Trying to get the side-bar background color to extend to the footer

I'm working on a site at http://dracsplace.com/beta/ and am trying to get the side-menu to fill the left side of the main area from top to bottom, so that it's background color will fill the area without requiring the 'main' area to have a background image.

Can anyone suggest a way to get this done?

 

put a div in and set the background colour in the CSS.

 

That's what I have now. The div is also set to 100%, but due to it being floated to the left, I think the float/block-layout/has layout is causing a shrink-wrapping effect around the contents.

 

Search "faux columns". It's a work-around that's necessary due to IE's poor support for css2.

An example in action, see 2 Columns — Apparent Equal Height. For comparison, see this 2 column layout for modern browsers.

cheers,

gary

 

Thanks for the help guys. I used the border-overlap technique for the border, and also used the background image trick for the navigation bar.