stepquick

Well for starters WordPress has a wonderful admin panel that allows you to edit the css and php in a simple textbox. It generally works for quick edits.

Under the Admin Panel > Appearance > Editor. This will show a list of all the files on the right sidebar for the active theme being used. The CSS for the theme will also be currently opened.

I’d say for Windows look into:Notepad++

Mac:Textwrangler

And a good universal that’s getting really popular is:Sublime Text 2

#content {
margin: 0 34% 0 7.6%;
width: 58.4%;
}

that appears to be what’s causing your weirdness.

Try changing margin to margin:0;

<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />

that would be an example of using meta. It’s also under the settings panel in the admin menu. That would be where you make a description for your site, the Tagline.

Hmm, for some reason it redirects from the category slug and uses a date instead. That’s a very odd one…

What is the permalink settings you’re currently using? Day and Name?

p#slogan { font-size: 15.5px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: italic; color: #ffffff;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); }

This is the line you’re looking for in your main css file. Just add a simple display:none like below. That makes it so the browser doesn’t show it, but it’s still there if you’d ever want to use it.

p#slogan { font-size: 15.5px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: italic; color: #ffffff;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);display:none; }

Now doing this will messing with the position of the photo slider.

#logo-area { float: left; margin-right: 32px; margin-top: -4px; }

Add something like this maybe, margin-bottom about 20-25px:
#logo-area { float: left; margin-right: 32px; margin-top: -4px; margin-bottom:20px; }

That should give decent room for the slider. Hope this helps. 🙂

The default excerpt function works like this:

If you don’t set the excerpt by default, it uses whatever you wrote in content after 55 words giving you the […]. What you could do is possibly use the excerpt box in posts to add an excerpt and you could potentially cut down to less than 55 words to resolve that issue.

The other option you have is to make a function to do a custom excerpt length for, or change it to whatever size you’d like.

And the final option would be finding a plugin that would take care of it for you.

Personally I use the excerpt box along with content. I don’t use more than 55 words to describe what the post is about and it looks better than using the same data over on the blog.

Hope this helps. 🙂

Here’s the material for excerpts from the codex: The Excerpt

Are you using a theme that came with wordpress or one you found?