I have a site which I have spent much time seoing. I would like to easly be able to change the look of the site. Is CSS the way to go?

Or tables a good idea for SEO. My sites will be mostly text but I would like to be able to jazz up the background with different colors.

I'm sure you'll get different opinions on this one.

Tables seem easy to work with, but CSS will help with making changes throughout the entire site.

Dave

It depends on what you are going to change, also depends on what resourses are available to you.
If you are using PHP
and just want to be able to change elements like header and footer or menu, you could use an "include" statement and have only one file to change site wide.
I'd have to know more about what will be changing before I could offer specifics because there are so many ways to go about it..

Although it can be difficult starting off i would recommend XHTML and CSS.It is that way u are completely separating the content from the layout and style and with a simple javascript or php script you can change entire design without changing any of the XHTML.

For instance like this site has many different colors. Is that best created through tables?

For instance like this site has many different colors. Is that best created through tables?

No, this site would most efficiently be done with CSS.
in css you can specify classes and have all those classes controlled from one place (known as a style sheet)
For example you can have all the headers blue and the text a lighter blue inside those headers.now say you decide to change those all to green with yellow letters. Without CSS you would have to go change every individual tag where you had a blue header and every tag where you had lighter blue text.. with css you change 2 classes and it is applied site-wide.
that of course is a very simplified example,but I'm sure you can see the advantages CSS present once you take the time to learn it.