woot, pretty good advice.

why would you advise to not use tables? i use lots of tables, and if used properly, they can be great tools. are you suggesting to use DIVs for layout? while i can understand why you might choose an alternate layout method, i think for a novice webmaster it might be harder. IMO.

woody, who is your host? do you have access to a database with your hosting plan? once you begin to add products or content, you are really going to want your page to be dynamic and to get away from the hard coding of the site. this is where adding your content will get easy, and much much easier to manage down the road.

 

Tables aren't really meant for design, where Divs are. It is a bit of a wishy washy thing - there are a number of strange reasons not to use tables... the big one it's non-standard and never will be.

One of the big reasons is graceful degradation, and browser independance. A palm browser can't ignore tables, it can avoid div tags - meaning that the palm viewer will see the same content in a gracefully degraded way. A table on the other hand wouldn't.

I realize this sounds extremely pedantic... if for no other reason than maintance and flexibility use div tags.

On the otherhand - if you know your target audience perfectly, and you don't care if others can't see it properly, then yes use tables. I'm not be sarcastic either. That's the time and place.

 

my major concerns as far as audience when it comes to design are to make sure it works right in IE and FF, as well as views normal in a res of at least 1024x768.

my other reasoning is i dont have much experience with DIVs. while i would like to use them more because of their flexibility and capabilites, i just dont have the experience with them yet. so i have stuck to what i know for now. i dont really anticipate too much palm traffic to my sites either. i still stick to what i said though, for someone without any previous coding experience it would be more difficult. i guess it all depends on what you are specifically doing.

 

I guess it depends for me I could do that site in a few divs.

Wrapper DIV ~700px

Top div (~400px)

side div (20em)

content div (remainder floated left into side div)

bottom div (~250px)

For me it's way easier... but that's me... and only because that's the way I was taught/learned how to do it - I fully appreciate your point.

 

and there is no better teacher than experience.

 

Ah, the battle of tables and divs... I'll stay neutral here (I use both for different reasons). But I must admit that I am getting away from static coding and moving to ASPX and C# but thats part of my job so I have to adapt. Use what works, but I will conceed that divs and CSS were designed for eachother.

MDFF

 

The point I guess is to seperate content from display... manage both seperately.

Yes - it's an epic fight...

 

wow thanks for all the advice
I'm stuck with Microsoft Publisher until the end of the week, then I guess I'm gonna pick up a copy of dreamweaver
How did everybody learn this stuff? pick up some books and the software and dig in? take classes?

 

Started as a hobby, got good, and now I can't get away from it. Sometimes I wish I would have picked something else.

MDFF

 

****, i started making dragon ball z websites and such when i was in grade school. just been playing with computers ever since. i just used to browse websites and view the source to see how something was done.

learn a pc language like any other spoken language, learn the formation of sentences and how the language works, then you can pick up on more words (functions for pcs) as you go along. my collective knowledge is a cesspool from 10 years of mingling with computers.

like i already stated, there is no better teacher than experience.

if you need any specific help with anything, i would be willing to help you out and im sure some of the other guys wouldnt mind either.