CMS Made Simple Forums

It seams to me that real designers don't use tables in their designs (unless the point is to acually have a table).

But as a person with no ambitions of becoming a real designer, only to have a design that works, are there very good reasons not to use tables?

I see many reasons not to put content in tables. But for headers and footers, I see no such reasons. And I know how to make my header with tables (that is how it is done in my current design), but I still do not know how to do it without tables.

Good reasons to not use tables:

1. tables are for tabular data
2. what if you want your footer to be in different place after few months, do you want to edit html and css or just css?
3. having multiple tables slows page rendering down considerably
4. blind people? how do they "see" your page
5. people with smaller screens / pda devices, with divs you can quite easily change how the content is shown for different devices (including printers, tv screens and handheld devices)

Good reasons to use tables

1. its the way you know how and dont want to learn a new way
2. you have three minutes to create three column layout and customer is banging you'r head with a hammer all the time you write it

http://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&q=no+ ... haku&meta=

wil give much more...

Thank you for an informative reply from Karma. It is not that I do not want want to learn new ways of doing things. But I am a law professor who happens - among other things - to run a guitar website. There are some time constraint, and learning new ways of doing things takes time. And as part of a major upgrade of the site, I am learning SQL, php and now a little bit more about css. When it comes to layout of the main parts, the advantage of css over tables is obvious, even for me.

Some of the site i got to by using your search string have a lot of useful information, and answer some om my question. (And it was an interesting experience to be sent to the Finish version of Google.) As an amateur in web development and web design, I know something fairly well, but there is a lot I do not know at all. Trying to learn from books etc is often difficult. They are generally either written for pepole who want to become developer/designers, and/or they take a lot for granted. I often have the same feeling that I would have if I try to read Finish using a dictionary: I may find the meaning of the words, but not have they fit together to give meaning. (Usually the problem is all the prepositions, but for a languge without preposision - like Finsih - I guess that the mening of all the endings indicating cases will cause the same kind of problem.)

Some of the sites seems to give the kind of information I need, and I will work on it a little more.

My basic understanding of css tells me that it is not to difficult to have two or three columns: Main, float left column and float right column. But in some of my headers I have four elements: Graphics, text, graphics and graphics. I am thinking of trying this concept:

{Graphics float left} {Main element [text]} - {graphics float right, position -40px (or whatever will give the right position)}{graphics float right}.

Is this a kind of basic concept that will work for a four part header?

It's easier to start with something close to what you want and tweak it than to start from scratch! Try the layouts here: http://www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts/

(As a programmer, I'm lazy--reuse whenever possible!  )

Tim