You raise a number of questions.

The site generally looks good. I would agree with similar comments in other discussions that counters are pretty much dated and looked at as amateur stuff. You don't see that on newer sites much. I think the navigation looks OK without lines and borders so I wouldn't worry about that now.

The blog content area seems a bit narrow to me. The big problem is the area outside the content columns, however.

Checking your source page I find there are fixed widths being used in the layout of the site. In this case you have a "margin-left: 254px." That is a wide margin that pushes all your content off to the right which is not good.

Perhaps that is what you did to "offset" the content, but it causes a wide fixed empty area on the left that doesn't adjust in either firefox or ie. That makes it hard to get the content on screen in a reasonable way at all.

It is not a quick fix but the real reason you are having problems making adjustments is that the page is written in xhtml and css which is great but continues to use tables for layout which is old style and not recommended by current standards.

If you go to http://www.w3schools.com/ and study a little about using css for style and layout I think you will find it pretty easy to learn. Then you can adjust your widths as you wish. It will also enable you to do a lot of decorative things with your navigation if you want. Meanwhile I think you should at least change the margin to a smaller number (try 50).


James