Still Being Annoying

[starshipcat]

After struggling for some time to figure out what the heck is going on, I finally decided it was time to stop letting the best be the enemy of the good enough, and decided to put together the naval history website and get it uploaded. It is now up at navalhistory.leighkimmel.com, so you can see how it looks all right in Safari, but in Firefox the

Comments

[green_knight]

For me (Mac), Safari, Opera, and Firefox look almost the same, only that FF displays a blue border at the top as well as at the bottom.

I think you need to go back and start with a CSS tutorial, because there are a number of issues with your page:

- you specify an image background in the body tags. This is not the place for it, which is why the behaviour changes so much. You want an outer container.
- your background colour (fallback for when you can't load the image) should match the approximate hue. The blue background should be partnered with a light blue value.
- CSS is built on a block model, and arrangements are made by wrapping things in mainly
tags and then specifying their positions with relative, absolute, and float values as well as margins and padding. You're not actually specifying anywhere that you want your text moved away from the edge, so it overflows right to the edge of the page

[starshipcat]

I know I need to learn the theoretical underpinnings of CSS through systematic study of a proper tutorial. I've known that for a long time now.

However, right now, trying to do that would be making the best the enemy of the good. You know the old saying about right or Wednesday. Yeah, right now, I need it Wednesday.

Right now, I need a short-term solution that will hold together for a few weeks or months, until I can get enough other things off my overflowing plate that I can actually free up and wall off a block of time of sufficient size to devote to studying CSS properly. Then I can rebuild the site properly. Otherwise, it's going to stay as it is for as many weeks or months or even years as it takes for me to reach that point.

Think of it as duct tape. Sure, the ideal solution is a complete replacement, but right now that's not feasible for whatever reason, so we need to apply duct tape to get things to hold together long enough to get to the point where complete replacement becomes possible.

[green_knight]

If what you're looking for is quick and dirty and minimum effort, you'd be better off with a Wordpress installation and a free template. A lot of them are easy to customise - you can insert your own header image, colour scheme, and with a quick hack, background image - and it would be something tried and tested that is likely to work much better for you than trying to roll your own site and spending hours tinkering with it without success.

(I'd recommend WP as a content management system anyway. You don't have to use it as a blog, but it's nicely versatile and with lots of functionality built in. Personally, I'd not build a static website again.)

Best of luck with your project!