I have new become much more familiar with CSS, and boy is it nice. The new design is more attractive, easier to read, and contains far less code to accomplish the same purpose. On average, each page now contains 30% less code.
I had a few problems with the old site design, the most troublesome being code maintenance. Editing pages wasn’t terribly hard, but since I was using tables extensively for the layout, it wasn’t exactly simple either. I would often find mis-typed tags since the majority of the code maintenance is via a text editor (vi).
With the new layout, all the positioning and page layout is embedded in the style sheet so the actual HTML page is much smaller and contains only the most basic of markup tags and a few <div> tags to mark the sections so the style sheet knows how to render them properly. It is now much easier to author new pages and maintain the old ones.
As is also apparent, with CSS I’m able to do some nifty stuff with page layout. The screened background graphic overlayed with a normalized image creates a nice effect. The top navbar with links to the major sections on my site is a floating window, as is the little info pane on the right. Those should render well in any modern browser.
Feel free to sent me comments, and if they are offering a critique, please include suggestions for how it could be done better.