[Fernando Mol]

Hard to say which software is better for you. It will depend on your background experience.

If you know Photoshop you can use it for designing web pages relatively simple using slices, but it’s not very flexible.

The software you mention it’s easy to use, but that isn’t the same as being good for the job. The code most software for visual designing web pages is usually full of garbage and gets complicated when you start making changes on the fly.

I personally use Dreamweaver to work fast, but it’s unavoidable to mess with the code from time to time. My advice is, start with something you already know and don’t be afraid to read the code. You’ll get to it sooner or later.

I hope this helps.

[Fernando Mol]

Be sure you are not missing any external javascript files, also the player files.

To help you better we need to see a link to your site.

[Fernando Mol]

Try adding a padding of 0px to the ul.MenuBarHorizontal rule and see if that works.

ul.MenuBarHorizontal
{
list-style-type: none;
font-size: 100%;
cursor: default;
width: auto;
padding: 0px;
}

[Fernando Mol]

I can’t find the exact point, but I can see a lot of bad habits applied here.

Don’t mess with CSS “on the fly”. Try to have a plan. Make your design in Photoshop or Illustrator and define your rules before going into actual code.

Try using a single unit measurement. Ems, pixels, percentage, etc. Right now you have mixed units and that makes it difficult to debug.

Also, I think your main problem is you have a defined width for your navigation bars and then your content gets bigger in IE. It’s better practice to have flexible layouts so if the content changes the layout does too.

If you really want to have a fixed width in an element, then don’t mix unit measurements (I know, I already told that but I think this is the main issue here).

Go and clean your code. Define your font size from the beggining (the body) and try don’t having repetitive rules defining the same element more than once.

Sorry I can’t give you a simple fix. Also I know I shouldn’t assume how you are designing. You know your criteria, but if it’s not working, well, don’t use it.

So, use a single unit and see if that works.

I hope this helps.

[Fernando Mol]

I used slices once, and they are a simple and nice method, but limited.

Flexible designs always come in CSS.

[Fernando Mol]

1- Slices are good and simple if you don’t understand coding and need to make your own site fast, without hiring someone else to do it with code.

2- Your rollovers work OK in my computer.

3- Your pictures are huge. Be sure you have a backup of your original images and then, in Dreamweaver, select one image. Go to the properties panel at the bottom of your screen and look for the little image icon with a circular arrow. If you stop your cursor a tooltip will appear showing the “resample image” text. Click on it and DW will warn you that you are about to change the image for good and there is no undo for that (that’s why you need to backup your images first). Click OK and now your image will be small enough for the web. Do this on every image and upload them again.

4- Font sizes are managed by CSS in Dreamweaver. If you are an Illustrator of Photoshop user you probably are trying to play with the font sizes in the properties panel. This will create a CSS mess. Read the CSS tutorial, here in the COW, to get a better idea on how to work with CSS. If you still have a question you can ask again.

[Fernando Mol]

Some flash sites put alternate content to be visible by search engines.

There are many different ways to do this. Some sites has searchable text at the bottom of the page, some others have the full representation of the flash content in HTML displayed only if flash doesn’t work.

Google has a javascript tool to do this called swfobject.

I hope this helps.

[Fernando Mol]

It’s hard to give any advice on a specific kind of monitor.

I don’t remember having any mayor issues when changed from CRT to LCD. Calibration rules are kind the same in both.

[Fernando Mol]

It’s flash.

A flash video with an alpha channel inside a Flash movie.

[Fernando Mol]

You can learn PHP and MySQL.

PHP is not the easiest, but is easy enough, free, popular and stable.