There are times to use tables, but if you're just looking to arrange some boxes I'd recommend using flexbox instead. That covers the basics of what you can do pretty well, and if you want to practice, there's this.

If you are looking to learn tables specifically, I think Code Academy has a pretty good tutorial on it, though with their new layout I can't find a way to link to it directly.

honey and the forgor land What knowledge are you missing specifically? How familiar are you with HTML?

Kitten4u i'll try these two sources out tbh i've never come across them bc i'm the big dumb. always found some link to some tumblr tutorial which didn't make sense.

elli i'm just looking for a way to set up tables in general? i'm familiar with how to just make a simple format: no hovers or anything, just a lot of <div id>'s and such. when it comes to tables i just blank because idk where to begin.

The Code Academy tutorial would be good then I think just because it starts from the beginning. You'll probably find the start really basic, but it'll build up on that.

For design itself, that's a bit harder to teach. Look at templates and skins that you like and try to emulate some of the things that you think are cool about them. Not straight copy, just look at how they organize their text, where they put images, just things you think are generally shiny.

If it's about how to put the various features of the template you want to be there in place, just think of designing for web as organizing a bunch of boxes. Sometimes you can do things to make them appear less box-like, but in the end they're still boxes being pushed around places. If you use Chrome, you can right click on something, then select element, and that'll pull up the code used to make what you're looking at. Again, don't use it to steal code, just look at how they did things. It's a great way to learn new CSS properties and give you an idea of how people are doing things.

As an example, I made a simple template that doesn't look particularly box-like, but it really is just an arrangement of boxes. There's one box around the whole template (so I can define the width and center it), a box on the top (for the top part of the ribbon), a box on the bottom (for the left side ribbon and text area), then a box where I put the left side ribbon (where the ribbon is actually coded), the box for the text area, then inside the text area there's a box for the avatar (it is inside the text area, I just use negative margins to make it look like it's outside), and then each piece of the ribbon is a box with border and positioning shenanigans to get it where I want (each ribbon has 5 pieces to make it work). So once you get used to just putting some boxes in places, then you can start doing weird things to make it look less like boxes in boxes.