How do people make sites like these... http://www.aol.com/ http://www.xbox.com/en-US/ http://www.yahoo.com/ with everything in the middle part of the page and whatever type of background you want?
CSS is the way to go! It takes a lot of experimenting, but once you get going, you can create sites just like those.
Just don't let the likes of Yahoo! fool you into thinking that the old ways are still the "best way to do things" and you should be fine. If you have some HTML and CSS knowledge, you may be interested in reading Designing with Web Standards, 2nd Edition by Jeffery Zeldman.
Are there any good templates for CSS? How would I make my own page with CSS? Like what program would I use?
http://cssplay.co.uk/menus/index.html this site give pretty nice info. i have learnt myself from this site you can give it a try
just make your site use a fixed width and then put <div align="center"> ....page.... </div> areound the complete coding
As for the coding of the site, I recommend gVIM, it is open source, and thus free. It's a plain text tool designed to be used by coders, but it highlights the code, making it easier to read, and find what you are looking for. If you use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, it can insert code that isn't what you want, or keep you from figuring out exactly how you got the results. If you code in a plain text editor, your successes and failures are yours, and yours alone (unless someone else gave you some coding help, in which case give them some credit too).
Just do yourself a favor. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of HTML, XHTML and CSS Visual Quickstart Guide, 6th Edition by Elizabeth Castro. It will teach you how to make a Web site. That has to be some of the worst advice I have ever seen. Fixed width sites do not work on systems with high screen resolutions and large amounts of visible browser real estate. They're called "crappy little stripes down the middle of the screen" for a reason. They also lock you into a set amount of pixels, and are VERY hard to for visitors to resize without breaking the layout, unless you literally box yourself into a corner design-wise. Also, align="" has been depreciated and set aside for removal from the specification. It is only valid when using either no DOCTYPE, or a Transitional DOCTYPE. You will not see it in HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or even XHTML 1.1
I've never used that program before, but I also know that Notepad++ does the same thing and is also free. You should really learn to code, don't think you'll be able to make a really awesome site in FrontPage or Nvu (It's possible, but it's better to learn HTML and CSS). Align is depreciated? Wow, I never knew that.
I'm sorry, I think I may have misunderstood the origonal question. First you make your 'body' tag have whatever background you want for the sides. This can be done either in the tag (for transitional standard) or using CSS. Using CSS makes it easier to change the elements of a multi-page site, so that's what I recommend. You then use a central div. You specify it's width either using a set number of pixils, or with a percentage. A popular percentage seems to be 80%, but if you want more content area per page, you might try 90%. If give a choice by your boss or client, I recommend going by percentage, as this will help your page scale better. If you need more help on the code for this, please ask. I'm sure someone would be glad to help you.
As everyone has said, (X)HTML and CSS will solve this and almost any other design problems. The best way to learn is by reading a book. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML is the easiest (and most thorough) book on this subject that I have encountered.