Sidebar Positioning

I’m having some issues with my sidebar. I’m a CSS novice so please be patient if I don’t get your solutions right away.

The idea is for my sidebar to be about slightly to the left of the the right border of the body, slightly to the right of the content, overlapping the header, and flush with the top of the page. This is usually what I see when I look at my site. But if I change the size of the window, the sidebar moves, remaining a fixed distance from the edge of the window. I’ve had people tell me that when they load my page, the sidebar is covering the content which means they can’t read my site which isn’t good.

There are a few things I would like to be able to do:

– Fix the position of the sidebar so it stops moving based on the window size. I’m guessing it has to do with the “position: absolute” attribute, but everything else I’ve tried either causes the sidebar to disappear if the window gets to small or permanently migrate to the bottom of the page.

– Fix the dimensions of the page. In addition to the sidebar moving around, the borders move when the window size changes. I’d rather they stay put so making the window bigger would just reveal more background around the content.

– Make the sidebar go to the bottom of the page. Right now it just has a very large bottom margin, but I’d like it to go all the way to the bottom of every page which out making the page any longer than the content.

Thanks in advance.