Dreamweaver help for beginner

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1

Hi everyone,

Please forgive my ignorance but I am very new to this. I have a trial version of DW CS5.

My question is…

How can I place a paragraph or block of text on top of an image?

I think I can use absolutely positioned DIV’s and then use the Z index to set the visibility, but it seems that many people criticise the use of absolute positioning. How else can this be achieved?

Thanks in advance
Richard

sorry if it was a dumb question :slight_smile:

2

Welcome to Site Point. Don’t worry about dumb questions. Do you have a link to your website so I can investigate further into what you are trying to accomplish?

3

Yes, welcome to the forums, drahcir sivad. :slight_smile: (It this username your real name spelled backwards? :shifty: )

I think I can use absolutely positioned DIV’s and then use the Z index to set the visibility, but it seems that many people criticise the use of absolute positioning.

This is the kind of situation where absolute positioning can be quite useful. AP is better used for small items like this than for the main page elements. So you can either use AP for this OR place the image on the <p> as a background image. That would be my preference, as it’s cleaner and easier, and it sounds like the image is not really content but decoration anyhow, so it’s better served up via CSS. :slight_smile:

4

Hi Guys, thanks for your replies.

I don’t have a website to show you yet. I am still trying to create something. I am using one of DW’s CSS templates (3 column, header and footer). All I am trying to do is give regions of my sidebars a background with radius corners, drop shadow, and contoured colour effect. I assumed this was done by creating a suitable block of colour in photoshop or similar and then using it as a background image with the text sitting on top.

ralph, how do I “place the image on the <p> as a background image”? sorry if this is REALLY basic stuff.

Thanks
(and yes, my username is my real name backwards - not very imaginative I know)

5

Hm, I’m not sure how it would be automated in Dw, but if you are coding by hand (which is recommended) you would give write something like add a class to the paragraph element in your HTML, e.g.:


<p [COLOR="#0000CD"]class="fancy"[/COLOR]>Text</p>

and then in your CSS file write something like


.fancy {background: url(imgaes/bg-image.gif);}

To help further with this, we’d need to see a real example of some sort—preferably a live link. We tend to talk in code here, I’m afraid, but we can try to talk you through this if you like. :slight_smile: