Forum:Why is my main page pushing wikia ads out of vertical alignment?

Hiya :) We've recently changed our main page over at the Doctor Who wiki, but we have a small, unexplainable hitch.  It's pushing the featured wikia ads at the bottom way down.

The basic philosophy of the page is used by MemAlpha, Futurama wiki, and others. You know the drill, no doubt. Instead of putting the actual content on the main page itself, you create a template for each and every section, then populate the main page with a series of calls to those templates. This makes it then easier to switch out the sections by just changing the contents of an individual section, rather than hunting through a massive stream of code. And it works, almost. But the odd behavior at the bottom is somehow a function of the interaction between the column formatting and the wikia ads. If I put the templates for the left and right columns in a column structure like: then it pushes those ads at the bottom down to an undesirable location. If I don't put 'em into a column structure, and just type:

then the right column is pushed underneath the left column. So it's a choice between neat little columns that play well with the ads at the top of the page (but not the bottom ones), or columns that don't play with each other.

I've thought that maybe it was something to do with the individual templates. But this was disproven by using fewer templates. Generally, the design will totally work if I only use three templates in the left column. But when I add that fourth template, I get the same undesirable behavior. And I've tried various combinations of templates to see if it was a particular template causing the error. But, no, all the templates will cause the behavior if I use "too many" of them. And some of the templates are very simple indeed, containing absolutely no formatting. So I don't think it's the interaction of code within a template with the larger code of the whole main page.

I'll be damned if I can figure it out. But I do note that MemAlpha's "Panel" templates make reference to  div class="panel" . Clearly, that's a special CSS class that has been created at MemAlpha, and I can't just call it at the DW wiki. Would someone here be willing to take a look at my code as it currently exists on the front page to see if you can see some little trick I'm missing? I really don't understand what's going wrong on the page that's forcing the warping the flow of the page after the end of the right column.

Thanks for any help you can provide.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  15:36, March 12, 2010 (UTC)