Forums » Art & Creativity » Help with custom templates

So, I know the basics of CSS, and I've seen some really neat custom profiles that seem to move the elements to other places on the page and such. I'd link them if I knew which ones they were (I've forgotten, lol). So how does one go about moving the elements to different parts on the page? Are there any tips anyone has for making customization easier, or the templates more appealing?

Thanks!

The only thing I can suggest is to study div layer focused CSS styling more in-depth and view the source code of profiles that have what you're looking for.

Whether a (custom) template is appealing is up to an individual though. From a site-wide point of view, templates' functionality stands above design. i.e. The content being easy to read is more important than the template looking pretty. Pretty doesn't work well if you can't read the important info or your links are hard to find for the sake of design. The more you customize your layout, the more you tend to need to customize content too. If you're using images for links, you need to change your page titles to fit on the image and manually position the links in many cases, which means adding, editing or removing pages costs a lot of time and effort. If you're not willing to do this, you'll have to create a template that allows you to fit existing and new content easily.

If there's something specific you're looking to do, we can probably help you with that. For moving elements around, floating elements to left or right within the container usually does the trick. Try to avoid absolute positioning though, as it tends to break a layout very easily in different resolutions or devices.

How you move an element will depend hugely on what you're trying to move, and where! Can you be more specific?

Thanks Sanne! I'll see what I can find on that.

Kim - Well, I was thinking about moving the portrait's location, and maybe the navigation for the character pages. Is it possible to do that with just the template, or would that need access to the entire html document to arrange the order of the div elements?

Depending on where you wanted to put it, CSS is quite sufficient.

So it seems I've reached another road block!

It looks like this: http://www.rprepository.com/c/stell

But I am trying to get it to look like so:
http://i1307.photobucket.com/albums/s581/Meedlebutt/rprexample_zps7c939adc.png

I've put height 100% under body, #header-and-content-container, div#sitecontainer, and div#charcontent with no avail. Anyone know where it would need to be in order to achieve this?

Mm, right, freaking height... doesn't like to go past what's specifically defined. There's a number of tricks to do that, but there's enough that I couldn't name off any particular one. You should be able to find something via a search though, but you'll want something that's CSS only. Any of the JavaScript/jQuery ones won't work here.

alright, thanks. I'll keep trying to work with it.