HTML and CSS

I'm really getting quite excited about the various background images I think I'm going to create and it makes sense to give you guys a quick tutorial on how to use them.

Basically you only need to make a one line change to the stylesheet of your website, so I hope it won't be too difficult to do.

Your stylesheet will typically be called style.css or default.css although other names could be used. Also, if you're using blogspot you won't actually have a separate stylesheet just to confuse matters. Hopefully you'll be able to work with these background images without too much difficulty.

So, once you're looking at your website stylesheet, simply search for the body element. This will most likely be somewhere close to the top.

Next, add this line

background: transparent url(path-to-image/caramel-chevron.png) repeat;

You'll need to change the 'path-to-image' part to the url of the folder where your images are stored, and of course you'll need to change the name of the background image if you aren't the caramel chevron.

That's it, your website should now be showing your new background. Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Being an amateur theme designer I'm always apprehensive when a new browser is released, and Firefox 3 was no exception. They always seem to make some minor changes that make regular HTML or CSS work slightly differently.

From reading some of the minor problems that have been discovered with FF3 I think I need to go back and check all my themes, but I'm in two minds whether to actually fix anything I find since so many people are not likely to update to FF3 for a few more months.

It would of course be great if FF2 would automatically update to version 3, but I think a lot of people will have auto update turned off so not sure how long it will take, and if the IE world is anything to go on, probably several months or more until the majority of firefox users have updated.

If anyone else is developing themes, could you let me know if you plan to support ff3, or if you're also planning to wait for a bit longer?

And for anyone who who is still using Firefox 2, please, go check it out and download firefox 3 now! It really is much better and more stable than previous versions.

I've produced a few sets of navbar images for free download dark, light, frosty, and original. In this tutorial I'm going to explain how to use them in your own site design.

This screenshot is taken directly from one of my free html templates. The HTML to create this is a basic list of links but without the CSS it looks quite boring, just a link, then a new line and another link and so on, however, once the CSS is added, you get an attractive navbar.

My introduction to XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) is designed for users of my free HTML templates who want to learn about the language used to code all of my templates. XHTML replaces HTML 4.0, and has been called HTML5.0, although almost all experts prefer to use XHTML.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposed the XHTML standard back in 2000 with the intention of unifying HTML with the new XML standard. Documents in popular software such OpenOffice are saved in XML format, as are RSS feeds and sitemaps for blogs and websites. Merging these two standards seems logical given the way people are starting to use the Internet.

Are you new to HTML and CSS style sheets? Kick back for a moment and read this simple HTML tutorial which takes you from knowing nothing to creating a simple webpage with some pictures and text. What you learn in the next few minutes will give you the knowledge needed to open and understand many of the wonderful HTML templates currently available free to download.

What do you need to be able to create and edit websites? Many people will tell you to invest in software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage, and that these will allow you to create a webpage to be proud of. This is true, but in this tutorial we're going to use a basic text editor, such as Notepad for our Windows readers or TextEdit for Mac users. These are free, they actually come bundled with your Operating System, and HTML isn't that complex that we need to worry about buying expensive software right now. And anyway, with so many free templates available online, most people only need a text editor to insert their own content, so without any further rambling from me, click to read on.