Create Full Width Header & Footer With Centered Content Using CSS

There are probably a million different ways to do this, but I’m going to show the way that I have preferred to do it, combined with my favorite centering position method.

So the simple way to do this is as follows:

Photoshop Essentials - Thousands of Free Brushes, Gradients, Layer Styles and More!

Photoshop is an amazingly powerful tool. It alone can allow you to create fantastic designs and photo manipulations. But, there are many, many other resources available to designers to enhance Photoshop and increase your productivity.

I’m talking about free gradients, patterns, brushes, layer styles and more that you can download and add on to Photoshop.

CSS Sprites - Easily Use CSS To Replace Images

If you’re not using CSS Sprites (also known as the CSS Image Replacement Method) you should be. Many coders seem to fear this easy and basic way to use images with CSS and I’m not sure why.

The benefits of CSS Sprites are plentiful, but you (and your visitors) will benefit from this method ten-fold. For the coder it’s less slicing and cropping of images, and for the user it rids us of that annoying image loading flash when you use CSS to replace background images.

I’ll take you through some quick steps to get started with CSS Sprites.

Using IE Conditionals For Cross Browser Compatibility

What’s worse than spending a week coding a brand new design to realize that your site looks like a bloody mess in IE6? Luckily we have a valid way to fix these problems without having to use hacks in our CSS and destroy the completed design that looks good in all other browsers.

IE Conditionals are an easy and awesome (and valid!!) way to insert any IE specific styles* into your code. You can specify styles for just IE6, just IE7 or for both. Not only that you can specifiy styles to affect all versions of IE below any version number. (*actually these conditionals can be used for anything that you want to display to IE specifically)

I Broke My Site in IE. Oops ;)

I don’t know how or what I did ;O but after messing with some stuff this morning I ended up breaking this site in IE6/IE7. I’m sorry for any IE users I don’t have the time to fix it either. Guess you will just have to wait 2 weeks for the new CSSgirl to emerge (possibly sooner)!

So just because I feel bad I’ll throw out another (scaled down) sneak peak of the new design: