Theme development

I am setting up a site, and am modifying box_cleanslate (a phptemplate theme) to my own purposes in Drupal 4.6.3.

However, I'd like to put gutters (is that the right term?), i.e., columns on either side of the page so that the body of the page doesn't start or finish right at the edge of the browser window; I've seen some Drupal sites set up like this, but don't know enough about the structure to figure out where this would be done, and haven't managed to figure it out by trial and error.

My site is using Drupal 4.6, with the theme called Interlaced. Interlaced is just a CSS theme, not using the PHP Theme Engine. I am about to begin my first attemp at styling my own Theme for my Drupal site. I hope to not use Tables, but DIV’s with the CSS.

What elements, classes and IDs in CSS control positioning and width of the left-, center- and right column?

I'm building a basic theme with a page.tpl.php and a style.css that has these lines:

.leftcolumn {
position: absolute;
left: 3%;
width: 10%;
}

.centercolumn {
position: absolute;
left: 15%;
max-width : 30%;
}

.rightcolumn {
position: absolute;
right: 10%;
}

Both in Firefox and IE I don't get the webpage title on top of the browser.

I have a page.tpl.php with this line:

<title><?php print $title ?></title>

It doesn't seem to do anything. Is this line of code correct? What else could I try?

I generally look for cool sites to create mine.

For static html I use winHTTP and for flash I may use flash grabber to take a closer look at files before I replicate a part I might like.

I'm not trying to violate copywrite but if I see a cool template design I'd like to be able to look at it and see how they did it in the code.

Does anybody know of a way to do this?

Using 4.6 and phptemplate...

blix, gespaa, greenmarinee and manji are examples of centred themes, where all content appears within a tight, central block of usually two columns. I have tried tjhem all and none are able to show large images without disturbing the layout. When a user places an image that takes up the whole width of the content column, it forces the side column down the page. I tried to avoid this by placing an image as a backbround to a table, but with the same ill-effect.