Can I create multiple page layouts with Atahualpa? (one for home page, one for a specific other interior page, one for general interior pages)

Can I save a theme design as a unique design?

Should I use a "child theme" of some sort? Or should I put all my custom coding into a custom style sheet? (And what happens to my custom code when you update Atahualpa?).

All of what you want to do can be done withing the theme options. You can use the hide sidebars feature and CSS to have different pages look different.

You can export the theme settings to save the design.

You can add your CSS to the CSS Inserts box so it survives a theme upgrade. The only things you may have to deal with are the header images, favicons, and logo in an upgrade. This is not very difficult to do and there are even some ways of avoiding most of the need to to that.

Thanks for the fast reply. I think I get the way you can customize layouts w/hiding sidebars on certain pages, and using page-specific styles in CSS.

Two follow up questions (should these be new threads?):

Styling the menu... looked through the css file to find out how to refer to the existing style rules for the menu to reference it, and holy moly! There are about a million details/references there to menus! Isn't there an easy way to style them? As easy as everything else is, I'm surprised this is just so complex... Can you point me in the right direction? And can I get the WP menu to override the ordering that Atahualpa imposes (which makes no sense to me-I want to choose the order on logical progression through a site, not alphabet or order of creation)? Otherwise, my goal is to add padding left and right and some above and below.

Second: i don't know php, and want to add a table widget to the footer. I've played with variations of the suggested code (simply by guessing and experimenting), but I'm really wasting my time. Do you have any tutorials on how to do this? Or where I can get a basic understanding of the code used? Any way html can be used?

There is the basic styling in the menu section of the theme options or you can use a menu plugin or you can use CSS in the CSS Inserts box to style just about any way you want.

If you want to use the WordPress menu just build the menu in Appearance>Menus and associated with either the Main Menu or the Cat Menu. In these setting Main and Cat only refer to the %pages or %cats that you add in the Style Header Area box to display one of two available menus. Once you play with this a bit you should get the hang of what's happening.

As for adding a single or multi-celled widget area in the footer just follow the instructions in the Add New Widget area section. Again it may take a bit to wrap your head around what is happening but even a non php coder like myself found it to be intuitive. An example of code that would add a two celled widget are in the footer with the content aligned top center would be.

<?php bfa_widget_area('name=Footer widget area&cells=2'); ?>

You would add this code to Footer Content box. This is a two celled widget area. If you took out the &cells=2 you would have a single widget area. Then you could put your table widget in the new widget that shows up in Appearance>Widgets.

Ok, I'm trying to figure this menu thing out. I'd created the menu in WP/appearance/menu; how do you "associate" that menu w/the Atahualpa theme settings? Atahualpa seems to override them.

On the WP menu page at top left you can choose to associate the menu you have built with Main Menu or Cate Menu

OOOOHhhhh! There it is! Now I get it.

Thanks SO much!