I have three unresolved issues with the layout — so far.
One is that there are no paragraph breaks, at least none that look like <p> breaks usually do, with a line of space before the new paragraph. Why is this happening? I am guessing it is in the CSS somewhere, but I’m not sure what to look for. Any suggestions?
Second is even more puzzling. On the front page, in Firefox and in Safari, the sidebar box is higher than the content box. In IE they’re even. What’s wrong there? I want them to be even everywhere. And in Firefox, they’re only uneven on the front page.
Third, the archive pages only show excerpts from each post. I’d like to find the code for that so I can determine how long the excerpt should be, and I’d also like to make the “More[…]” into a working link with the text “[Read more] ”
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Marcy Prochaska 
TechGnome at the WordPress support forums helped me with the paragraph breaks. His solution for the height difference solved the problem on the front page, but on other pages now the sidebar was lower. Sigh. In keeping with the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle, I’m starting again. I’ve commented out all the CSS I don’t quite understand, and have gotten rid of line-heights and most font-size declarations, and am trying again to use simple CSS, with variable sizes as much as possible.
Now I have paragraph breaks again. And the content and sidebar are even.
But on all pages but the front page, the content ignores my left margin.
Sigh.
I figured out how to get the left margin to work on all pages — duh, I had to edit the other templates, like for archives and single posts.
And I figured out the excerpting problem. I found a plugin called the_excerpt Reloaded that allows all sorts of ways to customize how the archive pages make and display excerpts.
And I’ve done a lot more today, too — look how I’ve got background color for the post headings (created a class called heading and put a
<div>around both title and date) and a border around the post metadata, and I’ve formatted the comments to look the way I want (by using a negative left margin, settinglist-style-typetonone, and changing the order of elements in the comments template.Woo-hoo!
I still need to work on the sidebar. I want to eliminate a lot of the excess white space and maybe use UrbanGiraffe’s code again to try to set a minimum width.