I gave in and did a workaround — I created a separate style sheet for the category page, which I really didn’t want to do. It still fussed with me, though; I started over from scratch, and ended up having to take zero out all top and bottom margins everywhere. In the end I had to use <br>
in category.php
to get it to give me a line after the excerpt. No amount of CSS would do that for me. Weird.
If anybody else comes along in this thread, I’m still interested in the solution to why I couldn’t get the title and the excerpt right next to each other in the first place. Thanks.