http://pivsmusic.homedns.org/

This is a shop I setup for a friend. I think the overall design looks good, but I am curious to see what other people think of the design.

The search button on the site does not work at this time.(even if what is typed exists on the site, it still finds nothing)

P.S. this is the third site I have made, so don't go haywire with the terminology in your posts

http://pivsmusic.homedns.org/

Whats the big deal about having ones site validated by the W3C validator, http://validator.w3.org


Excuse my ignorance if it seems like a stupid question.

and can someone take a look at the site and tell me what they think of the design

The big deal is that if your site is not valid (X)HTML (which it isn't) there's no guarantee that the site we see is the same site you see.


You're excused, now fix your syntax...


Looks pretty ok, a few suggestions:
-You're using a fixed width ( my guess is 1024?) so that on my 1280 setup, I get a big bar of nothingness on the right side, bit of a shame.

-Personally, I'd make the index block on the left fixed in position, so it doesn't scroll away tih the rest of the page.

-A bit of the same for the scope bar on the top (which might be better and faster as an animated GIF instead of a flash applet, btw) I'd make this a fixed div block too. This way the text will scroll underneath the scope bar, and not go OVER the guitar on the top right, which looks a bit silly imho.

Hope you get anything useful out of this.

ok I am some what new to css so help me out here...I am unsure as to how I can have unfixed width for my background

this is how I have the css as of now:
body{
background-image:url(background.jpg);
background-position: 0px, 0px;
background-attachment:fixed;
margin-bottom:0px;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-color: #E5E5E5;
}

how would I change this so that the width fits the screen every time, use a percent or somthing?



oh! and thanks for the tips I will make the changes

Well, the problem isn't so much the positioning, as the fact that you're using background2.jpg as background, which is only 1024 width.
Best way to work around is using multiple background images.
Set the background.jpg as the overall background, make the blue bar on the left into a seperat images, and make it the background for the <div> with the index (it'll display over the other image), and make the guitar neck the background for a <div> that contains the other part of the page, which in turn contains several <div>'s for the scope, the content, the google ads, etc.
Best way to get two <divs> to display side by side is either use the display: inline; command, or give the left one a fixed width and absolute positioning, and the right one an absolute position next to the other, but no fixed width.

Just looked at your code, and you've already pretty much done that (Looks good for a beginner! Good use of stylesheets), only you made the 'text' <div> of a fixed width.

Also remember to add background-repeat: repeat; to the body stylesheet, in case somebody uses an even bigger screen.

Bit of a thrown together bunch of advice, but I'm in the middle of something, hope it's helpful.

while I was trying to "fix" my page I found that all was swell in firefox, but alas...IE is behind the game again. IE is not listening to my stylesheets, is there any sort of css hack to make IE listen to a stylesheet with height=100% and z-index commands

nevermind I fixed the IE problems