http://wp-themes.com/atahualpa/?TB_i...829&height=527

When I preview the Atahuapla theme in Wordpress (link above) it's a crisp clean design. It's a white hovering 3 column blog. The white hovering has a nice dropshadow over a grey background. There are no images or junk cluttering the white hovering 3 column area. Widget lines are clean grey lines and the posting is on the left nice and organized.

I just downloaded the theme and the default settings look nothing like the preview. Not even a passing resemblance. There's images and transparencies on top of them and logos and it's a mess, wow, two search bars (hello I only need one)! How do I get the default to look like the preview without CSS coding a whole new platform?

That preview is wrong, but you can get it by removing the information in the ATO->Style & edit HEADER AREA->Configure Header Area option. Then go to ATO->Style & configure SIDEBARS and uncheck the boxes in the 'LEFT sidebar: Display on:' option and check the boxws in the 'RIGHT INNER sidebar: Display on:' option

Be aware, if you remove teh header, you won't have your blog name at the top.

Atahualpa has lots of options making it easy to customize the look of your site, you might want to look at the threads Showing Off and Showing Off - Part II to see what others have done.

Please don't cry out so loud without you have looked into the theme. Atahualpa is one of the best themes out there, but you do have to do some work before you get a beautiful theme. Atahualpa is not a just out of the box theme.
By the way there are 4 completed themes delivered with the download you did.

Thank you Juggledad, that worked like a charm. I ended up changing to the default theme in the zip file and it looks like the preview now. Too bad it didn't start out like that.