Yahoo! Style Layout - Margins and Alignment

[SJ McAbney]

Recently I was building my home page but it turned out to be a disaster and I have since decided to go for a Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) style layout as I can get much more on the page and it looked simpler to emulate. :D

I have three problems as regards my development page (http://www.talk-history.com/myHome.html).


I've played about with heights and valign properties but can't get the form inside the search area to be centred within the box.
I've played about with padding and margin settings but can't get my text within the boxes to be off the borders without disturbing the other boxes with gradients within.
I can't get a space between the top left box and the bottom left box. I've tried a BR tag but this did not work.


Can anyone see my mistakes and/or remedy them? Thanks

[KDLA]

Space between boxes, instead of using the <br/>-
I've used this before:
<span style="height: 25px;">&nbsp;</span>
or whatever height you want to use.

Centering the Search box -
<div id="search">
<form name="frmSearch" method="post" action="search.php">
<p style="text-align: center">Search Talk History:
<input type="text" name="txtSearch" size="60" />
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Search" />
<a class="tiny" href="advanced-search.php" title="Advanced Search" target="_self">Advanced Search</a></p>
</form>
</div>

Getting text "off the box" -
<div class="categorytop"><h2 style="margin: 4px;">Article of the Day</h2></div>
(You include the spacing attribute in the text's tag, rather than the box's.)

Good Luck -

[SJ McAbney]

Thankyou for you reply. I've tried all three of your solutions and none of them brought about the desired outcome.

Another thing I forgot to say was that I tried to make two other IDs - leftcolumn and rightcolumn - to go down the left and right of the page with each column holding its respective objects but the page became a complete mess; probably due to my inabaility to get used to floats.

[SJ McAbney]

Okay, I've got the left and right columns to work now.

Anyone got any suggestions on vertically aligning the search form within its area?

New Link (http://www.talk-history.com/site.php)