Paul_Roberts_UK - 3:17 pm on Jan 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

I myself moved completely away from table-based design just under 1 yr ago now. I am now designing sites entirely in CSS using DIVS for layout - and it is soooooooo much easier and better - the main advantage being modification of sites.

How did I do it? Training course. A FREE Macromedia Training Course that was going about at that time where I had to sign up, and a live webcam Macromedia guy took us through loads of slides etc. Sign up with Macromedia and watch out for these. If you use Dreamweaver, make sure you're on version 8, as from what I've heard there are a lot of display discrepancies in earlier versions (on the WSYIWIG screen) for full DIV sites.

The main thing to understand before you dive head-on into CSS site building is this : THE BOX MODEL. Once you've got an understanding of that, and which different spaces on your page will be controlled by which elements - it makes it a hell of a lot easier. It was covered very well in the hour-long course I did.

The next thing is to master the FLOAT function, left and right. I use this on about 80% of my divs to get them to behave correctly and appear where I want them.

After that you can then start to tinker with the more advanced techniques - all things that you discover in time. We're talking conditional comments to load different stylesheets depending on browser, 3-col layouts with borders that stretch for content etc (this technique is actually fairly easy to master).

PR.

[edited by: SuzyUK at 3:29 pm (utc) on Jan. 31, 2007]