recommended web page designer?

[iMeowbot]

and though i have no webdesign experience and am just starting out with this, i find the behavior of tables, in dreamweaver anyway, to be very disjunct and difficult to manipulate, though i'm thinking that maybe that's just how tables are.

It is. The table markup was really designed with, well, tables in mind, and they were never really intended to be used as layout aids. They cry in pain when they're abused for those things.

HTML as originally designed was never intended to handle book-style layout. That's why style sheets had to be invented, to halt the spread of inappropriate proprietary tags.

i'm amazed how little html there really is in websites (and slightly frustraited that it's not helping me figure anything out). so like just yesterday i've become really interested in CSS, because evidently it seems to be resposible for making the nice orderly layouts that i like.

Yesyesyesyes, this is the right way to do it. Styles were designed from the outset to handle that stuff well.

i tried ESPN.com in Safari and Explorer to compare just out of curiousity of that claim that CSS displays differently. maybe Firefox is different, but i couldn't see any difference between the two.

Quite a few sites use browser sniffing (examining User-Agent headers) and send different files depending on what is detected. This kind of goofiness will probably be necessary for a long time, unless/until MS get their act together and fix all the rendering bugs in IE

 

[decksnap]

so like just yesterday i've become really interested in CSS, because evidently it seems to be resposible for making the nice orderly layouts that i like.

Well that's just not true. CSS may be the future, and it may be more compliant moving forward, but I have yet to come up with a design that I couldn't execute perfectly with tables. You just have to really learn the stuff.

 

[decksnap]

(CSS for type styles is a different story- pretty much a necessity)