Customization is WAY too difficult!

Just start by opening index.php and wp-layout.css
Change something in the css file- make a background bright pink and put a dark green border around something, see how it effects the layout- then find the section in index.php that it is related to.
That is how I figured stuff out, when I was getting frustrated by not being able to get a certain bit of text the color I wanted it to- I would make a very obvious change so I could SEE it and then change it back.
I’ve only been using WordPress since April and I would say I have progressed pretty far- in my php and CSS knowledge

I may be off, but from my reading it sounds as if you want to do the css styling in the index file. WP outputs the tags and you should look at styling the page through the css.
I thought about our car analogy and my response would be the inference that Perl is to PHP as Ford is to Chevy does not hold. A Chevy and a Ford are fundamentally the same but Perl, from the ground up, is different from PHP. Gotta get a whole new set of wrenches when you switch to metric (mixing metaphors here).

Heck the analogies are getting way too complicated. Open up wp-layout.css and have at it. The h1 is to be found in h1 and header.

oh dear, everyone is making far too much of a meal of this.
You use FrontPage? Cool. You won’t get any support for that here, because they are hardcore ‘let’s have a super-basic layout in xhtml and style everything in an external CSS file’ people, but whatever floats your boat. Open up wp.php in a text editor. That’s a very basic WordPress template with the necessary PHP code to set the post engine whirring, which you can copy and paste into your html file. Consult the template tags section of the Wiki and you will see that WordPress has a tag system not too different from MT, Blogger, or any other blog software you care to mention. As long as you remember to save your new template as .php rather than .html it is no more difficult to make your own template in WordPress than in Movable Type. You will need some basic CSS in order to control the behavior of lists and headings, but the CSS you need for lists is also in the Wiki.
I will get flamed for this, but you had a right to know there is more than one way of approaching this problem. Good luck.

It’s not that there aren’t other ways, it’s just that I find the way you just described too complicated ??

Thanks, everyone, for your help. I really do appreciate it and want you to know that I’m not just a whining newbie who wants everything to work exactly the way that I want it to instantly. Okay, actually I do want it that way instantly (doesn’t everyone?), but now realize that most Perl scripts and and most PHP scripts do not handle templates, styles, and even CSS the same way. Well, maybe CSS, but configuring the actual layout appears to be quite different from what I’m used to. I’m also admittedly confused a bit on what’s PHP, what’s just relatively simply HTML, and what’s CSS (and which to go to for what I want to do), but just the suggestions in this thread have helped out immensely. I will keep at it. This is too good of a script to move on to a different one. Obviously, the community support for this script is also here and very active.
I’ll start with a canned style that’s similar to what I want as a final product, and work from there. Sigh…not another “learning experience”…. ?? I’m getting too old for “learning experiences”.

Well to get the ball rolling why not fit my Gemini Template ? ??

Internetpilot: For starters, forget all this Perl vs. PHP nonesense.
They both have their pros and cons but you no more need to know PHP to template a WP site than you need to know Perl to modify a Movable Type template. I modify them both heavily and believe me, scripting languages are not one of my strong suits.
What worked for me was reading the docs and looking at the WP template tags as an extension to [X]HTML. Make your layout and do your CSS like you would for any other site, just replace the static markup with the WP tags as required. This really isn’t complicated providing you don’t ‘misplace’ the WP required code in your template (this is easy to spot just looking at the default template).
Granted this requires knowing [X]HTML and CSS, but certainly doesn’t require any more than a cursory knowledge of PHP — if your used to hacking Perl this shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

hm.. no response there about listless so i’ll ask here. what happened to listless?

Its closed. Temporarily.

ah.. got it ^_^

If you are struggleing with the aspect of playing with the style sheets (ya know, edit, upload, check, edit, upload, check, ad infinitum) get Firefox, and then install the Web Developer Extensions. It allows you to edit CSS on-the-fly. You’ll love it and learn a lot.

Augh…my head hurts. But hey, I’m learning slowly but surely. I realize that I’m still a newbie to all this, but I still have to offer a newbie overall opinion: There has to be a better, easier way to do this. Like another thread mentioned, a lot of even the more customized WP blogs seem to still be more on the simplistic side. I think I’m beginning to learn why!
I’m pretty much at a point of just leaving things how they are, even though I’m not 100% happy about the results. However, one problem I’m having is I cannot for the life of me (keep in mind: Newbie!) figure out where to adjust the the font size for the post content. I must be missing something basic.
Also, another question on font sizes — why will the IE view/text size option enlarge or reduce some of my WP font sizes, but not all of them? What I want to do is prevent them from being resized view browser settings at all, but again — can’t figure that one out either.
I haven’t used CSS very much before…and I don’t think I will in the future if it can at all be avoided. Egads!
I’m trying, trying, trying! Still hanging in there despite telling my computer monitor it was “#1” using the wrong finger a couple of times during the process. Count down from 10…now breath in…and out…in….and out…LOL

Tried it — doesn’t work or it just ends up convoluting the problems further. FrontPage doesn’t seem to handle anything out of the index.php file very well, including moving every line that says “Don’t remove this” to the body of the file. Font tags or any other type of GUI based formatting that I’m used to using do not seem to have any affect on the output at all. It’s just a mess.
For WordPress it appears that I’m actually better off using CSS because the way that is most comfortable for me doesn’t work at all — at least I’m getting something when I use CSS. Still, I haven’t seen much use for CSS other than adding a layer of confusion to web page design, which is a rather simple thing in itself, especially for something as text based as a blog.

forget about the php elements while designing your template. design your template from scratch in frontpage. after you’re done, drop the wordpress code into your template. however, this method rests upon knowing what the wordpress code does. the following is one of laughinglizard’s resources in which he attempts to explain the default wordpress template:
laughinglizard’s commented wordpress template