Is it hard for SEs to see content when it's in a table within a table? My homepage is boring. It's basically a three column design, two navigational sidebars, middle column with content and a logo for a header and some links as the footer. I want to split the middle column into four sections with some individual content. It seems like i'd have create to many tables to do this because I also want to put some tables within these four sections to list recommended sites, reviews, etc. Any advice on an easy way to create this to make it look professional, maybe some nice borders, color. All my html experience is self-taught. I usually hire web designers for site overhauls, but I feel I should be able to handle this one page project.
have a look at swapping the tables for css, take a bit of reading and trial and error, but in the long-run its easier, nicer and much cleaner code.
The advantage of cleaner code is also that search engines don't have to see any of your formatting information, just your content, which is exactly what you want them to see. But I don't know the answer to your original question if it's hard to see content ina table within a table. I would think not, but then it's hard for a human to see and edit the code if its a table within a table.
The more useless code you have on a page - the less SEs love it. They will crawl it, they will index it, but they won't give you as much "love" as you could get. Tables are NOT bad, however, they should be used for tabular data, and not for layout. Read some basics about CSS and you'll understand what the fuss is all about.