I've had other webmasters tell me I need to get away from tables and use DIV instead. Does it really matter how I code the site as long as it has a good design and is easy to navigate? I'm redeveloping my site and I think the graphics are good, layout is good and is easy to navigate. My thinking is that most peoplel don't give a hoot what coding you've used, they are more concerned with what their eyes behold.

If I'm wrong please tell me.

Using div usually makes your design easier to be styled later on. Suppose to be faster as well.

Yes you should use div instead of tables. The other advantage for div, which hostentic did not mentioned is usability under text web browsers, tablets, or browsers without styles. When you are using tables, the page is really width, and it is hard to navigate. With div, you do not have this issue, because it is displaying all content, line by line.

Just try to disable styles for page (for eg. in firefox) View / Styles / Ignore styles. And check the differences.

Plus, working with DIV has better Exact rendering amongst the various browsers available nowadays. Most of the time, tables are rendered differently by different engines.

Also, I think DIV is more search engine friendly. Plus more semantical.

Div is better in many cases, but old Table is also fine when u need to just put elements in order. Div is for professionals, but table can be used easily by a newbie.

Using DIV can't be termed as being professional, in my opinion I think it is just good practice!! Yes you can design with tables but it should be limited to what it's used for. Tables can be used to design tables!! An entire page designed using just tables is out of standard and strongly discouraged.

You will find some people do look at the source to see experience or make some snarly comments and put you down.

But how the site looks and is coded is also Company image, so I would go with divs and css since it is more professional than good old tables.

div is more professional and hassle free way for web programming.

Divs are cleaner and easy to add css.

I always use divs and css hand in hand

I always use divs also. They are much easier to control, especially when there is a lot of nesting, I always got lost when using tables in the past

DIV shorten your code up to 60%. So of course web developed in it will be faster than table technique.

Using DIV makes the work easier. Also using it is useful for the SEO purpose.

Tabels are history. With divs is much easier to create template,divs use less code, easy to add new elements to the page in future.

So use div.

Designs does matter a lot, I must say that it matters more than 60%. because normal users are not be concerned about which code you wrote and how, they will like your web if it is attractive and design will be good.

Using DIV elements and CSS particles instead of HTML can be recommended but no magical gains would be made after doing the transition and this is an important issues always as you can find so many cool purely HTML made sites.

Even if your web pages contain tens of tables and even lots of coding errors but is at the same time powered by valuable contents plus incoming links, you will experience traffic boosts. Using proper CSS codes can make it easier for you to maintain structure of your site in the long term.