I don't know why your stuff is spooked all the time. No changes I make to your style sheet takes and I find no problems with it. I had to use inline CSS to make changes show up. I don't think the CSS you have for the two-columns take effect either.

I wouldn't go about it as you've done, but you should see an effect of it and there isn't any. It doesn't work locally when I download the files either. The validators don't find anything major and neither do I.

I'm stumped.

...

I wouldn't go about it as you've done, but...

Yes, I do! God almighty, I must be going blind! In the HTML you've given the DIVs the id twoleftcolumn and the id tworightcolumn but in the CSS you refer to them as classes!

There are two main differences. An id can be use one (1) time per page. A class can be used as many times as you want. Say you want some paragraphs to have red text - then class is the way to go. If you want an identifier for a DIV containing what goes at the top of your page you could use id because you aren't likely to want more than one.

The advantage of id is that it has high specificity. It overrides most other selectors.


But in this case the problem isn't your choice, but that you weren't consistent. You used two IDs in the html but refer to them as classes, in the CSS. So your selectors don't match anything because there are no classes with that name.

This selector

matches this P or any other element with the same class.


This selector

matches this P - and hopefully nothing else because you can only use an ID once in a page.


O.K., so, since I am using it more than once, I should be using classes with periods, not IDs with hashtags. I thought that's what I originally did.

With that revision, allendesigns.com/index.html works! Thank you for that help!

allendesigns.com/projects/20501/20501.html still doesn't align the way I would like it to. When I use the Validator, I get a warning that reads: A table row was 2 columns wide, which is less than the column count established by the first row (3). Which I get, but I don't know how to fix. If I use colspan="2", then the first two columns are the same width (total) as the left column in a two column row and the right column is the same width as the right column in a two column row.
How do I fix that?
Sorry to be such a pain. Yesterday, I worked 12 hours on a page and a half with only two breaks for a sandwich at lunch and one at dinner. Doing web pages is not my livelyhood (thank God, I would starve), so I need to get this process down so that I don't spend that much time on it instead of billable work. All my project pages are going to look something like this. Also see: allendesigns.com/projects/20402/20402.html to get an idea of what I am doing. 20501 is more complicated because the number of columns in a row change from 1 to 2 to 3. 20402 is much simpler.
Thank you.
Thank you

Since you used IDs in the HTML your CSS selectors should begin with a hash sign, not a dot.

You can read about basic selectors here.
https://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/structure.html

Good. But what I can see you only used each of them once, so either class or id is OK. You just need to remember what's what.

Maybe I wasn't clear. You can have as many IDs as you want, but just one of each, with the same name. So you can have #this, #that and #whatever in the same page but just one instance of each of them.

No, I got that. I may use twocolumn and threecolumn more than once.

Any ideas on how to fix the 1 column, 2 column, 3 column paradox?

Thank you

I don't know. What is the paradox?