest · Mar 15, 2009

swirt said:
catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.

Morticia · Mar 15, 2009

catlady said:
swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

catlady said:
I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.

I know that site doesn't apply to all of us, but it applies to a lot of us, maybe it's one to consider?

swirt · Mar 15, 2009

catlady said:
swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

I think it is grasping at straws. Google already has a great algo without needing to go backwards and use clickthrough rates. That was attemped years ago by a search engine called "Direct Hit". The problem with ranking sites by clickthroughs is that it immediately turns into a system that favors existing sites and excludes new ones thereby losing freshness and access to new sites.
Time on site tracking can only be done by those sites using analytics, displaying adsense or those viewers using the google toolbar who have the "share data with google" option turned on. That option has a default of "off" and typically only web developers bother to turn it on so they can see toolbar-pagerank numbers. Sure there are a lot of sites using these, but there are also millions of sites that don't, and there is no way google would risk showing a limited pool of results just to favor some metrics that would easilly favor sites that are gamed by more unscroupulous promotional tactics. If this were the case, companies will sprout up like wildflowers in April that offer an army of mercinaries from far off countries browsing and bookmarking your sites using ip proxies that would make it look like natural traffic.

EmptyNest · Mar 15, 2009

swirt said:
catlady said:

swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

Click to expand...

I think it is grasping at straws. Google already has a great algo without needing to go backwards and use clickthrough rates. That was attemped years ago by a search engine called "Direct Hit". The problem with ranking sites by clickthroughs is that it immediately turns into a system that favors existing sites and excludes new ones thereby losing freshness and access to new sites.
Time on site tracking can only be done by those sites using analytics, displaying adsense or those viewers using the google toolbar who have the "share data with google" option turned on. That option has a default of "off" and typically only web developers bother to turn it on so they can see toolbar-pagerank numbers. Sure there are a lot of sites using these, but there are also millions of sites that don't, and there is no way google would risk showing a limited pool of results just to favor some metrics that would easilly favor sites that are gamed by more unscroupulous promotional tactics. If this were the case, companies will sprout up like wildflowers in April that offer an army of mercinaries from far off countries browsing and bookmarking your sites using ip proxies that would make it look like natural traffic.
.

You know..today is just one of those days. I have been overrun with clients emailing about how a certain company has been at conferences touting their SEO skills..for a price of course.
And making them feel like their site is garbage!!!! I for one am tired of playing this game.
I like to do sites for my clients that look good, give all the pertinent information, put in titles, descriptions etc and do the best for my abilities

But what can I say when "those who don't have a clue" and ask.... "why don't I show up at the top in Google?"
I have steered them to your site explanations but I am just tired of trying to tell them nicely.....
IT AIN'T GOINA HAPPEN FOLKS!!! THere is just no way unless there is no other compettion out there:-(

EmptyNest · Mar 15, 2009

ON a different note...computer tech oh wise one...
Friday I installed Adobe reader 9.0 now every time I boot up my computer..it starts windows installer...saying it is installing Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0.
I just hit cancel and go on..but this is a nuisance.. ANy suggestions???

Morticia · Mar 15, 2009

catlady said:
swirt said:

catlady said:

swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

Click to expand...

I think it is grasping at straws. Google already has a great algo without needing to go backwards and use clickthrough rates. That was attemped years ago by a search engine called "Direct Hit". The problem with ranking sites by clickthroughs is that it immediately turns into a system that favors existing sites and excludes new ones thereby losing freshness and access to new sites.
Time on site tracking can only be done by those sites using analytics, displaying adsense or those viewers using the google toolbar who have the "share data with google" option turned on. That option has a default of "off" and typically only web developers bother to turn it on so they can see toolbar-pagerank numbers. Sure there are a lot of sites using these, but there are also millions of sites that don't, and there is no way google would risk showing a limited pool of results just to favor some metrics that would easilly favor sites that are gamed by more unscroupulous promotional tactics. If this were the case, companies will sprout up like wildflowers in April that offer an army of mercinaries from far off countries browsing and bookmarking your sites using ip proxies that would make it look like natural traffic.
.

Click to expand...

You know..today is just one of those days. I have been overrun with clients emailing about how a certain company has been at conferences touting their SEO skills..for a price of course.
And making them feel like their site is garbage!!!! I for one am tired of playing this game.
I like to do sites for my clients that look good, give all the pertinent information, put in titles, descriptions etc and do the best for my abilities
But what can I say when "those who don't have a clue" and ask.... "why don't I show up at the top in Google?"
I have steered them to your site explanations but I am just tired of trying to tell them nicely.....
IT AIN'T GOINA HAPPEN FOLKS!!! THere is just no way unless there is no other compettion out there:-(
.

catlady said:
You know..today is just one of those days. I have been overrun with clients emailing about how a certain company has been at conferences touting their SEO skills..for a price of course.
And making them feel like their site is garbage!!!! I for one am tired of playing this game.
I like to do sites for my clients that look good, give all the pertinent information, put in titles, descriptions etc and do the best for my abilities
But what can I say when "those who don't have a clue" and ask.... "why don't I show up at the top in Google?"
I have steered them to your site explanations but I am just tired of trying to tell them nicely.....
IT AIN'T GOINA HAPPEN FOLKS!!! THere is just no way unless there is no other compettion out there:-(

When you get a new client (or, in this case, deal with old clients) do you send out what you are going to do with explanations? So when your clients are at these seminars, they can confidently say to themselves, 'MY web designer does that already!' You will have to include some blurbs from Google so they understand what's involved, especially if they are in a high-traffic location and they're just getting started with a great website.
If your clients know in advance how you are handling all this stuff they are hearing, they won't panic and they won't fall for the sales pitch. They'll be confident that you are already doing all of these things for them.
Yes, hand holding. BUT, if you do it proactively, and perhaps with an update email every once in awhile (like RIGHT before they go to these conferences) I think you'll run into this less frequently.

swirt · Mar 15, 2009

catlady said:
ON a different note...computer tech oh wise one...
Friday I installed Adobe reader 9.0 now every time I boot up my computer..it starts windows installer...saying it is installing Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0.
I just hit cancel and go on..but this is a nuisance.. ANy suggestions???.

It sounds like you have different versions conflicting with each other. i would probably uninstall and delete all traces of acrobat and start over.

swirt · Mar 15, 2009

catlady said:
swirt said:

catlady said:

swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

Click to expand...

I think it is grasping at straws. Google already has a great algo without needing to go backwards and use clickthrough rates. That was attemped years ago by a search engine called "Direct Hit". The problem with ranking sites by clickthroughs is that it immediately turns into a system that favors existing sites and excludes new ones thereby losing freshness and access to new sites.
Time on site tracking can only be done by those sites using analytics, displaying adsense or those viewers using the google toolbar who have the "share data with google" option turned on. That option has a default of "off" and typically only web developers bother to turn it on so they can see toolbar-pagerank numbers. Sure there are a lot of sites using these, but there are also millions of sites that don't, and there is no way google would risk showing a limited pool of results just to favor some metrics that would easilly favor sites that are gamed by more unscroupulous promotional tactics. If this were the case, companies will sprout up like wildflowers in April that offer an army of mercinaries from far off countries browsing and bookmarking your sites using ip proxies that would make it look like natural traffic.
.

Click to expand...

You know..today is just one of those days. I have been overrun with clients emailing about how a certain company has been at conferences touting their SEO skills..for a price of course.
And making them feel like their site is garbage!!!! I for one am tired of playing this game.
I like to do sites for my clients that look good, give all the pertinent information, put in titles, descriptions etc and do the best for my abilities
But what can I say when "those who don't have a clue" and ask.... "why don't I show up at the top in Google?"
I have steered them to your site explanations but I am just tired of trying to tell them nicely.....
IT AIN'T GOINA HAPPEN FOLKS!!! THere is just no way unless there is no other compettion out there:-(
.

I think it is important to set expectations before you even start. There can be only 10...and the reality is there can be only 3 because the other slots are usually eaten up with directories.
I wrote most of what I've written so that I can direct my clients to it specifically as different issues or questions come up. It has a different impact on them if they read something I've written for everyone as opposed to me responding specifically to them. If they were to ask me about somebody that promises to get them to the top overnight, if I responded directly to them it would sound like it is just me telling them it can't happen so that they don't run off and leave me. If I say the same thing in an article and then I direct them to read it there, it for some reason is easier for them to accept.
You can try, but you can't always protect everyone from their own bad decisions.

EmptyNest · Mar 16, 2009

swirt said:
catlady said:

swirt said:

catlady said:

swirt said:

catlady said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

swirt said:

Bree said:

OK, I'm back at it again. In 2 separate places I have put in that the color of the font in the main body of the site should be black, it's white.
First off, here:
body,td,th,table {
font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, "sans serif";
font-size: 14px;
color: #000000;
width: 780px;
margin:auto;
}
Then again, here:
}
/* This section is for the text body.*/
table.info {
background-color: #fef2af;
color: #000000;
}

I have added this to the html:
<div>
<table class="info">
<tr>
<td height="25" colspan="2">

What am I missing?
Second question- I have commented out several items I don't want by putting /* */ at the beginning and the end of the statement. Do I have to put that on every line instead? I was messing around with changing 'px' to 'em' and found that a command I 'thought' was commented out was not. But as nothing is working the way I expected, I have to ask!
This is SO much more work than I thought it was going to be. Oh dear.
OK, I realized that all of my text is in a paragraph so I added 'p' to the first line and got all the text to be black. BUT, now everything is 'centered' instead of left justified. And the new table is 6 miles wider than the rest of the tables..

Click to expand...

Well first you don't really want to list all all elements like ,td,th,table,p in the same definition as the body because styles cascade. Everything is contained in the body. So something in a <p> </p> inside the <body> will take on the properties of the body unless overidden by another style declaration.
Times New Roman needs to be in quotes.
This will answer your question about css comments.
Hard to say on the font color. You are declaring it to be black so it ought to become black unless

you have an error higher up in your css that is preventing the declaration of black from getting read (this is very common)

Something on page is specifying white as the color (ether on page or somewhere else in the css).

I'd need to see the page in question and the full css to rule either of these in or out.
.

Click to expand...

Do I have to have a style for each 'segment' (argh, I don't know the words I want)? ie- a separate style for each: body, p, table, td, etc? Or will a style for 'body' suffice for anything in the body? (Then having separate styles for things like <h1>, etc.)
I did find that lists have to have their own style and I fixed that problem, except the 'bullet's' in the list are all white.
OK, I'm going thru the whole thing again and looking for punctuation errors.
.

Click to expand...

body, table, p, th, td, li ... are all elements
#blah refers to id="blah"
.whatever refers to class="whatever"
You don't have to declare every element. You only declare what you want to be different from the larger element.
For instance, in your original example you declared body and paragraph and table to all have a width of 780px which means that all your paragraphs and tables will take on that width. which is usually a bit much...especially if you want your paragraph to not touch the edges of the body container. So setting P to have a width of 90% would make it 90% the width of whatever container it is in...so if the Body was set to a width of 780px the P would take on 90% of that width.
.

Click to expand...

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.
.

Click to expand...

Bree said:

But, if I don't set the paragraphs or tables to any other size, they should just set themselves to 780px, right? Which the class .info is not. It is about 120% larger than what every other table is and I'm not telling it to do anything. I assumed it would just be the same size as all the other tables.
Is 780px too wide in general? I was doing 730px but it seemed too small if I want to have links running down the left hand side as well as the text & pix.

Click to expand...

They won't so much set themselves to 780px as they will fill the container that they are in. Which is the body.....but it gets a little wierd with Body because all content is within the body and setting a width on a body gives odd results, because body is treated as the entire page, so you get differing results across different browsers when you stretch the browser to larger than what the body is set to.
The better method is to set no size specifications for the body, but put another div just inside the body where you set things like widths. It will give you more relable results across multiple browsers.
<body>
<div id="pageContent">
all you page content paragraphs, tables, lists go here
</div>
</body>
.

Click to expand...

That makes sense. So far, what I did with what you saw inn the CSS file worked. Up until I had any 'large' content! Then it went kerflooie. Back to the drawing board.
If I were a planner, I wouldn't have to keep going back to fix 'one more thing'! But now I'm getting nervous...if I start installing the CSS call on every page and have to fix 'one more thing' I could blow up the whole site in one fell swoop.
.

Click to expand...

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.
.

Click to expand...

swirt said:

Yah make sure one page works exactly the way you want it before you go replicating it. But in general it will make things easier. ...in the long run.

Click to expand...

Which may be a long time from now!
.

Click to expand...

Can I sneak in a question here?? I can't remember where SWIRT mentioned this... Indicated that google was no longer using keyword metatags....so... why should we use them any longer ? I know there are other search engines..but it seems as if we all live and breathe by GOOGLE. So what do we need to include on our pages now???
TITLE TAG? DESCRIPTION TAG??? INTERNAL PAGE LINKS???
No ALL FLASH sites ...right???
NO Frames...right? been that way for a long time.
So what is the bottom line right now????
I for one am getting tired of playing the games. I want a site that looks good and appeals to the visitor.but it also has to be found by search engines
.

Click to expand...

Frames: definitely NO
All Flash: definitely NO
Title Tag YES
Meta-Description YES
Meta-Keywords worthless and has been for many years. The only two reasonably large search engines that used it are no longer around (inktomi is gone and teoma was bought by Ask and killed off) There may be much smaller search engines that use it. Most designers that still use them fall into three categories.

They don't know they are currently worthless and think the are the way to show up well

They use them out of superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder

They use them because they are a standard that may be used by something in the future. may not be a search engine, may be a directory spider or some lesser used technology. (I fall into this category)

We do live and breathe by Google...but remember, there can be only 10....those that show in the top 10 can do well whether they show well in other search engines or not, but those that don't place in the top 10 need the help of the other search engines too (unfortunately meta-keywords aren't the solution to that). Pandering to just one search engine is not a recommended idea, (eggs all in one basket concept)
.

Click to expand...

I just found this site. Haven't had time to read it all but sounds very plausible.
.

Click to expand...

I think it is grasping at straws. Google already has a great algo without needing to go backwards and use clickthrough rates. That was attemped years ago by a search engine called "Direct Hit". The problem with ranking sites by clickthroughs is that it immediately turns into a system that favors existing sites and excludes new ones thereby losing freshness and access to new sites.
Time on site tracking can only be done by those sites using analytics, displaying adsense or those viewers using the google toolbar who have the "share data with google" option turned on. That option has a default of "off" and typically only web developers bother to turn it on so they can see toolbar-pagerank numbers. Sure there are a lot of sites using these, but there are also millions of sites that don't, and there is no way google would risk showing a limited pool of results just to favor some metrics that would easilly favor sites that are gamed by more unscroupulous promotional tactics. If this were the case, companies will sprout up like wildflowers in April that offer an army of mercinaries from far off countries browsing and bookmarking your sites using ip proxies that would make it look like natural traffic.
.

Click to expand...

You know..today is just one of those days. I have been overrun with clients emailing about how a certain company has been at conferences touting their SEO skills..for a price of course.
And making them feel like their site is garbage!!!! I for one am tired of playing this game.
I like to do sites for my clients that look good, give all the pertinent information, put in titles, descriptions etc and do the best for my abilities
But what can I say when "those who don't have a clue" and ask.... "why don't I show up at the top in Google?"
I have steered them to your site explanations but I am just tired of trying to tell them nicely.....
IT AIN'T GOINA HAPPEN FOLKS!!! THere is just no way unless there is no other compettion out there:-(
.

Click to expand...

I think it is important to set expectations before you even start. There can be only 10...and the reality is there can be only 3 because the other slots are usually eaten up with directories.
I wrote most of what I've written so that I can direct my clients to it specifically as different issues or questions come up. It has a different impact on them if they read something I've written for everyone as opposed to me responding specifically to them. If they were to ask me about somebody that promises to get them to the top overnight, if I responded directly to them it would sound like it is just me telling them it can't happen so that they don't run off and leave me. If I say the same thing in an article and then I direct them to read it there, it for some reason is easier for them to accept.
You can try, but you can't always protect everyone from their own bad decisions.
.

I tell EVERYONE to read your pages!!! As well as try to explain to them what I am doing all along the way

CSS help, please

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Latest posts

CSS help, please

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