it just choved everything to the right about 500px.
its like it only shows half the page visible on the screen then half of thr rest of the page is pure margin

These are the 'bare' essentials of the CSS centering hack: the width and the margin. If you don't specify a width, the margin trick won't work. If you don't specify the left and right margins as auto the wrapper won't be centered.

You may say: "But I specified a width: 100%!" --- good for you and in truth, your wrapper IS being centered correctly. However, the contents of the wrapper (such as your navigation or content divs) are still aligned to the left since that is the default behavior for elements inside a block.

You can see this behavior by adding border: 1px solid #F00 to your .wrapper div.

Now to fix your problem, you have to specify a width, preferably something slightly greater than the size (or percentage) of the content you put in your wrapper.

Try changing your .wrapper attributes to this:

Actually, you should start weaning yourself away from absolute positioning (there are exceptions) but your design can be implemented better without it... BAH alright, I'll still fix that search_bar.

Try this:

hey it worked, i owe you big!
but the search bar fix you gave me puts it in the wrong position.
its like it cant even go to the right spot.
i would like it to be above the links centerd in the white area to the right.

regards

When I check your site, the page still isn't centered. Why is that?

It's size div.wrapper is still 100%. Tell me when you've updated your site so I can see how to fix the search bar.

oh yeah sorry, i am working on a localhost server. ill upload it soon.

>.< Crusty logo image is taking up the whole top portion of your nav div. Set the attributes of your .logo class to this:



Then change your search_bar class to this:

You can tweak the margins to fit your layout... I can't estimate how much margin you want.

thank you you fixed it. and i tweeked the search bar how i wanted it. thank you for your help.

and what mite you suggest i use instead of absolute positioning?

regards

It depends on what your design is. As for your current layout, it can be done with floats and a frequent check at possible values of the display attribute.