Web layout methods?

Hi Im making my web page rigth now using just tables with colums and rows. Its hard to keep track sometimes single td tags just mess up the whole site and sometimes somethings seem impossible.....for example I got this pic at the corner and I want two pics and some text to be in the same td tag....so I did it except what happens is that when i put hr tag over the para of text its aligned at the left cuz of the lack of space and the bottom hr is aligned at left cuz the corner pic is finished there...im totally messed...there must be a better way of designing layouts...and I cant afford frontpage or dreamweavers...I want to code myself for experience...please advice.

You should learn to code sites using CSS positioning - not tables. It is a lot easier to learn to code using DIV's and CSS, rather than the illogical structure of tables. Check out the threads in this category for a whole bunch of links to CSS-P sites.