Wordpress Questions

Joe the your first question all depends on the theme you are using. First you can't really use an editor to edit a WP theme, you simply edit the code directly in the themes files most of which is controlled in the stylesheet. (style.css)

All themes are coded differently and it would very hard to give a general how-to. If the theme you are using is using separate background colors for each section then you can change the hex color number for them in the stylesheet. If it is using a background image you will need to edit the image or remove it and specify a color in the stylesheet. If the whole theme is using one background image then you would need to edit that... You see its just hard to explain in detail because all theme are a bit different, and the way a theme author calls the code varies as well.

For your second question the answer is yes... sort of... but some advanced coding would need to be done. You would need to create the different sidebars you want on the different pages, change the functions file to make them appear in the widgets area and then create a different page template that calls for the specific sidebars, then you would specify what page template to use when creating the page. Now that is just for pages, not posts.

without looking at the theme you are using, it's a little difficult to explain but here goes:

changing background colors on sidebars can be done via the theme's stylesheet..in your WordPress Dashboard:
go to "Appearance", "Editor", and then you should see your theme's style.css

you are going to have to scroll down the page until you locate the div's pertaining to the sidebar

a lot of the times it would be similar to this:

#sidebarleft {
background-color: #ffffff;
}

there could be more declarations than that or maybe even combined selectors so again without seeing the actual theme you are using, I'm just guessing.

About your second question...
having pages with one or the other column, or both.
Most themes have one set page template called page.php
You would have to do some custom styling on your css to accomodate a page using one column (adjusting widths and creating new sets of declarations for the content area on the new page)
and then you would have to create a new php file for that page and only including the one sidebar using php includes.

You are better off searching for a theme that has that kind of flexibility already built in. More than likely you won't find a free one like that...at least not that I'm aware of. You might find you'll have to purchase a premium WP theme such as Thesis, WPNewspaer, Revolution, etc...

Elegantthemes.com has some nice looking themes, 20 dollar membership cost (per year)

My only remark is that a few of the templates look very nice, but the functionality for a SEO based blog could be better..

Several are well optimized though.

I'm not familiar with this thanks for posting!

Desertstorm, are you on a PC? How do you like Artisteer? Is it limited in what it can do or can it really help you position things the way you want?