The first week's assignment was pretty difficult. We had to redesign an already created web page that made use of tables, even for non-statistical data. I've gone and changed these tables to DIVs but am having a problem with formatting. Each subsequent DIV pushed a little further out of alignment, causing all data to eventually shift over. Another issue that I encountered was with the header, or branding, section of the page. The colored bar pushes up instead of staying in a static position.

The first roadblock that I ran into was getting the colored boxes to position correctly, and that was finally accomplished by using the "float" property. I needed to create a small box for text, then a small divider, and then finally a larger box of the same height but whose width goes to the end of the page. Quite frustrating until I came across the "float" property. From there I was able to create the correct DIVs for the content, but that is when I ran into the issue of the formatting progressively pushing further out of alignment.

After seeing some examples from a couple of other students I think there are some things that I can change to try and address this formatting. My feelings are that once I can force everything to align correctly the remainder of the page should be fairly simple to finish off.

My plan of attack on this is to get the page displaying as I would like, clean up the code (and try to keep as small as possible), and then finally validating to XHTML strict standards. I feel like I understand how CSS works but now need to learn the finer details that will allow me to force the page to display exactly as I'm intending.