Hi,a newbie question:

I plan to have 4 pictures for my homepage and have these with borders around them.Just like a frame. I am not sure if I should use tables or just draw rectangular outlines around them and add some shading.

Please advice. I am still trying to figure out how to use tables.

Thanks, James

Hi James
I would avoid using tables where possible, they are a rather old-fashioned method of positioning stuff. If you want to place a border around a picture, you could draw the border around it, then 'group' the border and the picture and render it as one image. That is not the most elegant way, I wouldn't think. My advice would be to modify your original images OUTSIDE of SS, using a 3rd party image editor which can place the border for you. Save the edited image and use that, rather. Also, make sure that your saved image (wherever it happens to be, and whatever method you used to edit it) is optimised for web-site use - make it as small (in bytes) as you can without sacrificing image quality. Good luck!

On the other hand, tables are a quick, easy and quite elegant way of doing it -- I think! Sorry Spencer, we disagree

See Photo Album with SiteSpinner.

I agree with both of the previous posters! (Fence sitter).

Tables are easy, quick and elegant but there is no need to do this in SS.

Load the picture on the page and then right click/quick properties and set the outline values to what you want - including the colour.

This way you don't bulk up the picture by making it bigger but you can still get the border you want - in any colour.

If you want a drop shadow, then I'm not sure SS will allow this (Pro maybe? Bruceee??).

If it doesn't then you'll need to do this in Photoshop or equivalent, but, avoid saving images with drop shadows ~and~ transparency as gif's because the gif's transparency dither makes the drop shadow show up horribly on anything other than plain coloured background.

To get round this, either grab some of the background and incorporate the background into the drop shadowed image, -gif is ok for this as long as 256 colours is ok, or save it as a jpg but watch out for compression artifacts as they may show up against the rest of the background.

Sorry if thats too technical but I spend many hours getting overlapping drop shadows to work.

e.g. An example of drop shadowed images

quote:

If you want a drop shadow, then I'm not sure SS will allow this

g-u-l, not for the example you gave. That would require a full blown graphics editor like Photoshop, Gimp, or Paint.Net.

For regular square image drop-shadows, use the rectangle shape filled with the appropriate dark gray shade of your choice and move it "to back" of the image. Hint: since a rectangle shape can result in a large file, depending upon the size of the image begin "dropped", I sometimes use two smaller rect shapes (one long and thin, the other wide and short) for just the 2 edges that require a shadow.

@Larryd
Nice trick!

I'm so stupid that I never thought of that.

Good advice as always, thanks

I really appreciate your valuable input.Special thanks to both the Gurus.

The link(Photo Album) that Guru Brucee provided shows exactly how I want my pictures displayed.Thanks for your guide.

Guru larryd mentioned that rectangle shapes create large files.My page background and the page itself are rectangle shapes filled with shading. Will these bloat up my site ? Am I doing the right thing ?

Thanks Again.James

Depending on what kind of shading you use in your rectangles there are different solutions to make them as small as possible. If your rectangles are created in SS and you don't use any gradients, transparencies or other modifications, just plain colours, then you can turn off the Re-Render and Anti-Alias options. That will reduce the size.

If your rectangles are created in SS and you don't use any gradients, transparencies or other modifications, just plain colours, then you can turn off the Re-Render and Anti-Alias options. That will reduce the size.

Roma
If my memory serves me right, according to the tuts, what you have described above may result in improper placement of the objects and is not recommended if placement of the object is critical.

Can anyone comment on this? I would like to use this method when possible as I'm on slow dial-up and every file size reduction I can get will be a plus.

The problem is with the rectangle borders -- some browsers put them inside and others outside the rectangle space. This means that the rectangles will be a slightly different size depending on browser.

SiteSpinner tries to avoid this problem by now automatically making an image file if the border thickness is greater than two pixels. But you can still work around this by putting a border around a blank Code object, which you can also shade.