I'd add a bit of padding around the .maintextlines

Not much, just 2 or 3 pixels so the text isn't hugging the corners of the black background. Make it a bit easier to read.

It's a whole lot worse in FF3b4/Win. Also you have 2 hosting issues. CSS and the maing BG image timed out on me (about 3 mintues before I posted this). Your deep-linking of the W3C image cost your load time over 15 seconds ("waiting for www.w3.org..."). So as it stands the site is muck, but once you sort it out, I can kinda see that it might be OK (but the text, even with it's black background, is going to be hard to read against that background image, I fear)

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The site look terrible in IE7 & FF2.0 as well.
My 2 cents? I don't like it.
Too many colours, the layout is totally out of shape and doesn't render properly.
The background image will put anyone off. What exactly is the meaning of it?
Do you drill holes for a leaving?

The website might validate (W3C - didn't check it) but what's the point if it doesn't look right?

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I quite like the style and approach you have taken.
But yeah, there are some layout problems. Once you have them sorted out, the design should be fine.

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Just realised it doesn't support variable widths at all. Things get seriously messed up if you go too wide or too narrow.

You'd want to wrap the whole thing in a fixed width div to sort that.

It does concern me a little bit that you're offering web design services when your own mark-up is so poor..
Indeed.

But aside from that, and with a bit of extra work, I don't think there's anything wrong with the design itself. It's bold and different and there's probably a market for it.

I'm just happy everyone sees potential in it....

My god I should really install a copy of IE6 on my other computer

I'll try to work around things and see how it all goes!

I'm really trying to step away from tables and eventually I will get it right. The whole opacic CSS validation is really killing me though

- Once I get the coding right atleast that won't hapen


Regards,
Baz

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the same thing can be achieved with a small image set as background in your CSS file for that particular div and it will validate.

Hi Louie,
Thanks I think I know what you mean. But if the actual opacity property doesn't exist in CSS 2.x then if you employ it on an image would it not also fail. If I use a solid image I won't have the transparent effect I really want.

If you know of a site off hand that uses this, I'll research into it, it seems all the sites out there at the moment are telling people to use the opacity property. I've looked around a good bit and havent seen this method used to effect.

I really do appreciate it, I'm more or less entirely self thought, and in secondary school so it's not like I don't listen in lectures, I love learning new things so well.. yes it would be very much appreciated.

Regards,
Baz

You can create a semi-transparent 1px PNG image. Although IE6 doesn't support transparent PNG, so you might run into additional problems there.

You could always use IE conditional statements to load a less-than-IE6 specific style sheet, which sets the transparent PNG to a solid black colour on those browsers.

I was just about to say what "Goodshape" mentioned.
Related to the IE6 issue with png file, I think there is a way around that.
Actually just found something:

PNG in Internet Explorer: How to Use