I'm trying to understand what tells SS to put the menu on the left so it's floated like a picture and the page content snuggles up against it to the right? And for that matter, what tells the search box to be in the upper right?

I've looked at layout.css and some of the php and ss files but I can't find anything that indicates positioning information other than alignment. I want to be able to better control where elements I add appear on the page but it doesn't make sense to my HTML mind. I know very little about PHP and CSS so I keep vapor locking on it.

Can someone help me?

Thanks,
Joe

I think you should look through the tutorials and documentation. Look for themes and templates.

Yeah, I'm digging through that right now but it's got me going around in circles. I can't for the life of me figure out what tells an element where it is supposed to be on a page.

You might need to be more specific - are you not sure how the page source (HTML) is generated, or are you wondering how the generated HTML produces what you see.

Your questions sound more like CSS questions than Silverstripe - so not really relevant to this forum, however, here is pretty much everything you need to know on floating layouts:

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/