Last week I was a personal web tutor for a very prestigious designer. I provided instruction on basic web design and how to use Adobe Dreamweaver CS3. Finished the course with instruction on using dreamweaver CM templates system, and the whole time we had a healthy dialogs about design and web best practices and so on.

I wasn’t able to complete the site in the alloted time, but this was because I labored a bit much on the basics and should have spent more time doing more advanced instruction. The real culprit though was that I didn’t know how to use div tags correctly for formatting purposes. (NOTE AS OF 2009 – This is pretty funny looking back on – its all I do now. I wish I would have taught myself earlier!)

Anyway, having taught myself this in the last 48 hours I feel I have a much better understanding on how div tags float and relate to each other on the z-index. Good times. When I get around to redesigning my site Ill be using div tags to hold my content and Ill place it in the beginning of the body so it’s indexed better by spiders.

Will I still use tables for layout? yes. I have used tables for years and thats how I think. So long as tables arn’t nested 3 layers deep and the relevant content you want indexed is at the top of the page code in a positioned div tag you’re fine.

The best way to learn something is to teach it because nothing will show you your weaknesses like a question you can’t answer.