Do you ever try to do something that looks so simple and fairly straight forward, and other people around you are able to do it without a problem, but you’re the one that’s having trouble?

Welcome to my struggle.

Although my coding skills are still at the beginner level and I haven’t touched it since we created it, anyone that goes onto my site is greeted with a white page with a simple sentence explaining that there’s nothing to see. I may not be able to create an elegant page with fancy features (yet), I at least wanted to make my page look a little bit more lively. To do that, I wanted to simply apply a background image to my page.

First things first, I wanted to play around with the code and not make anything final on the main page, so I duplicated my resume.css and renamed it for my sandbox page.

Since I had no idea what I was doing, much like with everything else when it comes to web design, I had to trust the good and mighty Google for the answer. Much like the rest of the class, I used w3school.com to guide me through the process. At first, I wanted to set the background using CSS, and this is what the code would look like:

cssbackground-image

Okay, simple enough. So I tried that myself:

cssbrackets

(I am aware there is no semicolon in the above image. I added it after taking this screenshot. It did not help)

No results. Okay, maybe there’s something else you have to do but they’re just not showing that part. I tried adding images/ to before the image file. Nope, that didn’t work.

This is the part where I tell you that everything starts to look like this.

After trying multiple other combinations and trying to toy with the code, I had a thought: “Did I add the image to the server?”

Oh, geez. So I did that, and then used the initial code I used. Still no dice. I looked up multiple videos and followed them to see if there was something I was doing wrong. None of them were working for me.

…Okay, now I’m getting frustrated.

This is about the time I noticed that Mike F was able to do what I was trying to do, but in HTML. “Alright,” I thought. “I’ll try what he did.” I used the same page of w3school that he had used and switched to my sandbox’s index.html document.

htmlbackground

I did exactly what he had done, and checked to make sure I wasn’t making the same mistakes he made. I inserted the code, and then uploaded the file to the server

No changes.

Yep. That’s it. I’m done with this.

After spending hours trying to figure out something that seemed so simple from the start, I came up empty. As of now, I don’t know if there was something I was doing wrong with the code or there was something outside of it I didn’t take care of. With my luck, it’s something so simple and an easy oversight.

Mike, if you’re reading this: please. Help a brother out and show me your ways!

-Domenic Manzi

http://www.domenicmanzi.com