Website size issues, backgrounds & menu bar sending viewers to Xara's page

So I spent about 3 weeks building our company webpages using XWD6. I have to say I love the software but I hate the fact I cant get someone on the phone to help. The issues I am having are minor but need to be fixed. After making all the pages, links and designing how I wanted evrything to flow I forgot one major thing. The website page sizes. Now that I have uploaded my website live I am finding that it is to small. I would like it to fill up the page more. I used templates for most of my pages. I am also having trouble with my bacgrounds. My homepage has a blueprint graphic that I imported and is supposed to show all the way to the sides of the page. It doesn't. I also imported some free backgrounds from info serv media http://www.**************.com.
Although the backgrounds look great I cant seem to tone them down. I tried transperancy on them and it looked great until I previewed. I then realized that transperancy only makes stuff "see through". What I was trying to do was dull the images. I then tried the fill tool and added fractal clouds. This gave the an effect I was willing to settle on but again when I previwed the page it had its original loudness. But what is really frustrating me are the buttons. My website is up and running you can see it here http://www.interdecorinc.com/. Some of the menu items and buttons redirect the viewer to Xara's website.
Any help would be much appreciated.

1. To have the repeating background image, select the bitmap in the Bitmaps Gallery and click the Background button. Or just drag and drop the bitmap on your page.
2. To tome it down in WD6 just do whatever you like to make it look correctly (use transparency etc). Then select this object and export it as true color PNG (without alpha). Then import this PNG into your document and use it as a background from the bitmaps gallery.
3. The links to xara.com. I have looked at your site and some pages have transparent objects overlying the main menu (and even the header). These objects have links applied to xara.com. Remove them.

Your page width is only 900. which also affects the background image. I use 1000 with no problems, but the "official" word here seems to be 985 or so. Make the page wider.

Your background graphic is HUGE at 1846 x 614, and it's non-repeating. Once you settle on a page width make the background graphic the same width because it now takes WAY too long to download. How are you with graphics? If you "brighten" the background graphic in XWD that may get you what you want -- which I assume means "fading" it, without all that transparency stuff.

Oh hell, I tried it myself. Here's what I did, all in XWD, in case the attachment isn't what you want. I cropped to what I thought was the best 1000 px width. Then I "brightened" it -- a LOT, and saved it as a 16 color png. That gives you the dimensions I think you want. 1000 x 600. If not, just change the width to whatever your new page width is. The size has been reduced from 357 KB to only 24.3, which will load a lot faster.

Forget transparencies for this type of thing. Instead click the camera icon for photo editing and play with BOTH the brightness and the contrast to get it "toned down" to what you want. Contrast keeps it from getting both faint and soft -- you'll see,

You seem new at this, so always save non-repeating backgrounds in the smallest file size possible so it loads quickly. People leave a slow-loading page, especially slow-loading home pages!

Oh yeah, you do have a great eye for designand the mechanics will come, especially because you're using XWD.

P.S. I can't get the upload to be full-size, so there must be a size restriction here. Try enlarging this, or just follow the same steps I described.

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Originally Posted by mikehihn

Your page width is only 900. which also affects the background image. I use 1000 with no problems, but the "official" word here seems to be 985 or so. Make the page wider.

Your background graphic is HUGE at 1846 x 614, and it's non-repeating. Once you settle on a page width make the background graphic the same width because it now takes WAY too long to download. How are you with graphics? If you "brighten" the background graphic in XWD that may get you what you want -- which I assume means "fading" it, without all that transparency stuff.

Oh hell, I tried it myself. Here's what I did, all in XWD, in case the attachment isn't what you want. I cropped to what I thought was the best 1000 px width. Then I "brightened" it -- a LOT, and saved it as a 16 color png. That gives you the dimensions I think you want. 1000 x 600. If not, just change the width to whatever your new page width is. The size has been reduced from 357 KB to only 24.3, which will load a lot faster.

Forget transparencies for this type of thing. Instead click the camera icon for photo editing and play with BOTH the brightness and the contrast to get it "toned down" to what you want. Contrast keeps it from getting both faint and soft -- you'll see,

You seem new at this, so always save non-repeating backgrounds in the smallest file size possible so it loads quickly. People leave a slow-loading page, especially slow-loading home pages!

Oh yeah, you do have a great eye for designand the mechanics will come, especially because you're using XWD.

P.S. I can't get the upload to be full-size, so there must be a size restriction here. Try enlarging this, or just follow the same steps I described.

Attachment 80889

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Thank you guys for helping me out. I fixed the button issue with the embedded Xara redirect. I still have questions about the page sizes and backgrounds. How do I change the background width of all of my pages without moving anything around on the page? Will everything grow toghether? Also, I understand about the home page size being to large and loading slow. I really want to fix that. The problem is that the background graphic is an actual blueprint. I think I saved it in photoshop as a JPG. I don't want the background to move around if I make changes to it but it is also not displaying properly. It is supposed to be visible to the sides of the page as well. I put a transperancy on it so it would be softer on the main area. Maybe I should duplicate or double layer it and dull the layer in the area I want to see? Most importantly the width of the pages is my main concern right now.

Everything you guys told me helped out alot. I am still working on making the homepage a smaller size and I think I understand how to do that now. There is something I am having a problem with though. I designed the front page to display that blueprint background all the way to the edges and even display on peoples widescreen monitors. For some reason it will not display the actual width that I see on the design software. What is the issue? First thing I'm going to do is export it as a PNG and trim the data size down. After that I would like to import and scale it so like I said it will fill up the sides of the page no matter how wide your screen is.