First of all, hello all and thanks for helping through this website. I am currently volunteering in Cambodia and since i have done some print design, my boss apparently thinks me qualified to manage our website at www.bsda-cambodia.org. Having almost no prior experience, i taught myself a couple of usefull things, but am not able to solve the issue implied in the title. What i basically want is a header layout similar to the one on www.hypem.com, with a picture and a background color of the same height that adjusts itself to the browser width. I have looked for this online but apparently havn't found the right combination of words :-). All help is greatly appreciated.

I don't know if this is what you want, but for me, I found that if I wanted to float or self adjust to the with of the window, I needed an image that was larger than the largest window that I wanted to support. It seemed (and I am open to correction) that a too large image would shrink to the smaller size ok, but a too small image would only go to its own size and not stretch at all.

At least that is the way it seems to work in the Philippines!

As far as putting a smaller image on top of a bar of color. That should not be a problem I think (I have not tried this yet) because the smaller image will not enlarge.

I think...

Do you have a test site in the back of a local computer, it can be very valuable to test these kind of things...

Lan

No, i don't have a test site, but that is probably another thing i should learn :-). Would it be as easy as somehow making an offline server and then copying everything i have on the website on there or is it more comlicated? The streched image wasn't really what i was going for, but thanks nevertheless, I will fall back on it if this doesn't work. As for the small picture + bar of color thing, could you point me in a direction of how to 1. create the bar and 2. stack them? would that be a css insert thing or is it achievable with atahualpa options? as i said, i am very new to this
thanks
Jake

I use Ubuntu on my personal Computer that has a LAMP program running in it. LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhpMyAdmin. It is sorta like having a personal web server inside of your computer. For me it works identical to my servers configured around the world that I work on. No need for a special server.

I have a friend who does it the same with his desktop version of FreeBSD and I am assuming MicroSoft has some version for windows also but that is beyond what I can help you with.

I have a copy of my server that I can make tests on, and if I crash the whole thing... ok, start over with my last good result. It also makes a nice offline backup copy... of sorts.

As to what you asked...

<div id="imagecontainer" class="header-image-container" ...

This appears to be the background of where your header image is. You could add some css as to the background color attached to this id.

Something like:

#imagecontainer { background-color: #FF0000; }

This might give you as start...

Perfect, seems to work on my labourously set up offline server thingy. Another option i just thought of would be to just set an appropriate background picture for the entire site.Thanks a lot, I really appreciate the quick and precise help. Enjoy your island
Jake