baldguy... the answer to your question is somewhat dependent on knowing how much you already know about design.
Slicing images into smaller components and placing those components within a container, the "table", is a way to ensure that the images load up faster in the browser. The concept is that many smaller images will load faster than one large image.
Designing in this way has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that the overall design can often look much more pleasing to the eye when text and graphics can be integrated. When your text becomes a graphic, rather than text, it can benefit from certain design choices not otherwise available, such as "drop shadows", "embossing", etc.
One disadvantage to working this way is that the search engines, which look for "text cues" in order to index sites, will not find those cues in graphics. One way to diminish this limitation is to include descriptions of the site in the "IMG ALT" tags of the html source code. Without giving a complete tutorial here, which would take several pages to explain just this isolated topic, I will say that when images are included in a site, the html coding looks something like this: <img src="imagename.gif" alt="a description, or keywords about your site">
img is short for "image"
src is short for "source"
alt is short for "alternate"
If the designer types keywords about his site after the "alt" tag, the search engines will identify that text.
The search engines will also pick up on the site title, and the "meta tags" hidden in the source code (although some search engines do not use "meta tag" information in the indexing process).
This explanation has probably confused you more than clarified things. I found something at WHM that may be useful for you... it is a free graphic program that may have a nice tutorial in it for you. You can find it here: http://www.gimp.org/
Best of luck...
