Help a distraught polar bear!!!

Ooops, guessing you’ll need the URL!
https://www.solaswebdesign.net/blogindex.php
Thank you again for your kind help!
Miriam

First, I’m shocked and disappointed that that you are unable to do what I’ve done here, since you advertise “excellent advice on web design” ??

The theme you are using IS available for previewing, I found it, saved a preview page to my desktop.

I opened your site, saved your site to my desktop.

Using a windows application called “beyond compare” I compared the basic structure of the two saved files, removing “non-structural items” from both files as I went along.

What stuck out?

Your most recent post is chock full of <divs>. Are you not using a browser that allows you to view your source?

<div class="post-content"><div>Greetings All,</div>
<div>Yes, we’ve finally gotten around to it - the blog is up.</div>
<div>We plan to be offering excellent advice on web design and SEO for small businesses here, as well as various musings.</div> <--- closing div
<div /> <---- Huh?
<div>It’s a big cold world out there on the Internet when a new web business owner is trying to find his way. Step into the SEO Igloo - it’s informative, it’s dedicated to small businesses, and it’s toasty! What more could anyone ask for.</div>

Im guessing if you change the status of that post to a draft your sidebar will be fixed. You need to fix that post, DONT copy and paste from Word.

Whooami,
Thank you for your kind suggestion!
We will certainly try this.
Not understanding your shock…blogging, as we’ve said, is a whole new thing for us. I believe I made that clear in my post, that we are new to this form of technology. Though we can program HTML in our sleep, we are new to PHP, and feared that we might do something wrong to the code if we didn’t ask the expert help of people here on these boards, as we were invited to do when we signed up with wordpress.
We are quick learners, however, and are sure that we will soon become skilled at this. There’s always a first time for everything, and I hope that when you were new here, people were as helpful to you as you are being to us.
Thanks again.

we can program HTML in our sleep, we are new to PHP

Then this might help > WordPress is not PHP…
https://mattread.com/archives/2005/04/wordpress-is-not-php/

Oh- I just wanted to add to this, whooami. The post that you pointed out to us with the div tags… we were just using the ‘write a post’ option to do this. We didn’t code that and are as surprised to see all the div tags as you are. Do you not use the posting option when you add posts to your blog?
We are just confused, as we haven’t done anything to the theme we downloaded. This is how it appeared on the screen once we’d downloaded it, with the navigation underneath it. So, it isn’t something we’ve ‘done’ to it that’s causing this. Any futher kind help would be much appreciated

Go to Manage:Posts and select that post, when the editor comes up click on the HTML button (should display popup with non-wysiwig post contents). Delete any divs you find…

Save and test again… If you’re comfy with html then I suggest you turn off the wysiwig/visual-rich-editor.

Dear Yosemite,
Perfect! Exactly what we needed to know.
Thank you, and thank you Moshu for the link. What a good article!
Thanks so much folks.