Please help with some header banner alignment problems

[stardotstar]

Hi guys,

I am feeling waaay out of my depth playing around in my style manager and templates right now. I have spend hours and hours changing and tweaking things, cutting and pasting code that works somewhere else only to find whole chunks and blocks of the forums get displaced or otherwise reflowed and rarely anything like the result I am trying to achieve.

If someone could coach me through some simple and elegant layout issues I would be most grateful as I have had much success in getting my screen width realestate and graphic sizes quite uniform and neat and only now need the ads and banners to behave!

I have settled on a minimum graphic build width in the header of the forums of 212 for the main forum logo and 900 for the header banners of the site (served from openx).

This gives me a minimum workable width of 1112 before horizontal scrolling kicks in. I have found it impossible to target the 1024 size and am therefore trying to keep everything under the 1200 magic number.

The way that my header builds is thus:

(and unless I am very much mistaken this is pretty standard vB3.8.x for logo and header ad object placements:

<!-- logo -->
<a name="top"></a>
<table border="0" width="$stylevar[outertablewidth]" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center">
<tr>
	<td align="$stylevar[left]"><a href="$vboptions[forumhome].php$session[sessionurl_q]"><img src="$stylevar[titleimage]" border="0" alt="$vboptions[bbtitle]" /></a></td>
	<td align="$stylevar[right]" id="header_right_cell">
		<if condition="$ad_location['ad_header_logo']">$ad_location[ad_header_logo]<else />&nbsp;</if>
	</td>
</tr>

</table>
<!-- /logo -->

<!-- content table -->
$spacer_open

$_phpinclude_output

$ad_location[ad_header_end]

The result I have is the main logo top left and then the main 900x90 banner "sort-of" centered over the main forum content block. I run USC with a width of 200 which offsets the main forum columns.

The code that the 900x90 banners come in with is this:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.sourcepoint.com.au/openx/www/delivery/fl.js'></script>

<if condition="$forumid == 671">
<td align="$stylevar[center]" valign="$stylevar[middle]" ><ad what="zone:11" /></td>
<else />
<td align="$stylevar[center]"><ad what="zone:1" /></td>
</if>

From this you will see that aside from some inclusion of flash delivery script and a case for a specific forum the main logo banner is delivered with:

<td align="$stylevar[center]"><ad what="zone:1" /></td>

So far so good. That usually looks pretty good no matter what the width of the client window is - the main forum logo is top left and the main 900x90 banner floats across the pages as the width dictates.

What I need now to really integrate things is a second row of smaller ads - these are currently two 300x26pixel banners side by side, and I want them to centre perfectly under the main ad above them, unfortunately I get very disappointing results. They either go to the very left under the main logo or float uncentred as far as the main logo above them goes because they don't get the style values that the top left logo dictates when applying the centering of the main banner. I have tried copying and pasting and editing the top row code and usually break things because I can't fathom the table layout or how and why I am introducing new Table Data vs Table Row tags - let alone the alignment phrasing - using vb style strings or actual specs ie align="$stylevar[left] vs align="left" and so forth.

Here is the ad_header_end code that I am trying to get zone 13 and 12 to display with that I want centred under the main 900x90 banner above it - you will see that in this example I have inserted a transparent "block" graphic that is 212 wide to try and buffer or pad the left side of the row the same as the main logo does above it in the main header row - but I can't get it to play ball...

This code produces the attachment in the Dark style screen grab.

<td align="$stylevar[left]"><img src="http://www.archeli.com.au/forums/images/arcHELI_branding/infolayer-padding.gif" border="0" />
<td align="$stylevar[right]" id="header_right_cell">
<td align="$stylevar[center]"><ad what="zone:13" /><ad what="zone:12" /></td></td>

A simpler example using a lighter style is where I don't do any padding and just have this in my ad_header_end - you can see that the main banner is nicely centred and all I want the smaller pair to do is centre off that main banner above.

<ad what="zone:13" /><ad what="zone:12" />

That forms the layout in the second shot.

What do people think? Is there any hope for me?

Will