Ok so the past few days Ive been asking some friends and around on a few forums on what I should use to code a site Im getting ready to make. I've got suggestions on everything from css, php, xhtml, dreamweaver to joomla. It never fails, however, that people dont know exactly what I want my page to look like. So I had a copy of dreamweaver and I went ahead and threw a crude layout together so that everyone can see exactly what I want the layout to look like. As you will see I already have all the images its just a matter of putting them together to form the layout.

At the top is of course the banner which will remain in teh same place regardless of what sub dir you go to on the site...

then there are the two side bars and links that I would like to remain in the same place as well. Is that as clear as mudd?

So thats leads me to a couple of questions?
1. What would be the eaiset code to make this layout? Please keep in mind Im not very good at coding, but Im willing to learn somethign ifs its not extremely hard.

2. and the links are images. I tried to use font but its a custom font so it wouldnt work. Is there a way to use custom fonts? or should I stick with them being images?

http://www.geocities.com/cheesehead_griffey/index.htm


^^ Link

1 - CSS is the way to go, of course. That layout is easily done with CSS.
2 - links should NOT be images. If you want a custom font, try something like sIFR, which uses a bit of Flash to render custom fonts and its relatively easy to implement.

Ok, so css it is. Are layouts called "layouts" in the css world? In other words what should i google?

I say css to make the layout. It is easy to code and update. You can use images as links but just make sure the alt text is the same as the image so search engines can read it. If not they will punish you and your pageranking will drop.

If not they will punish you and your pageranking will drop

You are NOT going to be "punished" for having images as link without alt text

No, but images for navigation isn't a great idea, not very accessible. Use images as background and make the text REAL text.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

You are NOT going to be "punished" for having images as link without alt text

It will really hurt your pageranking. Google uses alt text like it would for the actual content within the anchor brackets. Without that you are losing a lot of keywords within your site and Google does look for alt attributes within links and ranks images without that them lower (it can't read that image and therefore doesn't understand what it is being used as).

So, yes, it does hurt your pagerank. Maybe "punished" isn't as good a word as not bing made better. But overall the same idea comes out in the end.

A normal image without alt text is fine. That isn't important. But alt text in images that are links are needed.