I'm having a major brain fart here. I'm not certified in any HTML or CSS, but I get the basic gist of it and mess around with stuff until I like it. What is the design called when you have what looks like 3 columns on the page, the left and right sides are a different color and the main column in the middle has the sites information. If you go to gamefaqs.com, you'll see what I'm talking about. Web design isn't my forte, I'm into IT. but just for fun, what is that called? and how does one go about getting it to work?

I suppose you could call it a three column layout, but that really is not the case. The columns on either side are just "filler" that allows for web pages to scale to different size monitors and different resolutions. So in reality, they are just areas with no content. In order to achieve that effect, you just have to make sue that your content does not take up the entire width of the screen, and the content is centered. In this case, the content is constrained to 760 pixels wide, to allow for screen resolutions of 800X600. IN that case, there would be only very thin strips on either side of the main content.

Does that help?

Yes, it does. Your advice is always full of help groov, but, I guess my next question would be, how do I go about making sure that the "main column" stays constrained to 760 pixels?

And also, what does CSS have to do with this? I'm sorry for the questions.

That's what forums are for.

The way to constrain a width is to just set the width. Some html tags allow 'width' as an attribute, although I am pretty sure that it has been deprecated now in favor of CSS. You would do something like the following:

The rest of your code would then go between the div tags.

As far as how CSS fits into everything, the easiest way to explain is to use an analogy. HTML is the building block or structure of a web page. If you were a carpenter, you could think of the HTML as the bare framework of the house. CSS is the instrument by which one decorates that framework. OR to draw another analogy, HTML builds the canvas, and CSS provides the brushes and colors.

Thanks for the response. I swear you're better than 90% of the teachers at my college. Anyway, Im going to see what I can do (no, this isn't a school project, the semester is over)

Its just something I'm doing for fun. If you don't mind me asking, where did you learn all of tihs?

I am self-taught as far as HTML and CSS. I develop web-based applications, so I pretty much had to learn.

Glad I could help you understand.