The main trouble when designing a page is placing images, texts etc. I find Layers in Dream weaver the easiest method than tables. Should i prefer tables over layers ? Is tables better for SEO ? Why Firefox and IE shows different result(position) when using layers ?
You should not use tables or layers when it comes to positioning elements on a page. Hence why you are getting browser compatability problems. Just use floats, margins and paddings in a clever way and you can get any element to appear where you wish.
I'm with wd_2k6 on this matter. Use table only for tabular data. For web designing, use CSS. The future of the web is CSS and not tables, so you should start learning it now. - Dynashox -
Always seperate your markup from your styles. Apart from the common advantage that they dont clutter your coding, it is also a good practise for SEO. Also you can easily change styles without having to change content. These are general good coding practises.
Go with Div's. try and break down your design into blocks and then positions them with float:left/ right etc. If you getting different positions from i.e to firefox try setting all your elements to 0 by adding this to the top of your css. *{ padding:0px;margin0px; }.