Do NOT use Word for HTML. It screws up the code badly! There's a lot of free WYSIWYG editors out there. Try softseek.com or download.com to find them. Frames suck for many reasons. If someone links to one of your pages inside your site, then your navagation is lost. (Been there, seen that. Won't do it myself.) Frames do not work the same between IE 4 and IE 5. I know one site where the frame cuts off some of the content of the page. Just chops off the last letter of each line no matter how you size the screen, no matter what the resolution. (I never did figure out the problem, and since I wasn't responsible for that disaster of a site, I didn't care.) Tables are GOD. You can do tons of neat tricks with them. If you need info on using HTML and tables, go to www.webmonkey.com for more information than you'll ever need. Since you are making a background image, this probably won't come into play, but be warned that the Hex code for colors in photo imaging programs like Photoshop does not quite match up with the Hex code for browsers. My current front page picture has an oval frame with a hex code of #333333. My background is #333333. Looking at it through a browser, I could clearly see where the picture ended and the background began. I finally made a small background gif of #333333 so the picture blended into the background properly. (Argh! At least it only added .5kb to the page.) Another trick is the blank.gif file. You can use columns and rows to make dividing lines between sections. (Color the row/column itself to a different color. The dividing lines between my site areas is an example of this. A really good example is devshed.com.) In Nutscape, though, if there is nothing in the column/row, it won't show it. I routinely use a 1x1 blank (transparent) gif for my site. If I want a dividing column that is 5 pixels wide, I put in the blank.gif and size it to 5 pixels. It displays the same in all browsers. Sorry, site design is fun for me. I just wish I had better design/color skills.