First time post to the forums, but long-time WordPress.com user.

I have developed a Blog to act as an extension to a main website, and I've basically got my blog to a reasonable standard and all is well. My CSS stylesheet might be a bit messy compared to some advanced users, but it has got me this far and I'm happy with the overall appearence of my blog.

BUT I have been trying to add various snippets of coding that I've found by searching the Forums and online to add a background to my blog, but I don't want the background to appear behind my text - instead just at the sides.

My Blog: http://www.healthwatchsefton.wordpress.com

My desired background to display at sides of main body :
http://imageshack.us/a/img10/1231/wallpaperqe.png

I would liek to keep the main body of my blog with a white, or even an very light opaque background, but the above wallpaper to display in full at the sides of the blog. I would also like the background to be fixed with no scroll.

is this possible at all? I genuienly have trawled a lot of forums and sub-forums.

Any help would be appreciated and apologies if this is the wrong forum - I know, newbie :-(

Many Thanks,

Ste

For the menu width, add this to your custom CSS:

#nav ul ul li {
min-width: 130px;
}

(adjusting the number to where you need it to be. 120px was enough for "Upcoming Events" to no longer break).

To change the background color of the drop down, and only the drop down, add this:

#nav .children li, #nav .sub-menu li {
background: #000;
}

Replace #000 with the hex value of the color you'll like to use.

As a reminder, here is how to edit the CSS on WordPress.com: http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/editing-css/

Cheers!

I would like to adjust the width of my custom menu drop downs. As you can see several titles become 2 lines because the drop downs are too narrow. Additionally, I would like to change the background color of the drop down menu.

My blog is:
nicolephinney.com

My theme is vigilance with the customization upgrade.

Thank you!

Also, you can see that there is a lot of disparity in the font sizes in the widgets on my sidebar. How can I adjust this and get the text in each of them to be the same size?

Try something like this to adjust the sidebar fonts:

#sidebar ul li.widget ul,
#sidebar p,
#sidebar td {
	font-size: 1.2em;
}

I am using the Vigilance theme with the Custom Design add on.

I have successfully edited the sidebar to be smaller width wise and the content to be wider, and most of the text seems fine, however I have noticed that the things automatically embed, like youtube videos or photo galleries have not adjusted to the new width. They still appear centered or aligned to the old width. See the video at the bottom of this post: http://adventuresofourown.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/lent/

It does the same thing with photo galleries.

Also, you can see that there is a lot of disparity in the font sizes in the widgets on my sidebar. How can I adjust this and get the text in each of them to be the same size?

Thanks!!

Quoting from my post again:
"C. If you [... ...], then the stray div tag is in a text widget."
You need to open the widgets "Follow at Bloglovin" and "I'm an Independent Fashion Blogger" and delete this from the end:
</div>

http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/sidebar-at-the-bottom-and-related-issues/

You most likely have a tag out of place or unclosed or some other coding error.

All I want to do now is add 'Archives' to my widget list. I've just done that and unfortunately it also appears down at the very end of my blog posts, on the left-hand side, instead of on the right.

I have not added my own html coding for the ARCHIVE widget so is there any reason that is not appearing where it should?

(1) content has been imported into the blog

(2) the blogger has been copying and pasting content from elsewhere, without using either icon 5 or icon 6 in Row 2 of the visual editor http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#pasting-text

(3) or the blogger has copied and pasted invalid HTML into a text widget or left an HTML tag open

See here for sorting this out > http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/sidebar-at-the-bottom-and-related-issues/

#wrapper {
	width: 1220px;
}

#content {
	width: 900px;
}

#header h1 {
	background: url('http://mattemrichphoto.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/kc0077vigilance.jpg') center repeat-x;
	height: 180px;
	width: 100%;
}

Note that the example above will manually reset the header image and if you do it that way, you will be overriding the random header image setting on the Appearance → Header page.

If you wanted to keep the random headers and just center and repeat the image, do this instead;

#wrapper {
	width: 1220px;
}

#content {
	width: 900px;
}

#header #title {
	background-position: center;
	background-repeat: repeat-x;
	height: 180px;
	width: 100%;
}

#content {
	float: left;
	width: 700px;
	padding: 20px 20px 20px 0;
}

#sidebar {
	float: right;
	width: 200px;
	padding-bottom: 20px;
}