fairly good graphic designer CRAP web designer

Ok so i'm a graphic designer working in the newspaper industry, i know boooooring. Anyway never quite got around to the whole web design thing. So here i am with my copy of Dreamweaver trying to place a picture in a circle with a nice lime green stroke and a few other coloured strokes layered on top top of the circle. Just a design effect I use in quark or illustrator etc. So, now i can't finish the stupid tutorial because i can't get past the fact that as far as i can see, i can only place a graphic in a table or layer as a square????

cheers! if anyone can help
Kath

why not create the image in photoshop and import it as an image in its own right?

I guess all the web tecchies here get fed up with us designers asking bog-easy questions, and pretending we know what we are talking about..... thing is, so many people bunch web designers and graphic designers together as one and the same.... I don't think we are, in any way shape or form, similar... like saying sculpters and glass blowers are the same... both create beautiful things but in completely different ways...

good luck

Ju (graphic designer, crap web designer)

You are going to have to create your design in your graphics program. Get it exactly the way you want it. Then you can insert it into your web design.
You can have a transparent background on the corners to make it appear to be round or make the background color of the graphic the same as the web page background. Designing in the web world is pretty flat. Everything that has layers must be made in a graphics program and then placed in a webpage.

Since you are just learning, learn how to use div's instead of tables. Tables are passe... There are so many great learning sites posted in the css forum sticky. Welcome to the world of web design! Once you overcome the learning curve I'm sure you will enjoy it and create beautiful sites!

thanks for your replys guys, you know I was telling my husband my frustrations and he said "why don't you just do it in photoshop and insert it as a graphic" but i need it to be TRANSPARENT!! i whined. "So why don't you just fill the background colour the same as the colour you're placing it on" At this point everything became clear to me; i'm thinking like a graphic artist, and need to change my way of thinking for web design. (by the way, my husband's a salesperson, who uses word to design his flyers). Any way I was looking at someone elses code and saw they had used transparent gif's (which i never knew was even possible) so i created my images in illustrator and just used the save to web option and saved them all as transparent gifs and presto exactly what I wanted.

Ok i'm off to check out what a div is

cheers!

That's great!!! It's amazing how simple some things end up being after you step back for a bit!