footerstickalt with graphic layout (absolute-positioned divs)

[waterox]

I will freely admit I dont really know CSS.

Please have a look at this page I am working on. There are a number of issues I have been unable to resolve on my own.

<snip>

The main problem here is that I cannot get the footer to stick to the bottom of the page. I am using footerstickalt, but must be missing something fundamental, because as soon as I add my absolute-div content/layout, it doesnt work. I have included the CSS in the html page.

Also, in IE7 the last line of left menu text has a larger gap.
The bullet point text in IE is positioned differently, although I am using an absolute positioned div to contain it.
Do lists and paragraphs have different spacing in firefox and IE? In which case how should designers make sure that everything will look the same cross-browser?

My main gripe about CSS so far is the lack of practical guides on how to implement it for designers.
At least with tables we had a GUI that worked with Dreamweaver!

For fluid text layouts that are not graphic based there are tons of examples.
But for graphic-based layouts its proving a nightmare. All of the resources I google seem to explain text-based layouts very well, columns, floats etc etc.
But anything I output from Imageready needs serious hacking.

Should I just go back to tables for this type of layout? Or is there a simple set of rules for creating these kind of pages with css and workable footers?

[edited by: Robin_reala at 6:18 pm (utc) on April 2, 2007]
[edit reason] Removing URL as per TOS #13 [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Setek]

If you're a designer who has no time to learn CSS, nor the want to, then you're better off going back to your WYSIWYG apps, like Dreamweaver, or even letting ImageReady do the slicing and HTML creation for you.

In my opinion (I can't speak for everybody, but I'm going to say the majority) believe WYSIWYG apps output terrible code, like the auto-slicing tools from ImageReady, and we would all rather do it ourselves.

If your focus is more on how something looks (its form) over how something performs (its function) then you can keep using what you've always used, because you probably would find no benefit to CSS-Presentation.

If you really want to learn, you have to trudge through mud and learn and learn and learn. By then, you might also have learnt that it's well worth it :)