You making progress. It all takes time. Themes definitely help users with less time. Change a few images, colors and textures to fit your taste and you have a website.

Haven't made a whole lot of progress over the last few days but anyway... have updated the header & I think I'm finally happy with it. Especially happy with the menu bar which now features transparency on the drop down section - anyone think it should be a little less transparent?
Way way past my bed time. Anyone else here in Australia enjoying our early taste of winter???

Been a while being busy with other stuff & all but I've finally got a header & menu setup I'm pretty happy with. Don't mind the coding - it works but I'm sure more than a few of you will start foaming at the mouth...

Looks nice Robbie, but I would definitely run that through the Validators, quite a few things are amiss there. Looks wise though it's a nice layout

Thanks Jo, that's pretty handy to know.
Heading to bed now but a quick run through the w3.org validator found 39 errors & 36 warnings on my home page alone. Got a bit of stick over all the hyphens in my comments... will look into it a little more tomorrow.

Did some validation error hunting today. Some more still to do but the night is getting away & I'm yawning already... too many late nights!
Tidied up the home page a little & made good use of Rolly's scrolling div frame () thingy for the dear diary section which I'm sure to put to good use again somewhere on the site. Makes things so much neater.
The side bar menu with obligatory CoffeeCup link
All my playing with positioning means I have a big gap down the bottom of each page to get creative with & fill up...
Really want to get some images happening but alas, that's it for tonight.

Looks like I've minimised my validation errors/warnings to 4 & 5 & they all relate to my menu set-up.

As I wanted to keep the font/styling as is so I've effectively put in 5 individual menus & positioned them accordingly - as you can see from the coding what amounts to a bunch of coloured underlines with transparent backgrounds. The validator doesn't like the fact that I've got 5 identical ID references & any attempt so far to correct that renders the menu useless... it works for now...

That's because "ID's" are supposed to be a one use item. If you use the same settings on different locations you should make them classes instead of ID's. Classes are universal and can be used however you want to use them, but ID's have a specific setup and that's why the validator doesn't like what you're doing with it

Thanks Jo, I'll have a play with it when I get home.

Can I have 2 classes then next to the ul tag thing?
I'm guessing it needs the "css3menu1" reference & the "topmenu" reference? If so how would these best work together?

As it is at the moment...

<div class="menu_drop">
<ul id="css3menu1" class="topmenu">
<li class="topfirst"><a href="index.html" style="height:14px;line-height:18px;">_________</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

If anyone has any thoughts that would be great.

Yes it needs those, and using that menu on multiple pages works fine too, you actually should be able to use the exact same menu (barring of course you'll want to change the code you may have in place for selected items if your menu shows color alterations or different images for pressed/selected menu items). You can just copy the same menu from page to page rather than having totally different ones. My guess is that you're referencing the same ID's on the same page though which is what the validation is most likely not liking.