donnyb

These updates are a mesurement of your site content. If it is natural it is ok. But if you stuff your content with keywords, you do not have any hopes of survival from the clutches of Panda.

It wouldn't be considered if you go beyond the character limit. However, if you stuff keywords in it then it may harm you.

The excess words in meta description doesn't bring up the negative effect, instead the search engines will knock down the extra characters while considering the site to result for the search query. It's effective to cut short the surplus characters in the description and the ones that are really needed and gives away the desired meaning.

Welcome to the forum
At first glance, you need to float the content and sidebar and to give them a width.
 
The theme is not responsive, so you can use fixed width. In your style.css add the following:
#content{width: 600px; float: left;} #sidebar-home{width: 280px; float: right;} That should look like the attached. Hope that works for you