How can I format this to be like my website?
 

I'm a WordPress and Atahualpa newbie so have a basic question I hope can be answered easily!

Basically, I chose this theme because the format looked like that of the website I was making it to go with (a professional homepage for my girlfriend) however I'm having a little trouble formatting the customisable regions to fit.

My site has a blank content region like altahualpa however to make it look more like a page I have added some graphics with drop shadows for the effect. This involves a graphic placed at the top (below a banner) and at the bottom of the page, and with a background image repeating down the sides.

So far I have managed to get my banner and top shadow graphic aligned whilst keeping left and right padding (as I wanted padding but this kept pushing the banner to the side as it's inside the content box) by giving them their own ID tag when placing the 'img src' tags in the header and then inside the css section putting in a negative indent.

However I am having difficult setting the background for my second graphic and need suggestions of how to get this done! So basically how can I get the repeating background inside the page to work?

Also, the footer section doesn't seem to want to accept an image inside it - and even when I specify it's size so the shape appears for a second before refusing to load that's only below the copyright and not the 'powered by wordpress' text. Any ideas on how I can get this done? Or alternatively, any pointers on how to navigate the hundreds of .php files to get my hands on the source code to put this in? I also thought I could

It will probably help explain what I'm trying to do and the stage I'm at so far if I link you to those pages (the blog is live as I couldn't see a way to set it up offline first? but not linked to so hopefully nobody's watching me stumble along!) though I don't know the forum policy on this so I apologise if links aren't supposed to be used!

http://blog.evaxu.com is the wordpress blog (not started of course)
and http://www.evaxu.com is the website I'm trying to get it to look like.


Any suggestions/feedback welcomed!

In the Gold forum there are instruction on how to create a simple splash page. What that gives you is a front page with no header, sidebars, or footer. It seems as though you could then put a table in that page with your images and links. If you don't have the $20 to enter the Gold forum just start playing with the theme options and CSS (especially display:none) to create that plain page and do as I mentioned with a table.

Thanks for the reply, as I'm still playing with wordpress (and the issue of being a student ;) ) I guess I'll just keep playing with it and see if I come up with anything. One thought I did have -which seems to have disappeared from my post:confused:- was to put what I want under my footer at the bottom of my page, so that would be kicker I guess, and then push its positioning down... Thing is these things aren't loading very quickly either!

performance of a wordpress site is based on many factors but probably the biggest factors are
- the host you are running on and how many other sites are on the machine your site is assigned to.
- how many plugins you are using
- how much info you are grabbing from other sites (wait time for them to response)

use Firefox and firebug and you can see some of this stuff.