How to have background image but with white behind boxes?

Hi
I am quite new to OC and coding but have managed to add a background image to my store, but cannot work out how to get it to appear only at the sides and give a white background behind the boxes for easier viewing.
Can anyone advise please?

Here is what I have currently - http://www.debbiekneale.co.uk/store/ind ... ommon/home

Here is what I'd like to achieve - http://performance-cycling.net/index.shtml

This site has a 'wrapper' which I think has something to do with it, but I have not been able to recreate the same in my OC site, so hope someone who actually knows what they are doing might help :-)

Many thanks!

( I am not a designer but can do the backend code. )

The ornament is the background.
The site uses a 960px or 950px layout which is centered or wrapped.

You create the wrapper for 960 px, center it and the ornaments will show in the background.

You also need to use drop shadows for the images so that you get the same effect across all 3 sites.

The main site is having problems with the footer area separating from the content area. Also, your round corners use a background color when you should have either matched them to the color of the ornament gif or used transparencies.

At the moment, I working on a CSS blueprint layout for opencart. At the moment I'm doing it for my site but since it's blueprint (another is 960) you can layout a site in very little time, the only problem is design skill

Thanks SapporoGuy for your post and alerting me re the footer issue, will work on that!

Thanks to NellyShark too for a previous post which I was able to use part of and adapt to create what I wanted to do.

Here is the code I added to my theme stylesheet for anyone else who might want to achieve similar... and NellySharks post link is below too...

#container {
width: 960px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding-top:0px;
padding-bottom:30px;
padding-right:5px;
padding-left:5px;
text-align: left;
background: white;
}


http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 446#p19363

Don't know since that CSS only centers your page and makes it 960 pixels wide.

Need more CSS and how you are building the content and footer areas.

Hi SapporoGuy
No sure what your latest post means - the code I posted is all I added to the default theme .css to achieve what I wanted on the shop part of the web.

The other site address I posted which had what I wanted in terms of the look i.e. white background in the centre and image background only visible at the sides, was just to show the difference and what I wanted to acheive with the shop site.
Once I added the code above to the shop site .css, it achieved the same, which was what I wanted and so I posted the code in the hope it might help others :-)

ooops, sorry I thought you were still looking for help with the footer thing.

HI Debbie,

Having looked at your site, you might want to use my free template. It looks a lot more like your website than the default theme, and you can change the colours and background easily.

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... ion_id=768

Hope that helps.

Hey Chones
Your template does indeed look much more like my existing layout - thanks for the suggestion :-)

I will have a closer look when I get a mo. but wanted to post now quickly, to say thanks for both the suggestion and for making such a resource available to the community :-)

Thanks. Am just glad to be of help.