That sounds like a very inefficient way of doing things. Ecommerce solutions are designed from the ground up around an ecommerce CMS like Magento, Open cart etc.
Are the Indian company just doing the design (PSD files), or are they building a working website?
Yes, it kept getting hijacked and all the threads/forums deleted. After a few days of this they took the site down. It came up briefly with a message about "coming soon" but now it's gone again.
Is anyone here involved with the team at webdevforums.com? It was taken down by a hacker a few weeks ago and I am curious if there was any progress on bringing it back online?
"large amount of *cookie-cutter websites* along with a bunch of other websites that would market these *cookie-cutter websites*"
Sounds a bit like he wants to set up link farms to me by creating sites that link to each other in an attempt to fool the Google algorithm. So he's probably just...
No extensions spring to mind, but I suggest you do some digging in the Joomla extension directory to see if anything does what you need:
http://extensions.joomla.org/
If you're not experienced with coding then I would suggest Wordpress as it has the biggest and cheapest selection of templates to choose from. Personally I prefer Joomla as I find it more flexible, but for mosts sites Wordpress should be fine.
css without the html is a bit hard to interpret :) Can you post a link to a demo of the template you're using? That would make it easier.
I'm guessing the 3 occurrences of width: 960px is what you need to change, but it probably won't be as simple as that.
Hmm, never seen that one before. Did you successfully create any articles before you started seeing the problem?
It might be worth trying it on the web server, it'll probably be more robust than developing locally.