Theme development

Hi Everyone,

total new guy here, but loving Drupal already! I'm moving an existing site which I've made seperately into a Drupal theme to learn about theming, and I've hit a snag...

Basically, I'd like to know how to customise the output from print($content)

The above statement outputs something like

Hi Everyone,

total new guy here, but loving Drupal already! I'm moving an existing site which I've made seperately into a Drupal theme to learn about theming, and I've hit a snag...

Basically, I'd like to know how to customise the output from print($content)

The above statement outputs something like

I have a silly beginner question that I'm embarrassed to ask, but I've been working for days (literally) on this small issue and I decided it was time to ask for help.

There are ten pixels of whitespace above my page title that I'd like to get rid of so that my title's background is flush with the border around the page. Take a look at the image here: http://www.winningnightmarerobotpunch.com/images/whitespace.gif
The part highlighted in orange is what I'm trying to edit out.

Any ideas on how to do this?

I took the Zen-theme as template and I'm currently trying to adjust it. I would like the middle column to have all nodes in one "box" with a border and a background colour. Currently it looks like this:

 .-------------------------.
|                         |
`-------------------------'
.--. .---------------. .--.
|  | |  Story 1      | |  |
`--' `---------------' `--'
     .---------------.
     |  Story 2      |
     `---------------'

I want it to be like this:

I've just switched to using Garamond as my theme, and I'd like to make what should be a fairly easy (for someone with more experience than I!) change to it.

I'd like to change the icon that appears to the left of the posted nodes, so that different types of nodes have a different icon. Currently it's a calendar-like background image, with a date superimposed on top. I've created three CCK node types (question, answer and entry) and I'd like to highlight them with different icons. See www.whatdoesthatmean.com