Huge mess up with my site

I need to get everything figured out. I'm totally lost and very angry. I had it fine before, and then I went to work and tried to add in the gradient background, well that wasn't a very good idea. The site is supposed to look like this: www.desmondsweb.tk

Here is my site so far www.desmondp.host-dot.com

Here is the style sheet for the page layout: www.desmondp.host-dot.com/wp-layout.css

And the code for the page is attached. I've tried everything, i mean everything, but I cannot figure this out.

Thanks to who ever can help me with this. It's a ton of work, and you''ll surely get my thanks.

 

i've fixed some of it. So now I really only have two questions. On the side, how can I make the menu bar extend all the way down. And, I need to get rid of the space between the header image and the content. These aren't that hard, but I'm a noob when it comes to CSS and so I can't remember. Whenever I try to set the menu on the side to height:100% it extends beyond the space, and goes all the way to the bottom of the page. Any ideas?

 

here replace your menu id with this

#menu {
background: #fff;
border-left:dotted 1px #e0e6e0;
padding: 20px 0 10px 30px;
position:absolute;
top:0px; right:-30px;
width: 170px;
margin: 89px 112px 0px 0px;
height:99%;
}

 

well, that doesn't exactly work 100% either, but it puts it in the right side of the site. You should use position absolute sparingly. I don't have time nor the motivation to really dig into it.

 

Why should I use the absolute positioning sparingly? Just for the sake of knowing for the next problem.

 

because it places elements outside the normal flow.

 

ah, well if you take a look at the page, i've gotten the menu lined up, but for some reason it keeps extending beyond the normal. I'm thinking it has something to do with the actual html. So I've attached the edited source for the index.

I think it might have something to do with the divs closing in the wrong place, but I'm not completely sure. Thanks Kodo for helping me once more with my coding problems

 

That's because you're using an absolute for that element. Like I said, it removes it from the normal flow.

 

ah that did it, forgot about what you said before. Thanks kodo once again for helping me with a problem i just couldn't figure out at all. Thats why i come here to ask my questions

 

ah scratch that last comment, it still messes up every so often, and it looks horrible in IE. Is it some compatibility problem with my coding? although i've never heard of a problem where it looks bad in ie and not in firefox.