I believe these 2 rules:

#content .inner {}

#side .inner {}

could be replaced with:

.inner {}

after adding the padding-top declaration to

#footer .inner {}

Also, rather than using these extra DIVs, I’d move the horizontal padding to the nested block-level elements and move the vertical padding back to the parent containers (content, side, footer).

And if we’re talking starting points, I’d zero out margin and padding:

* {margin:0;padding:0}

And take care of the “small text size bug” (IEWin):

html {font-size:100.01%}