site border and tables

[bluey83]

I've been working on a site for some time now and I've been told by the "know nothing" marketing dept that they want a border round the site with a grey background outside it. Now I know that I can do this by nesting all the tables and putting a border around that but I don't really want to do that because I want the site to load efficiently. Is there any way of getting the border and background without nesting.
When I change the body colour at present it just shows up all the flaws of the table alignments.

Thanks

[gil davis]

A picture would help. If the border is around the "site", what is left to be gray?

Perhaps you can style the BODY with css.

[bluey83]

sorry, by site I meant the width and height I have set the page at, in this case 1024 by 768. I need the grey background to cover all the whitespace outside of these dimensions for browsers that are bigger than this etc. I tried styling the body but I could only get a colour to go inside of the dimensions not outside. Is there something I'm missing?

[the tree]

Seriously though, can we at least see the site or an image of the layout that you're aiming for?

[bluey83]

Sorry about that. I've now got around the problem. I set a master table with empty cells and placed all the content I wanted in the centre cell. Inside the lead table for the centre content I gave it a css border. I then set the body colour to the grey I needed which seems to have solved the problem. It's kind of a dirty way to do it but when I get more time I'll look into it more closely.

[the tree]

Is there any reason that you're using tables for layout anyway?

[bluey83]

Hmmm, because I'm still mastering css and I'm also pressed for time on the website deadline. I decided that once I had it all up and running I would then go back on work on things like that, and clean up my code.