[Child Theme, Parent: Sight] First Time at Child Themes and PHP

Hello everyone,

I’m new to the world of wordpress, I’ve written CSS stylesheets for livejournals and tumblrs before, but this is my first time making a self-hosted site on wordpress.

I posted on here about a week back and was recommended to make a child theme rather than directly edit the theme I’ve used as a basis for my own edits (WPSHOWER’s Sight). I have done this, but there are some changes I think I’m only going to be able to do by uploading copies of the relevant php files to the child theme’s folders and making edits. Of course I could be wrong, any and all tips and feedback are appreciated!

The Issues

Site link: http://www.hookturnmelbourne.com
Child Theme CSS: http://pastebin.com/4h4wSiLv
Theme CSS: http://pastebin.com/DU7HpwU6
Parent theme functions.php: http://pastebin.com/BMSs0uJc

1: Since making the child theme, something has gone wrong with the menu navigation: when the “Culture” drop-down menu displays, it displaces the slideshow. I can’t work out what it is in the code that is causing this, as when I edited the original css sheet this didn’t occur, and I didn’t add any extra code to this section when transferring it to the child theme.

2: The slideshow, content and sidebar are all contained in a div named .container. I want to make it so that the sidebar is in its own div so that it can be displayed alongside both the slideshow and the content, and span from the navigation menu to the footer.

3: I’d like to permanently disable comments, and thus remove that functionality from the theme.

4: There are social links in the header of each individual post. I’d like to move them to underneath the main content of the post.

I hope that this is all clear and makes sense, thank you in advance to anyone who reads this and can help me learn how to make my site work!