Auto expanding cells?

I have a site that I'm doing for a client. I'm currently trying to set up the templates for the pages. There's 3 columns for information to go but it seems that the templates are not set up to "expand" when the content fills up. You can view how the page should look at http://tjfdesigns.com/pirana. When the dark green area or the medium green area on the right side gets too full, the left nav column will start to split up trying to fill the void. The middle and right columns did the same, but I was able to put in the bgcolor values to the nested tables in order to avoid the problem. Can anyone help in figuring out where to make the adjustment in order to keep it from happening on the left side? I put up an instance of what I'm trying to avoid at http://tjfdesigns.com/pirana/index2.htm

Thanks for the assistance.

I can't duplicate this problem. I copied your source file and added a lot of content to the right-hand column and it expanded fine.

Odd, it expanded at the bottom? Or did the button images and color start to come apart? I added more to the right cloumn (duplicated what was already there) and it started pulling apart even more (index2 page ). Maybe I'll just have to add page breaks to the left column under the text, when needed, though not the easiest way to go, it does work,... unless anyone else has got an idea.

Thanks
Jim

It seriously isn't coming apart for me. I'm using Firefox, Safari, and Netscape so maybe the crap-tacular Internet Explorer is the culprit. Regardless of what's to blame you have to fix it. Have you considered making your template more CSS driven? Less dependency on tables and expanding cells interfering with attached cells makes life a lot easier.

If you're not into CSS then maybe using valign="top" in a couple of your TD tags should do the trick.

If I were doing this website without CSS I would start with a single, all-engulfing table. Inside of that I would have a table with 3 columns and 1 row (one for each shade of green). I would then have a DIV (absolute positioning at 0,0 of the table) floating on top of the three columns which would have the logo etc. in it.

That would be my first try. Slicing images causes problems all the time like you're experiencing. Consider CSS for this one. The site will end up with 20 band-aids instead of an error-free design. Consider what might happen if someone with poor eyesight needs to enlarge the text on your site to better read the green text on green background (which is sorta hard to read even with my 20/15 vision). All the band-aids in the world might not fix what happens to your slices when that happens.

Thanks, in what little spare time I have, I'm trying to expand my knowledge in different areas (DB driven sites, CSS, etc) but for now, my CSS is limited to the sheets controlling the typography. I know there's so much, but so little time

Jim

once you learn CSS you'll realize there's something else that has so much to learn and there's so little time. It'll never end and that's the fun of it. Eric Meyer on CSS is a great book that talks about CSS. Many web tutorial too. Controlling the layout via CSS will help you in the future with W3C compliance and XHTML which I heavily promote.