Hey Laura, great looking website. But reading the source code it's easy to see why you are having so many problems. Tables were used alot back in the days before I had a computer... or so I've heard. I started out with DIV's, but read how using tables causes all sorts of problems because older browsers and are especially bad for editing in the future. I would be glad to help you with your website tomorrow when I get home, if you plan to redesign it without tables. But will give you some information to work with - it seems like you put a lot of effort into the site
Anybody here will probably say its best to convert to a div layout. Which isn't necessarily hard to do, but can be time consuming. Of course, it's the same answer if you try to fix the tables for all different browsers. I put your link in for browsershots.org default seletion and many of the lesser-known programs looked very bad, the older version of things like IE and Firefox had problems with centering the bottom panel and spacing them out. Just different problems in each browser.
I use Google Chrome, and the only problem I see is on the elements with rounded corners, all corners are rounded - so it shows the underlying background in places where it shouldn't. You would only notice it if you looked at it though.
Of course, there will be many problems like the screenshots you provided simply because you used tables. Every time you split content with a table, it just adds liability for problems in different browsers. It's best to keep images whole when you can, and only split them up if you need the element to expand or be placed differently. The best way to do it is to use a div.
If you would like to try a div layout
You will likely need to learn how to use DIV's. They are a different concept than using tables for alignment. I would give you a tutorial or some good examples, but I'm on my laptop out of town for thanksgiving. I could google some but... I'll explain how you would use them instead.
Here is an example of how I would lay out the website, with illustrations. Keep in mind that you will lay out the images as backgrounds most of the time, and they do not need to be split up horizontally.
http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o...lustration.jpg
0: All of the blue boxes are container div's. They just hold the content in place and you build the content within each. Because your site uses images like they are, you should assign these div's a width equal to the size of the images, and then center (using the margin: 0px auto; method). Except for in #2, centering should do most of the work for you.
1: This div is simple, give it a width and center it. You just need to make a child container in here, which can be another div, and give it a width equal to the size of the blue area (minus padding) and center that. Keep in mind, if you use text it will be easy to edit - but browsers without that font will see a plain font and might lose it's charm. Consider embedding the text into the image instead.
2: For the mid-section, you will use one large div wide enough to fit both subsections, then within that you will create two more divs - one for navigation and the other for the content. You can find many methods to align them, but if you make them each half of their container you should be able to use floats.
(I don't know why I labelled these 4 & 5, lol)
2a(4): For the left section, it would be easiest to keep it as a hotlinked-image, and align everything to the center. Note that the <center> tag is deprecated, so instead add to the container "text-align: center", which will work on images as well. If they appear to close to one side you can add padding, but if you add padding to the container you will need to subtract from its width.
2b(5): For the gallery, just use tables. For the paragraph content, what you have will probably work.
6: This should be a div with a background image of the entire journal area. To make the text aligned properly, use padding. You can specify padding in specific directions, something like "padding: 100px 20px 20px 20px;" should work, going in order as TOP RIGHT DOWN LEFT. iirc.
