I've made a number of edits to the original site, including removing the top plain-white div border which was originally there only while I did some debugging - then I forgot about it. I've replaced that with a border as you demonstrated in your example. When I had originally developed the layout I was simply using a margin and letting the container behind show the white. I've decided not to go that route as I need the additional flexibility to outline the white border (which would use the parent container).

The page gradient is actually a horizontal one and the graphic for it is only 1 pixel tall. It repeats as you also mentioned, but vertically instead of horizontally.

I've left the bottom page edge as its own div and for a couple of reasons. I need the footer itself to remain modular, so I can't have the page edge be part of it. Or I could, but then I'd have to include it multiple times for each different footer I created. I'll see if I can clean this up in the future though.

The site itself is a PHP script I wrote that serve up content pages, headers and navigation in a modular fashion. You can define, per page, a different top navigation, footer nav, sub-nav and image block (the meadow class in the current iteration). Pages index names just get passed in via the URL.

Nothing as fancy as a CMS, but it helps keep the content as clear as possible from the presentation and page framework. It still unfortunately needs some knowledge of HTML to modify. I'd love to be able to cobble this together into a WordPress template as it would make it much easier to deploy to prospective clients.