Design newb

[Zlixar]

For a long while i have known HTML, javascript, PHP, and Perl. While i am good at programming i suck at design. recently i began teaching myself photoshop 7 and am looking more into the design aspects of webpages, mainly CSS.

My problem is simple: on my mainpage im going to have a news listing. for each news item there is going to be a title bar across which the title (duh) is written. however, the title bar is going to be a graphical blob i poorly made in PS7, and i need to write the text over it.
so far i have only these solutions:

1- manually look up the location in px of the title bar for every post and put the text in a div or the like in it every time i wish to add a post.

2- add the text in photoshop hence having a different graphic for each post

3- roll into a ball and cry

this is what the site will roughly look like:

--------------------------------------------------------

Badly_ made_ title_ image

---------------------------------------------------------
----------
---------- ---------Title Bar---------
---------- | |
---------- | News |
---------- | |
----------
----------
---------- ---------Title Bar---------
---------- | |
---------- | News |
---------- | |
----------
well the different font screwed it up but like i said, its not gonna look good in RL anyway :)


the design will suck for the most part, but its one of my first design trys with all my own graphics. my question mainly is how to get the Tital bar text over the image for each one without a manually positioned Div.

I know this is probobly eazy, but like i said im not good at design, until now i've been mainly PHP/Perl Programming

[Zlixar]

Figured it out. told you i was a newb, now you dont get the pleasure of giving me the horribly simple solution, god i'm dumb.

[gish]

no you are not dumb....you figured it out....that is part of the learning process....

[Dru Lee Parsec]

One of the cool things about writing code is that when you figure out one of this "obvious" solutions you never forget it. After many years of figuring things out like this you'll have a HUGE knowledge base.

Kind of like then I couldn't figure out why this code wouldn't run:

for (int i=0; i<10; i++);
// do somthing here


hint, there's a semi-colon there that shouldn't be. It took me 3 hours to find that one. Yeah, we were all newbies at one time. ;)

[gish]

exactly.....never forget something you worked hard at trying to figure out.

[Zlixar]

Well, im teaching myself photoshop and not doing too bad, but the code for this site is going to be so insanely sloppy...

at one point i had a td in a table in a div in a div in a td in a table in a tr in a table, when a simple td -> div would have worked, because i end up reworking evertying so many times

:banana: <--- just found that in your smilys, i have that in my pic collection for years ago, love this pic :)