struggling with CSS
This was a rather painful experience at first. I started out by examining the index and css file. When I couldn't find some of the classes that were used, I suspected that Movable Type has a lot of hidden classes that we can't see (which I later confirmed by googling). A friend taught me some more advanced syntax for css which helped me understand a lot of the original css file. After examining the sources for a few sites and looking up some references, I was able to understand the jist of things. The hardest thing left was determining what to do.....
The main change to the website was moving the categories link right below the banner. This gives the reader more freedom to navigate around the website, since this can be added for all the different archives (date, categories, entry). It also provided a common place where the user can link to different topics, which could only be done by returning to the main site in the previous design. For the colors I choose earthlier tones since it's easiest on my eyes after a hard day of work....
Warning - MT's web-based editor seems to load everything from a database, so ssh'ing into your itp account and then updating the html and css files with emacs/vi won't actually change a thing. If you want to use an outside editor you have to follow the instructions here. I realized this after a rather painful one hour struggle where I had to rebuild the site numerous times.
Lesson of the week - read the manual!!