If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see that I’ve finally managed to get the footer look the way I want it.

Like the content section and sidebars, the bottom section floats to the left, and I used the background element in the style sheet to make the image stretch across the page (except in very very very wide monitors).

IE doesn’t look quite right, but this isn’t unusual, and really, if you have the option, switch to Firefox or Safari or even (gag) Opera. They’re much better browsers and will render HTML, XHTML, and CSS correctly, which IE simply remains unable to do.