Well, I’ve tinkered and I’ve experimented and I now think I understand how my new template works. I’ve learnt three things:

  1. CSS isn’t easy to understand without a book (I’ve yet to get one, recommendations welcome!). The two column layout without a background image took me ages to figure out.
  2. Use an externally linked style sheet.
  3. CSS is really powerful!

Yeah, OK, you all knew that already but hey, we’ve all got to find this out for ourselves. I’ve now eliminated almost all the traditional HTML tags from my Radio Userland template (not including the tags contained in posts themselves of course) though there’s still a lot to do. Thanks to Bryan Bell for creating great templates and thanks especially for making them freely available. The template I’m using now is based upon Bryan’s CandidBlue theme though I’ve changed it somewhat in an attempt to understand how CSS works.