I have just spent a whole lot of time redesigning my site without tables I noticed the following points..

1) The redesigned pages load 3 times faster than when they were in tables

2) I had more problems making it work equally well in Mozilla/Firefox IE6/7 but with some perseverance and tweaking manged to reach a compromise on how things were diplayed.

3) I had tried this 6 months previously with poor results and when back to designing in tables - now it all seems to work better, im sizing all my divs in pixels rather than percentages.

4) The above I had to be careful and view the results in different resolutions.

5) I still have a few problems with Mozilla Firefox in the way they display heading tags - leaving a lot more margin around the tags which results in pushing the content down and out of the division sometimes not dipslayed - if I make it work OK in Firefox then it looks silly in IE too many spaces! But as analytics reveals the majority of browsers to my site are still using IE

6) Redesign a page at a time using CSS and divs, pages with the same theme you can use classes etc. Try to make the page appear exactly as it did in tables, this is good coding practice and herlps you control the appearence and not the other way around!

7) Always check that it displays in the major browers OK before uploading the files, keep back ups of your old table pages until you are sure that the new ones work OK!


I came across an interesting problem a couple of days ago. I have a tip of the day with an external javascript file, one of tips was slighty longer than the rest and pushed all the divs out of alignment beneath where it appeared. As the page appeared OK the previous day, it puzzled me at first and I spent a while tweaking the CCS to no avail. When I reaslised what was happening I cut the tip shorter and the page went back to normal without any further altrerations.
Moral of that is dont panic if a page suddenely appears funny! Its usually something simple.
So if you have active content changing on a time basis check that each change will diplay properly!

9) I resisted rebuilding the site for a while as lots of top sites still seem to designed with tables but I decided to bite the bullet and start redesigning and am pleased with the results so far- it also makes my site easier to maintain due less coding on the html files and more in CSS.



OK hope some of that is useful to anyone who is in the same postion wity a website - meanwhile I have to get on do a weekly update for my site (already done the Monthly update!) plus I have at least another 150 or more pages to convert to "tableless" oh I left things that should be in tables - in tables, price lists etc. Start with all the parent pages and work down! Good Luck!

Anyone has any similar probs or fixes post here

Rod