thanks for the help nonetheless, looks like we both went a looooong way round before reaching a simple resolution!
resolved by using
.widget ul {
list-style: none;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
i was fiddling around the entire night and copy-pasted my page.php into archive.php which seems to be working… but somewhat imperfectly. thank you for your comment! i shall try looking in index.php and continue tweaking.
