Building a Liquid Design with Evened Margins and Centered CSS DIVs
If you’re a web designer who wishes to learn how to build fully-centered web page layouts using CSS, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the final installment of a seven-part series on centering DIVs with CSS. This series shows you how to take advantage of the functionality provided by different DIV alignment techniques to construct centered web page designs, which can be incorporated into any existing site with minor effort.
Building a Liquid Design with Evened Margins and Centered CSS DIVs - Constructing an elastic web page layout with evened CSS margins (Page 2 of 4 )
As I expressed in the introduction, my plan here consists of using evened CSS margins to create a liquid, centered web page layout. I'll start by defining the structural markup of the page in question, which will be properly styled at a later time.
So, in this case I'm going to use the same web document coded in previous tutorials of the series, which looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Centering DIVS with a liquid layout (uses CSS evened margins)</title>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
</div>
<div id="navbar">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" id="about">About Us</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Products</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="maincol">
<h2>This is main section of the web page</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<h2>This is the footer section of the web page</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas enim. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum accumsan augue vulputate justo. Fusce faucibus. Sed blandit, neque sed lacinia nonummy, diam quam imperdiet justo, at dictum augue nunc a neque. Sed urna lacus, tincidunt at, aliquam id, fringilla id, felis. Vivamus feugiat molestie quam. Sed id dolor. Sed ac purus id sapien.</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
I'm not going to explain again how the above (X)HTML file works, since this process would be rather pointless. However, it's valid to mention that this file presents a simple structure, which makes it ideal to be styled via the aforementioned evened margins.
Thus, now that there's a sample web page available for testing purposes, it's time to see how the page's structural markup can be turned into a centered, elastic layout.
How to perform this task will be discussed in depth in the section to come. Therefore, go ahead and read the next few lines.
Style Sheets 
Using Auto Margins to Center DIVs with CSS
