s are great for single boxes here and there, but they don't really work out for multiple columns with rows of changing height.

Okay, to answer the rest of your questions in order--to the best of my ability.

First, don't get confused, the shadow around my text box and the shadow on actual text are different properties, and I'll explain each here. Since you seem more interested in the actual box shadow, we'll go with that first.

I applied box-shadow: #585858 0px 4px 15px; to my final div (There are actually two in my layout). As you can see, there are four different arguments within this one property. The first is the color of the shadow. Don't get discouraged, you CAN--and perhaps should--use easy color names (red, blue, etc) because not all hex codes will work. I haven't yet figured out why that is, but some just don't. The second is the horizontal spacing. Positive numbers move the shadow to the right, negative numbers to the left. This, like all measurements in CSS can be measured in either pixels, em, or percent. The third is vertical spacing. Positive numbers move the shadow down whilst negative move it up. Hey, this is easy! And of course, the final number is the blur radius of the shadow. I've found that, depending on your layouts borders, and what's underneath it, the best results are had in the 5-20px range.

Also, don't forget to call a border with shadows, otherwise they tend to look a little odd. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the right color and size border can make all the difference with making your shadow look good or terrible.

Now, as for the shadow on the text (More commonly used to make text "glow"), this is done with the text-shadow property. This layout used to have (And actually it's still there, just commented out) text-shadow: grey 1px 1px 2px; which was intended to give it a glowing, translucent look. It was hard to read, so I removed it. As you can see, this property can be broken down exactly like box-shadow. Now, I should tell you that both of these properties are applied to a single div that contains your text. For instance, this layout's final div tag is:

The overflow-y was commented out because I realized it wasn't causing any problems. It's important to remember that text properties are applied to the element containing the text, not the text itself (With the exception of the span tag, which isn't actually a very good way of doing things for layouts--but then again, I've used it in this post...)

As for your second question... Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. It typically doesn't matter what order your CSS items are in, as long as all of your properties come before the element in question, but that may not be what you're asking... As for how I handled my background, in another div (nested OUTSIDE of the div posted above) I used background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: bottom center; (Notice that the background-position property has whitespace between bottom and center--this is not normal behavior for CSS).

And to answer your third question, the CSS for my layout all together looks like this.

In the "Header" box //

In the "Signature" box //

Layout by Lazlo">https://www.vizzed.com/boards/profile.php?id=162314">Lazlo Falconi

. (Don't even ask how I managed to print the code without invoking it, because that would be a lot of &

Anyway, if you have any other questions, or I failed to answer something to your satisfaction, feel free to ask any time!