i have a jpg image that i am trying to stretch down both sides of my page. if i enter the exact dimension of the page it falls short. i am not sure what code to use to make it auto stretch. it also displays different lengths in I.E than in FF

Here is the page!

What makes you think that the page is going to be 1399px high?

A tiled background image will stretch as high as the page, regardless of how high the page is.

I tried putting a background image in background="blabla.jpg" but it distorted the jpg in the horizontal dimension as it stretched it vertically. i then adjusted the image size slightly and now it fits.

only now it looks like its tiled instead of stretched is there any way of getting it to look a bit better?
I have put it in as a background so you can see what i mean here

http://www.cam-guide.co.uk/Bolton/pubsandc...on/nights1.html

and i cant seem to be able to get the thing to display empty with just a background. every time i try it it collapses the layout cell

No, do it with CSS. You can use the background with any element and you can tile it in one direction only (or not at all).
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/color-background/
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/colors.html#q2

ok, I did as suggested and it works fine. thanks.

Although i am still having a problem keeping the layout cell open when there is nothing in it. as soon as i delete the content it collapses.

i am having to insert text to keep it open as shown below!

<td width="60" rowspan="20" valign="top" class="test2">blabla</td>

I tried inserting &nbsp; but that didnt work either

Fix the errors.
http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.c...s&input=yes


Also, your widths don't add up. For example, how is a 886 pixels wide cell supposed to fit in a 640 pixels wide table? If I remove the width from the outer table the background shows up with only &nbsp; in the cell.

well spotted! i had a feeling it would be something like that!

About these errors, they are all connected to imports from either flash or fireworks into Dreamweaver. do you think there might be something wrong in the settings of these programs to cause that. i can fix the errors pertaining to the "id" issues but not sure how to go about fixing the flash errors.

No idea, but I doubt, because there isn't any situation when you actually would want multiple IDs. Most things you try to use them for will fail. Some browsers may be happy to apply style to them, others won't. Every attempt to use scripting will miserably fail. You should use a class instead (or a smarter selector) if the IDs are for CSS only.

Also, I think you have more width discrepancies, but the first one I spotted worked so I didn't look too close at the rest.

Fireworks seems to have chucked a load of spacers in above the navigation bar that i designed which has thrown up some of the id errors. thats fixable but the flash insert seems to have an error on ever element in the code. That is the way dreamweaver imported it. is it going to be detrimental to the page causing it not to display on some browsers and what would you recommend for the fix?

I have also just noticed i seem to have ended up with a table inside another table. This Dreamweaver isn't as user friendly as it claims to be! thanks for your help so far. i am learning loads as i go!

Yeah, that's because EMBED is nonstandard. So the validator goes crazy and tells you none of its attributes is defined... because EMBED itself doesn't exist. You can either live with those errors or try to implement this.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/

have you tried creating a 1x1 pixel gif that is transparent and giving it the width of the box your trying to keep open? This will maintain the width while it looks like there is nothing in it.

Just a design note, In the Night Guide place a small space between the descriptions below the posters, as it is now the text flows into each other, it's a little counter-intuitive.