drastic reshaping of pages - I need help

[barco57]

I tried my method using just the css RELATIVE positioning of the header wrapper moves it over.....but then you have to use some absolute positioning on columnLeft.....kinda like .columnLeft {position: absolute; top: 0px;} to move the entire left column up and to hold the headerWrapper in place for when people change the size browser window.....takes a little teaking to get everyone to line up correctly

[rstevenson]

Yeah, that should be worth a shot. I was poking away at something like that, but I'm not too familiar with CSS positioning, so I didn't get it. Your hint should set me in the right direction.

I think, considering the simplicity of what I'm aiming for, I may need to slice and dice the stylesheets to get rid of any inadvertant coagulants, to coin a term. I've often thought of starting with a bare bones one and building up. Now might be the time to try it.

[barco57]

When I did it before I was converting a site that was "2" columns....actually it was two frames and I wanted the left column to start at the top of the page...the processes was made simpler by the fact the site I was converting was all white background and no borders any where so to get some alignment stuff to work I just used strange but different background colors on each element til I got em where I wanted and then changed everyone back to white....the only thing that was a pain was the footer.....everything in the footer centered to the page so I had to fix its width and shove it over under the center column so that centered elements looked consistent from top to bottom on the page.
I had never thought about Kims idea but I think I might set up a test cart and give that a go to see what I come up with.