By g-d, friends I think I have the design here complete. I'm actually pretty happy with it, though it's certainly true that I haven't put it through it's full tests, so breakage is prone.
I need to set up the static pages, but I'm pretty happy with this. I'm thinking of buying a new domain. For such a web-guy, I think having one domain is excessively reasonable, but I need to think about these things, of course.
On to other projects.
update: ha! this post fucked up the desgin. time to fiddle with CSS again!
update: ok, we're back, and I think I may have realized why it wasn't behaving the right way the first time. this is much more logical. just have to make the tags work a bit better, but that shouldn't be hard... (famous last words, I know)