Depending upon what you want, you can do quite a number of things.
One thing you can do is use (and it sounds like a lot, but it's not) 3 wrappers.
Wrapper 1: Overall content wrapper. Everything will fall inside it.
Wrapper 2: Will encompass everything in that left "column" we talked about earlier
Wrapper 3: WIll be everything to the right of the left column
Now, Wrapper 1 would be absolutely positioned. You can put it in the center (which a little bit of handy dandy coding 😉) or in the top left corner. It's up to you.
Wrapper 2 would be absolutely positioned to wherever you want it, within wrapper 1. So if you used top: 0; left: 0;, that would be the top left corner of the wrapper1, not the browser window. Same thing with wrapper 3. Then you just float or position your child divs as necessary inside the columns.
The reason this works is because absolute positioning is absolute relative to it's parent positioned div. So if the parent div has no position, it won't matter. If the parent div has a position (absolute or relative) the absolute child will be relative the area of that parent.
It's hard to understand, but you can see an idea of it over at www.patternet.com
