Many webmasters who use GoLive/Cyberstudio have been graphic artists who are moving into web site design as a "natural" progression from design to publishing on the Web. Because of their background and the use of tools available in GoLive's palette many select the grid to lay out their web designs. Unfortunately, some browsers do not understand all of the code that a grid produces so the site is often not presented as it is intended.

The grid is a terrific tool. It allows designers to place images and text boxes precisely where they belong on the web page. Adding text, images, plug-ins, or whatever can be easy, rapid and fun with GoLive. But adding items to the grid means more code is produced and that means a site will take longer to load on the viewers computer, and in some cases provide them with line errors. Using tables to format your page saves download time and will allow more browsers to "understand" your page. A grid in HTML code is basically a table within a table within a table etc. As you add text boxes, images and the like more tables within a table are created. In addition, an HTML code <spacer> is also included in that code and Internet Explorer "Does Not Recognize" it. Therefore, the majority of your web viewing audience will have difficulties viewing the page as designed and some may encounter warnings loading your page. Since the grid is a table within a table within a table... why don't we just create a table within a table ourselves and leave out those <spacer> tags that Internet Explorer just "Does Not Recognize".

If you can put your web site design on paper you can plan your site out for the use of tables. It may take a few minutes longer to pre-plan your tables system, but you will save time in the long run as it will produce much less code and won't need to be tweaked later. [Most of us use GoLive because we really do not want to learn code. We want the "Want You See Is What You Get" ease of GoLive.] The major difference in Web pages produced with "grids" vs. "a page made with just tables" is that the "grid" pages contain over double the code of a similar page made with tables. Yet tables provide us with additional interactivity to the display of the Web page. Tables allow us to stretch the page from side to side to fit on anyone's monitor or shrink down to fit on the majority of the market's 13" and 15" viewable monitors.

Using tables may be frustrating at first but once managed it will be intuitive for you to use tables on your next site.