Old newbie needs help please

Sorry about that. I must've missed that sentence when I read over your post the first time.

So, now that I've looked at the site, I'm not certain that a WordPress install and cheap template is necessarily the best answer for you (though it certainly couldn't hurt...)

You should start looking into putting together the capital to hire a designer. You really need a logo, and some consistent branding work. You need a professional eye to make sure that things like white text on a white background don't happen in your primary navigation, that you don't have tons of information being dumped right up front, that you don't have unused bits in the sidebar, and that your information is organized in a logical and easy-to-navigate way. A good WP theme will give you a little bit of control over some of that.

What's your goal with your site? Are you selling gear? Are you selling information about fishing? Are you selling fishing vacation packages? What is it you want people to come to your site for? I mean, I can buy the gear on Amazon. What value are you offering me? Why should I come to you, and why should I keep coming back to you?

When you get a clear picture of what you want your site to accomplish, it'll be easier to see what needs to be done to achieve that goal. And you need to be *really* specific about it. "I want to make money on the internet" is not a specific goal. Think in terms of what you want to deliver to your customers. What value do you want to add? How are you going to do that?

Web design is more than just making things look pretty. Web design is the practice of laying out information on the web in a way that helps achieve those goals. If you're clear about your goals, the design follows from that.

Hope that's helpful.

How about: "force the browser to re-render the content column" ? Would that do it?

Update: Never mind, I researched "browser re-rendering", and it would seem to be irrelevant to page width.

You'll have plenty of visitors who are still using 1024x768 screen resolution, and for them you want content to only be about 960 wide, to allow for the vertical scrollbar on the right side of the page.

If your theme only gives you options of 1100 or 800, then you'll need to go with 1100 but you can design the content part of your pages so that whatever is to the right of 960 is optional viewing. Ads, for example, or images. Don't make readers have to scroll horizontally to read your primary text.

Your site has design issues, but you have clearly put a lot of work into it. I can understand that you've reached a point where it's overwhelming and you don't know what to do next.

If it were mine, I would walk through it with a critical eye and start making a list of things that need improvement. Find similar sites for other niches, and pattern components of your site after what they're doing.

For example, your top navigation is problematic. The links aren't aligned well, they're hard to see, it's not obvious they're links, they're 3 lines high on my screen (which might be because of my 1024 width). So, go browsing to find example sites that have top navigation with lots of horizontal items. See how they do it. A two-line menu bar, maybe? Smaller font?

Your side nav, ditto. You have lots of ads of various widths, and it looks messy. Go find sites where the same is true, and see how they solved the problem. Maybe you just need to specify a width for those images, and force them to be the width you want.

Your social bookmarking toolbar is in a strange location on some pages. There's text above and text below. Maybe it is logically positioned code-wise, but to a reader it looks funny. A reader doesn't know that it's at the bottom of the top division of your freshwater fishing page, for example. So maybe move it to the top, near the title. Or add something visual to make it clear that the text above the store is the start of a new section on the page -- a horizontal border, maybe.

These are examples of things I would change. If things like this are not already on your mental list of what needs work, then you need to work with a designer, or a friend with a good eye. I'm sorry I can't make a full list for you, but the scope of change needed is just too big -- on the order of 50 or more things that could be improved to make it look finished.

I think it's worth pursuing, though. You have so much there. I think it can be a great site. (I don't fish, but takemefishing.com is one of the sites I keep in my example site bookmarks.)

At some point you'll want to improve your text content. Right now it's Vanna White-ish, in that it points out what's on the page like a tour guide, instead of delivering interesting information/stories about fishing. Your text content has the most SEO value; your store and ads, not so much. So you'll need text that is more robust, in order to be relevant for longer search queries.

Regards, -- Patey