help with positioning CSS?

[Austinkir]

Hello!
Temp. site url: http://www.arkster.com/TAL/index.html
A few things:

1. How do I avoid using "<br><br>..." within the header and logo div tags within the html? I am currently using them as placeholders, but it is causing the page to become too long... Is there a better way? Eventually the " Featured Content" needs to be directly to the right of the picture.
2. In my CSS, the z-index does not seem to be functioning. Deleting a few of the placeholder <br> shows "header_bg.png" behind "bg_white.png"... am I doing something wrong? I can avoid using them if I need to.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I have to have this completed in about 6 hours. Thank you!

[Snookerman]

1. You can give the header and any other element a height attribute instead of using <br> tags. For example:

#header {
height:300px;
}

2. For z-index to work, the element needs to be positioned. For example:

#header {
z-index:5;
position: relative;
}

You can learn more from this tutorial:
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/40-how-z-index-works/

Good luck!