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Two major things wrong:

1. You have two doctype declarations and two doctype headers. Get rid of one or condense them into one if you need the code for both. THAT in itself can be giving you a good majority of your current troubles.

2. Your current sidebar coding won’t work for what you want it to for a few different reasons.

Your total width for your content is 608 pixels. Your narrowcolumn is 400 pixels. To make your sidebar fit next to your content, you need to make sure the total width of your sidebar is not bigger than the remainder amount of space which is, in this case, 208 pixels.

Your sidebar code currently looks like this:

#sidebar {
	padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
	margin-left: 500px;
	width: 190px;
	}

Try this instead:

#sidebar {
        padding: 20px 0px 10px 0px;
        float: right:
        width: 185px;
}

And see where your sidebar ends up.

From THERE (and make sure you fix that doctype problem I mentioned earlier), you can troubleshoot the rest of your coding.

Okay, a few things going on:

Where you’ve done a great job piecing together your code and such, it’s also a bit messy. It helps you a great deal if you can keep your code clean because it makes it a lot easier for you to troubleshoot things like unclosed tags or double tags and stuff like that.

With that said, you have a mess of CSS for your sidebar.

Just specify the width of your sidebar and float it right of your content and see what it does in IE.

No absolute positioning, no weird margins, just float it right and leave it and see where it goes and see where you get extra spacing if you get extra spacing at all.

Float your content to the left as well and don’t bother with absolute positioning.

What you’ll probably see is maybe a bit of extra space or something is too ‘fat’ or that there are extra pixels and the like.

From THERE we can fix it.

Things to remember: padding adds pixels, margins sometimes collapse, and IE likes adding extra space in some places.

I’m going to revive this thread and say that I have also experienced similar problems with the theme previewer, though the problem in my case appears to be isolated to Firefox? And perhaps Firefox 2.X?

The theme works dandily if you activate it, but yes, the theme preview option just won’t display a darned thing for some themes.

Awesome and you’re very welcome! I’m glad my own hair-pulling moment with going WTF over the problem with theme previewing ended up helping you out!

Try and validate your code first and if you still see the same issues, come back and drop a line. ??

It’s much easier to explain and illustrate IE’s code rendering problems if the code is valid (that way, we can make sure it really is IE and not just bad code).

As it is, right off the top of my head, I can name a few problems that IE might have with rendering your site but can’t be confirmed until you have valid coding that proves that the issue must be with IE.

With that said, make sure you validate your CSS as well.

IE is notorious for not being standards-compliant and one of the biggest and most popular IE problems comes from how IE interprets and handles and renders floats and margins and block level and inline level content and percentages.

Once you get your coding validated (this will fix the majority of potential bugs :)), I would suggest doing research on those issues that I mentioned if you still encounter issues with how IE displays your site.

What browser are you using? I know that on Firefox 2.0, the theme preview option doesn’t always show a preview of the theme in my viewing window. If I activate the theme, however, the theme still works despite the preview and the screenshot image not working/showing.

When I look at your website in IE6, I see the black background behind your header/title (AAA), but see a paaale blue background in other places.

The pale blue suggests to me that there is an attempt to perform a transparency in the code and I would believe that that is your problem as IE6 doesn’t have the proper support for alpha transparencies – especially if applied to backgrounds. The slider, I believe, is what is causing the conflict in your theme.

Also, as an aside, if you take a peek at your site in IE6, your content column is shifted down.

Something to bear in mind when you design themes or design websites in general:

How code behaves and is rendered and displayed on the browser depends on how a browser itself renders the code. Sounds redundant, but the fact is, IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari don’t behave the same way when it comes to rendering code.

The most ‘foolproof’ way, I guess you can say, to make the code as compatible with as many browsers as possible is to follow the W3C standard when coding, which means writing W3C valid code/code that validates according to W3C standards.

THIS, I feel, is why validating code and writing valid code is so important.

IE is very VERY famous in the web development community for not following the established W3C standards in the earlier versions of the browser up until 7.0 and one of the ways that coders have worked around this known issue is to code for Firefox or a similarly standards-adherent browser and THEN add the IE fixes/hacks accordingly afterwards.

In this vein, I would suggest to anyone who is interested in designing themes to investigate the differences in rendering code between the browsers as there are several well-documented IE-specific ‘bad’ behaviors that can oftentimes screw up coding.

I’ll come back and post a more thorough reply once I get some sleep. Just letting you know that I so far like the changes you have made.

And you can also use this same method to change the colors for other tabs as well if you’d like; just substitute the page numbers with the appropriate matching ones. ??

Found it.

In your header.php file, delete this bit:

<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">Subscribe</a></li>

and your Subscribe link should poof. ??

@kapil: Sorry about posting what you said!

In the header.php file, can you find this link in there that looks something like this:

/feed/

This is what that Subscribe tab is linking to.

The full link path is: https://www.m4bmarketingblog.com/feed/ but will most likely show up as /feed or /feed/ or feed/

If you can find that, can you copy and paste the code that contains that link?

I’m going to download that theme to my account and open it up and have a looksee.

Ohhh okay, I see. ??

I know that when I was first using WP, I never really realized how versatile the Pages functionality could be. With the recent upgrades, Pages are more functional than ever, which is something I’ve been fiddling with for my latest project. Wasn’t sure if perhaps maybe you missed the Pages like I did so I thought I’d throw it out there.

I’m not much of a php coder, either, otherwise I’d help you work out that script you have started. Hopefully someone else can help tweak the rest for you!

Just for clarification, though, are you wanting for the links to specific categories (like say, if a post was categorized under Apples and had a link to the Apples category and the sidebar/widget bar Categories links) to link to a specific post within that Apples category?

If such is the case, then would it be possible to script something that substitutes all the links to the category to be links to specific posts instead?

Also! You can create custom Pages as well, which will allow you to customize how different pages look. ??