Your typical computer screen is wider than it is long; yet most blogs are longer than they are wide. They use narrow columns and require you to scroll down constantly. Meanwhile, all that real estate on either side of the text goes to waste, like the "county strip" that surrounds suburban yards.

There are ways to utilize more of the horizontal space, but it gets tricky. I'm finding that mussing with margins is one of the surest ways to mess up your blog. But it is also a sure-fire way to make your blog more readable. No reward without risk.

The template's CSS code allows you to set the basic structure for your blog very simply. In the case of this blog, I deleted all the existing formatting code -- contained at the top of the template between the tags < style type="text/css"> and </style >

I replaced it with this quite simple structure:

  #main {
    width:950px;}


  #content {
       width:80%;
       float:left;
       padding-right:10px;
       margin-left:15px; 
       border-right:1px solid black;}


  #sidebar {
      width:15%;
      float:right;
      padding-right:15px}


  select {
      width:100%;
      color:#666;
      background: #e0e0e0;}

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I then went through the rest of the template and added the divisions:

Each division has to open with the div id tag -- < div id="main" > , < div id="content" > , < div id="sidebar" >
-- and close with a div closing tag -- < /div > . Be sure you nest the Content and Sidebar divisions within the Main division.

As you can see, I set a wide area for the main page -- 950 pixels. That may be too large. To tell you the truth, I haven't tested this one much, but in theory it would be good to test on Netscape and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.

Within that wide main page, I've alloted 80 percent of the space to posts and 15 percent to the sidebar, with padding to keep the margins neat. By using percentages instead of pixels, it gives the page some ability to resize its columns when the window is resized. Also, the "select" elements are set to utilize 100 percent of the sidebar area, stretching or narrowing to fit the space available. (That way, the drop-down menus don't send the sidebar toppling to the bottom of the blog.)

There is always some finessing required, but this one might not be too bad and is certainly simple.