Archive page- list of posts with dates

Hey everyone. I’m quite new to WordPress, so bear with me.

I really like the way CSS-Tricks has its archive page laid out (http://d.pr/i/GKBM), and was wondering what might be the best way of achieving this? In my html mockup, I basically have a similar thing going on, by using unordered lists and divs.

I’ve Googled around and often only find how to use a php specific “line of code”, for lack of a better term, e.g. something like this:

<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=postbypost&limit=20&format=html’); ?>

But that generates a list, which unfortunately doesn’t allow much for css manipulation, like certain php lines do such as <?php the_date() ?>, <?php the_title() ?>, etc. in relation to index.php

Anyway, if anyone knows of a good solution, that’d be awesome. Hope that makes sense, thanks!