You can make flat colored rectangles and lines without having SiteSpinner create image files for them. Because the method shown below generates pure HTML which uses less bandwidth, your published page should load faster and more cleanly. The bigger the rectangle, the greater the savings you make.

Here's how:

Create an empty 'code' or 'text' object by pressing the Code or Text button on the left-hand toolbar.

Press 'Save and Close'. This leaves an empty rectangle on your page.

With the Quick Editor shading tab, add a flat shading of whatever color you like.

Resize to whatever size you want. You can even resize to just a horizontal or vertical line.

Optional: add a border of whatever color you want (Quick Editor Outline tab).

If the optional border is greater than 1 pixel wide, you may see slightly different rectangles on different browsers -- some put the border inside the rectangle and some put it outside.

The shading must be flat and not any kind of gradient fill. If you want a gradient fill, you will still need some kind of image file -- e.g. generated by a 'Rectangle' object.

Use these 'cheap' rectangles anywhere you would make a simple colored rectangle. Put them behind text objects. By making the rectangle considerably larger than the text, you can have a much wider colored border than you would get with a text object alone.

Thanks to Harpo for the original tip.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bruceee,

thanks brucee. i was wondering about that, because why would you need an image file for a flat image? i think SS should do that by default for flat images.

Actually, SS should do that now if you have re-render and anti-alias turned off on your rectangles.

Golly golly gosh, you're right! When did you guys sneak that into SiteSpinner? I just checked V2.50b and it is there -- also in V2.50d.

There is still one restriction -- rectangles do not work with lines whose short dimension is less than 4-pixels. The lines are still rendered as separate images. So, if you want cheap lines, code objects are still better than rectangles.