GoLive help required...crazy layers

Hi everybody. Im new to web design and this website!.

My dad owns his own mechanical engineering company, he is a "one man band" and has no other employees and cannot afford professional web designers etc.

For the last 10 years, by hook and by crook, me and my brother have made his website, which has always been pretty basic using Frontpage, and uploaded to some BT webspace he got with his dial up connection account.

The site is terribly stale, and has been "under construction"/unfinished for about 5 or 6 years, so I have been designing a new website and decided to use Adobe GoLive after much deliberation (having tried various programs like Dreamwaver and having a nightmare with them).

So far, so good. Ive read though tutorials and layed out my "index" page. I like GoLive, its been really easy for me so far.......

However, Im in trouble with it and I cant find out how to solve my problem, and wondered if any of you know whats going wrong.

I started a new 'site', and added grids, images, texts to my index page, laying it out as desired, and its looking great. For the buttons that I want to navigate the site with, I have imported plain pictures from Adobe Photoshop and used 'layers' to "type" over the top of the pictures, such as the words "About Us" over a blue rectangle. I intend later to convert the text over the button image use as links to the other pages.

When I preview the site, it looks great. When I preview the PDF document of what it would print like, it looks great. However, when I export the site as a HTML file and open it in Firefox and Internet explorer, it looks right, exactly like Ive layed it out, but when I go to print the website, all hell breaks loose and the entities on 'layers' shift totally out of place and makes the site nonsense.

What is going wrong? Is there a way to fix this easily?. I dont know anything about code. I dont understand why it looks right all the way through, yet when it comes to printing off in a browser (which a customer would want to do) it goes haywire.

If you look at the screenshots, I have highlighted the layer "dots" in Go Live, and in another picture it shows how these seem relevant to the problem because its moving the text to the dot locations when printing.

There doesnt seem to be many "active" golive forums, so hopefully somebody can help me out here, or atleast point to somehwere who can.

Working Area:-
(see attachment 1 - workingarea.jpg)

Preview (and how it looks in a browser):-
(see attachment 2 - preview.jpg)

How it looks printed from (any) browser:-
(see attachment 3 - printed.jpg)

(the lines in red Ive drawn in paintbrush to show where things are diving to).


Any ideas?.

Thanks

Epichouse

(applogies for the big pictures, I dont know how to make them smaller on the forum).

Attached Images

	workingarea.jpg (238.6 KB, 18 views)
	preview.jpg (169.7 KB, 20 views)
	printed.jpg (76.0 KB, 28 views)

Ive now removed some of the layers, and re-typed the category texts, welcome text, and quoted text, without layers.

I have removed the layers for the "about us" "products" etc from the site buttons at the top, so they are now just plain blue.

I have removed the 'overlayed' text layer which I put over the gear image in the middle to test out whether it worked.

I exported the file to html and opened in a web browser, it now prints okay........but I need to use layers on the buttons and to overlay the gear image, unless there is another way of doing it.

Once the index page is done, I intend to save the file multiple times and edit each one to show the relevent category page, tidying up the links to each page accordingly. Is this right?.

Im still no wiser on why the layers freak out.....so some insight is still needed, especially seeing as I still need layers.

Thanks

Epichouse


Actually, I might go back to PhotoShop and permanently write the texts on the images and re-exporting as a dumb jpeg, then make the whole button image the clickable link to the page. Then there is just the overlaying layers to sort out over the gear image, unless I just ditch that.
I dont like running away from problems because I never learn, but on the other hand, I need to get this done somehow.

Hmm, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) canbe very limiting and problamatic.

What you really need is to have the website hand coded, which can be expensive, or time consuming if you teach yourself but it's definately worth doing.

A maximum ten page web site will usually set you back £350-ish? With around a £10 charge per month for Hosting, and a once every 2 year fee of £7-ish for the domain name (www.yourbusinessname.com).

Kirryn's nailed it on the head. WYSIWYG editors create really crappy, tangled, messy, non-standard, non-semantic code. You can't expect it to make miracles for you.

By hand-coding the site, you know *exactly* where the problem lies since you wrote it.

Using Dreamweaver and the likes

If you want a site that works cross-browser and printed, learn HTML, learn CSS. There are plenty of resources out there so there's really no excuse.

Resources for learning how to use CSS for layout