Hi Ben, many thanks for your responses!
I use firefox myself, and the website does apear ok on there, but I don't know if it would if someone used a different screen resolution to mine I also don't know how to zoom in and out on firefox to check things stay in place. -however your comment encourages me.
The other browser I use is Avant Browser, an Internet Exlorer enhancement, and I have also checked on IE itself, and both of these place the content a set pixel width from the edge of the screen rather than centered, which messes the whole thing up completely. So I guess it's maybe just an IE problem I have, but still one that has got to be fixed before the site goes live, as most people use IE.
I will try your suggestion -with your later ammendment, would that make it
div#container {
margin:0 auto;
width: 800px;
position: relative;
}
?
I use images instead of text just for reasons of apearance really. I didn't know this had a serious impact on the search engines -of course I will be adding page descriptions and key words etc. The unnecessary code that I am using on my elements is because I originally used sitespinner and sort of learned the coding side (not very well) through cut and paste and seeing what worked, so I wouldn't really know if something is redundant or not!
Once again; many thanks for your suggestion.
LG