CSS - Css Designers Wanted

Hey guys i've got a problem that I just can't figure out a solution for, i've attached a screenshot of the design. Basically there are various textboxes arranged in two columns, but their backgrounds (glows/curves behind the boxes) are causing me problems.

The width of the design with the curves is larger than my target resolution (1024x768). I've tried playing around with margins but it makes the design generally very inflexible (all boxes have to be non-expandable that way). Is there anyway anyone can think doing this without
a) having the minimum with of the website at 1200px
b) positioning the boxes absolutely

Cheers

Here's my blog h t t p: // valcun.com. I have made the Base text color as bluish. is there any professional designer here who can suggest something? I am not very satisfied with the look. I am thinking it should look vibrant and attractive to all age groups.

I tried making this bluish text as red but that doesn't look very nice. please suggest how else can i make my blog look attractive. Is it any good?

http://www.cyclomedia.co.uk/?24

took a couple of days to debug for major browsers, the horizontal version doesnt work in ie (even if you fully merge the CSS). if anyone knows what the problem is there then it'd be good to know. what is interesting is that if you look at all the sub menus in IE and then switch to the horiztontal version they work correctly... i think it's something to do with trying to place an absolutely positioned element outside of a float that is also position:relative! (overflow: visible doesnt help BTW)

the source is overly spread out and commented, eventually i'll produce a more compact source for both versions.

note: the html is the same for the horizontal and vertical versions!

one day i'll update my site to be more blog like, allowing comments for each article... one day!

edit: atricle/article

edit: fixed the IE bug, needed another work around for the general lack of support for the child selector, basically the root menu items need to be floats, but everything below that doesnt.

I'm one of those people who has relied heavily on using tables to layout my pages in the past, but I've been in the process of redoing everything to use CSS instead...and for the most part I've been able to, but there are a few things that I'm not sure about. I also wonder if in some of these cases I'm trying to re-invent the wheel, or something like that

1. I have a few pages that I used tables to line up elements in what I guess would qualify as the same type of thing as 'tabular data' which is what I believe is what is considered still good practice to use tables for. Example:

Name|Age|Qualifications|

Bob|25|BA in Marketing, the University of Arizona...etc

Sue|30|Masters in English Lit, the University of Michigan...etc

etc, etc, etc....


So in this case, I could use CSS to do this, but after trying, it just doesn't seem to flow correctly. Now initially I was having a problem because apparently, setting the table width to 100% was spanning the entire width of the page even though I only wanted it to be in the middle column, so after some research, I discovered that setting the width to anything less than 100% (I use 99%) solved the problem. Am I right? Or am I just being naive?


2. Although I used style sheets with my pages already, there were many times when say I just wanted one little line to say be 'bold' so I use the <b></b> tags. Is mixing those tags with CSS a bad idea? Am I better off just making a class, say, '.bold' in my css file? Is there a danger of having an inline element have too many classes? ie <span class="bold center class1 class5 class9.....'>?

3. Is there such a thing as having too big of an external css file? I find myself trying to locate the same font style etc, that I've used for something else on another page, but finding the exact color, style, size etc, is becoming difficult and I find myself constantly adding new classes....Is this a bad thing?

4. When it comes to font sizes, should I stick to using just ONE way of measuring? i.e. using ONLY %, or ONLY px, or ONLY em? What are the dangers of mixing them together? Which way do you find is the most consistent for you?