Having started in web design prior to the popularity of CSS, I have always be a “tables guy.”  Using Dreamweaver hooked me on tables early on for structual site layouts. 

Of course it did no take me long to abandon Dreamweaver for a large portion of my desing work in favor of editing the html code directly.  When setting up new structual area of my site it seemed so much easier to just log on to cPanel and enter in the little <td>’s  and <tr>’s directly, especially if the main structual elements were in place with a template.

 When CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for you true newbies) started gaining popularity I took an initial look at it.  My first reaction was “Great! I can set up a site wide standard for how I want certain text to display.”  Setting up a standard for hyperlinks, various headers (<h1> <h2> etc.), hovers, and paragraphs, really help give my sites more consistancy and made it easy to change color schemes without search through the entire site looking for all the <text color=red>.

Jumping on board with CSS for color schemes seemed like a natural.  But there I stayed, mired in my own limitations by with the way I used CSS.  I continue to design my sties with structual layouts with tables.  As more webmasters began touting the benefits of using CSS for structual compontents, I decided to take an intial took at it. 

At first glance I was confused by the some of the terms and codes CSS used for structual components.  I thought, “tables seem so much easier, ” and quickly abandoned the idea of using CSS in place of my tables.  My theory was “go with what your know.”  For years I stuck with my precious tables.

With the expolosion of web 2.0, a lot of the designed seemed to revolve around CSS strucually.  So when I decided to redesign this site I took another look at CSS.  I quickly realized that even though CSS took a little longer to learn than tables, the power of it was unmatched.  I had so much greater control over the layout display with CSS than with tables.  I could control exact page positioning and perfect layouts much easier once I got the hand of it.  Additionally, it made changing the site a breeze.

So I call out a challenge to all webmasters still using tables for your primary site layouts.  CSS is a powerful alternative that you should definately take a look at.