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I am glad that collectively some kind of implied line is being drawn in the sand between tech support for themes in general and theme dev. It can be too much.
Let *fit another theme* be the new mantra. There are plenty out there. ??

My advice, for what it’s worth (if it’s free does that assume that it’s worth nothing?!) is that CK — if he’s not cleared off for good — downloads a couple of good themes that he likes and disassembles them line by line to find out how they were created. There’s nothing like doing the preparation first before starting to build or altering someone else’s code.

Before I began creating my theme for a WordPress 1.5 site I’m working on (currently at https://www.nycgb.net/wordpress/ and still very much in development) I must have spent a good month or so printing off themes, and working out how they worked; devouring CSS code files to learn what they had done and why. I also (laser) printed off a good whack of the Codex so that I could read that at my leisure and now have it filed in a binder on my desk now.

At first I was a little baffled by some of it. It was only having read it through a couple of times that when I began to create the site that I began to grasp WordPress’s potential. I love it!

Of course, a good grounding in CSS is also a bonus. I thoroughly recommend the O’Reilly books on CSS (The Definitive Guide, the Cookbook and the Pocket Reference). And PHP — I’ve a host of books on PHP that usually gets me out of any puzzling situation.

This is one of those areas that you can sometimes get by with a few hacks to someone else’s code, but the really satisfying task is building from scratch having done the homework to find out how it all pieces together.

My tuppence-worth … hey! it’s gone up in value already!

Gareth

That’s an extremely clean looking and fast loading site, Gareth! Very nicely done.

Well done, Gareth!

you are somewhat obligated to answer if not what is the point of you or anyone being here

The point of being here is to help people in their usage of WordPress, not be a free design bureau for someone who doesn’t care to take the time to learn from what’s out there. There are a surprising number of resources available to teach you how to achieve a two-column layout in CSS, which is what you want to do. As a couple of people have said, there are also a number of existing themes that have two-column layouts that you could apply to your site. However, you’d rather have someone — let it be said again in case it hasn’t sunk in yet, an utterly uncompensated volunteer — do the work for you. And then complain and be a smartass when it doesn’t happen.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you’ve likely burned your bridges with the very people who were the most willing and able to help you. I know you’ve burned them with me, as this will certainly be the last missive you’ll hear from me. Good luck.