Matt Heerema

If you must use tables…

Use them properly.

Isolani does a great job with a succinct, easy to understand Guide to creating accessible, structured tables for your tabular data (the only thing for which you should be using tables).

Forms

Forms are usually pretty messy to deal with in a pure CSS layout. They look very nice in tables, but are rather hard and hackey to deal with without tables.

The Man In Blue , along with Eric Meyer came up with some very pretty ways of dealing with Accessible, Semantic, Table-less form layouts

How do I become a Web Designer??

Here is a well put article by D Kieth Robinson on how to learn to be a Web Designer.

It is fairly reminiscent of part of a presentation I gave on Web design (to a bunch of 7th graders ;)). Here’s the main point I think:

So what does it take to become a successful Web designer? To begin with, you�ll need to want to learn, and practice lifelong learning throughout your career. Things change often and quickly; to keep up you�ll need to be committed to staying abreast of those changes and adjusting your methods and work style to them. For example, what you start out knowing could likely become obsolete shortly after you�ve mastered it. Realize this and keep yourself ready for it.

Also very important to keep in mind:

If you�re considering course of study in Web design, it�s important that this formalized education set you up to succeed in a real-world working environment. You�ll want a broad program, one that focuses on the basics and soft skills more than it does on software. Be wary of a curriculum that promises only to teach you Flash and Dreamweaver.

CSS Crib Sheet

A nice resource by Dave Shea (with colaboration from the Web community). Helpful to have on hand when developing a site with CSS.

CSS Crib Sheet

RSS 2.0 Specification

RSS 2.0 by Harvard