Help with basics of styling PHP CSS…

I am relatively new to WordPress and am probably missing the basics of styling with CSS under a PHP framework, so I’m asking for some clarification on why my CSS code isn’t working. What I want is to style each post to look like it’s contained within a box with a drop shadow. I’m trying to do it the tried-and-true CSS way of styling the “.post” class to have a background image slice with repeat-y turned on, and then a top div and a bottom div, each with a “beginning” and “ending” background image to complete the look of the box. However, at best I can sometimes get the “.post” repeat-y section to work, but my other two divs won’t show. I’ve run into this problem before with the Header, but this time I don’t know what PHP to add to make WordPress “see” it.

This is my HTML section of “page.php”:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<!– This is where I’m having trouble… –>

<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<div class=”post-top” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”></div>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php the_content(‘<p class=”serif”>Read the rest of this page »</p>’); ?>
<?php wp_link_pages(array(‘before’ => ‘<p>Pages: ‘, ‘after’ => ‘</p>’, ‘next_or_number’ => ‘number’)); ?>

<div class=”post-bottom” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”></div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link(‘Edit this entry.’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’); ?>

<!– End trouble –>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

So as you can see, I have three divs: post, post-top, and post-bottom, the latter two within post. They also all have their own classes (.post-top, etc), styled like so in CSS:

.post {background-image: url(img/post.png)}
.post-top { background-image: url(img/post-top.png);}
.post-bottom { background-image: url(img/post-bottom.png);}

I had CSS code to repeat-y on the .post background, but have since removed it all since little seems to be working. What I’m most concerned about is getting the top and bottom divs to show. I know there must be something I am fundamentally missing about coding for WordPress and PHP, so if someone could clue me in, that would be great.

Thanks…