Need help with stacking my website design

I'm having one of those pull-my-hair-out moments that has become an all consuming obsession at work and I can't figure it out for the life of me.

I'm working on a site where I have a repeating background image (gradient of blue) and I need to put another image on top of that which goes beneath my "container" div. The large image that I'm having to put the "container" on top of has designs that appear to pop out of the sides.

The trouble that I'm having is this: when the user shrinks the window size, my buttons (that are within the container div) get all jumbled up and go one on top of another when I do this in IE and Firefox. I would like it to stay in the same spot on top of th开发者_开发问答e large image in its spot despite the size of the window.

I think it has to do with absolute position, something that I'm not too familiar with, but I'm wondering if this is possible. I have also never used tables and have just used div tags to create sites. Fairly new at this - just have been designing websites for about a year now.

Help!

I am answering this without seeing an example, so bear with me.

It sounds as though the container div does not have a width assigned to it.

Since the container div doesn't have a width, it is shrinking and expanding causing the buttons to jumble up. Also, make sure that your buttons and such are positioned absolutely inside of your container div. Your container div must have position:relative; set in its style in order to absolutely position items inside of it. However, it sounds as though you have your positioning already set accordingly, it is just worth re-mentioning.