Hi there Yeroon
Many thanks for all your suggestions and apologies for not coming back to you sooner - I never received an email to say that there had been an update to this thread so didnt come back and see your answers straight away !!
I have chosen to go with the second option and while I know that having images of this size isnt ideal my partner is insisting that this is the look that she wants !!
Is there any way of preventing the scroll bars from appearing in the maincontent div as I think it would look much better if these didnt show
Slowly starting to get to grips with CSS now so many thanks to you again !!
Ian