[DDD3]

Please bare with me since I am a newbie. I am desperately overdue in redoing my website (I have barely updated it in the last 3 years. When I created it 5 years ago, it was in Front Page on Windows. I bought an IMac and last week I finished the design elements in IWeb and decided it was a little like being in High School with Kindergarten tools. So now I bought Dreamweaver and need to get some basics down before starting this project. My two questions now are:

1. When a website uses a center area for the website content (such as the design of this forum), what is that called as opposed to filling up the entire screen with one's website. How is a center area created in Dreamweaver and what are the pro's and con's of each?

2. I am an artist and have a photo I want to use as the background for my website template? What is the optimum size when doing that so it isn't a loading nightmare (or is it always going to make it very sluggish?)

DDD3