gnits

I am stripping my child theme css down to bare bones and re-applying it item by item to check if individual items are still needed. (simple spacing, etc… to reduce white space in twentytwelve).

When I finish that exercise I will revisit your comments as some behavior may be influenced by my frequent child css changes ongoing this afternoon.

I look forward to looking at your answer in more detail then, when I will have less variables to contend with.

Thanks again.

I really appreciate your response.

However, I have not managed to get this to work.

Did you just paste this into the bottom of your child style.css.

I have it.

See the nice shallow menu items.

https://mattobrienblogcom.fatcow.com/matt_blog/

I can now work my way around the CSS to fine tune.

Best wishes.

I re-booted my machine, reloaded firefox and firebug is working as I expected.

Thanks for showing me the light.

That gives me something to work with.

Any idea why i cannot replicate what you have done.

Thanks again.

https://mattobrienblogcom.fatcow.com/matt_blog/

Thank you for such a prompt response.

I have already added Firebug to Firefox and exploring its interface now for a few hours.

I am just depressed that all the themes I have searched so far seem to lavish white space around the top of the web page and that it is so much effort to trim this down.

I am obviously doing something very wrong in Firebug to try and isolate the menu / title elements.

I am in HTML mode, can see the Style / computed / Layout tabs on my right, click on the Inspect button and then click on one of the menu items. All that happens is that the web page follows the menu page I clicked and so I am now on a different web page.

I have spent at least 8 hours to-day just trying to remove excess white space. I do not want to be a java or css developer. I am sure I will crack it at some stage.

Any hints will be appreciated. I have also downloaded Dreamweaver, but thought Firebug would be a quicker route to follow.