Hiya Noel,
No worries on where you posted, you are in the right place. My suggestion is more that the problem you're having sounds like something the CC team may have to help with and that you'd get more result options and probably more accurate responses as to what the issue may be, and probably quicker too.
I agree with you 100% on the user to user help though, usually that's a great way to find out the ins and outs of a program and tips and tricks for using them. This post seems more like an "issue" is the only reason I suggest putting in a support ticket.
Other than that, your question about positioning is that positioning of elements on a page work exactly the same as any X Y system. If you picture the page with an X and Y axis down the center of the horizontal and down the center of the vertical planes of the page, then picture the numbers are in pixels so a -700 would me 700 pixels to the left of the center of the page or below the center of the page.
What happens in some cases though is that the axis is positioned within an area such as a container that is positioned itself. When that happens then many times the positioning is relative to the container position it's within rather than the entire page.
This type of positioning that you'll see on some pages that it's fully positioned all over the page is done with the Visual Site Designer program which is a WYSIWYG system of web designing. Every element is pretty much using that type of positioning by using a drag and drop visual system rather than coding things within the CSS as a coder would do. The program itself is writing that code not the website builder and that's just how VSD creates all it's pages.
Hope that helps and good luck with your issue.
