I think I've finally gotten my new site the way I want it. I'm learning more about themes and PHP as each day goes on, which is a hidden benefit (I guess). It's a content management based system, rather than hard-coded HTML/xml, which is like a fancy way of using frames without all the baggage. There is a lot of CSS used, so I can't guarantee that it will look exactly the way it is meant to on all the browsers, but it works on the most often used ones.
You can check it out at https://jamesnunn.com/