Sit down to create a website and pretty much the first hurdle is getting the layout right. Tables are deeply unfashionable and won’t help you with search engines.

The ever-useful Yahoo Developer network has a good solution to this problem with the YUI 2: Grids CSS, a collection of page templates with, apparently,  1000 page layout combinations.

If you don’t want to get your hands too dirty with the code, the YUI Grids Builder offers a quick and simple way of setting the different areas of the page. The screenshot shows the page tool and a preview of the page appears in behind it in the browser window. Once you’re happy with it, click on the Show code button to copy and paste the code into the HTML editor of your choice.

There’s lots of help and documentation on the website along with a 42 minute video. Common to most of the the YUI pages there’s a PDF cheat sheet, which is a helpful reference.

The only disadvantage that I can see is that the default code uses stylesheets stored on the Yahoo website. It is possible to download these as part of the full YUI Library to host on your own website.