Neilo, thanks. I appreciate your response.
But to do something like the example you had is possibly 15 min. or probably more worth of work. And then, if experience is any lesson, it won't look right because IE ver 7 isn't happy with one thing or the other. Or, someone will want it changed and unless you have a box full of boxes to use, you need to start over. I understand that tables were not meant to be used for design. There are a lot of things that are being used for something they shouldn't be. Take, for example the use of Unordered Lists. Now they're being used for everything. They sure are handy but eventually someone will come along and tell us how they weren't, originally, meant to be used this way. I don't know, PERHAPS THE CONSORTIUM SHOULD CONSIDER DESIGNERS for once. And since I'm on a rant, do you think they should have figured out a standard for making column heights the same by now? Instead, we have to do "Faux" backgrounds to make it "look" like a div is the same height as the other. They keep making things fancier without solving basic design issues. Anyways, sorry about the rant.
CSS is great; I totally understand it's value. That said, this sort of CSS design work just takes way too long to get to the design. It really should be as easy as drawing a few boxes where you need them, dropping the text and pictures in and that's it. It literally takes 5 seconds to do the same thing using tables and since I know how to do it, it's easy.
I'm looking for a better way without tables. I want to use CSS but CSS just takes way too long to do it. I'm just trying to get some strategies together and I was hoping CSS Sculptor would make this task easier; perhaps it does and I just need to spend some more time with it. Most likely, it doesn't quite do it. Perhaps that will come in some future update.
Have you tried using Adobe Fireworks to create boxes? It slices the boxes up nicely and then exports images and all of its css. I've played with it enough to know that it's more to my style of design but I've not put it into production yet so I don't know how well it stands up to all the different browsers.
