CSS Adapting a template

I am a newcomer to CSS design, and my company recently asked me change the old site from table layout to CSS... I am not really a web tech person, but I have done a good amount of editing on our old table based site.

Anyway, I recently downloaded the "Beauty Company" template, and it is great. I have redone some of the colors and all of the images without any problems.

Unfortunately, this template is only a front page, and I need a basic blank to fill with text content. I fiddled around with this myself, and got a basic page that uses the header and footer of the template, and after much experimentation, a nice left sidebar (unordered list, no style).

My problem is my sidebar is quite short. The main text wraps around the bottom of it, but i would prefer blank or colored space on the left. Is there any way to avoid this? Since the amount of text will vary, I would ideally like an automatically resizing length. With tables, this would simply be a two column table, keeping everything in its place. With CSS layout? No idea. It seems a common problem, from what I read.

The key thing is that while many things are working, I'm not confident about why, and I don't completely understand the hierarchy of the wrapper, body container etc... this is also affecting the footer, but not drastically.

Can anyone help me out here? I imagine its a pretty simple mistake I'm making, but I'm learning as I go along. I can post code if necessary.

Thanks in advance for any advice.