GoLive CS2 - Alignment Troubles

Question

I'm working with a scratch built site (a number of separate attempts) and trying different ways to layout my pages.  I'd like to not use tables, if I can avoid it.  The trouble I'm having is if I use a layout grid, and layout text boxes, and align them with the tools in GoLive CS2 they do not actually align, they are off.  In the layout view, they look right, but in preview and in the browser preview they are not where they should be.  I have looked at the source code, and my grid is 960 px, my box is 800 px, so there is 160 px left, I see it's position is 80 px from the left.  Seems like it should work.  Sometimes it looks right, so I go on and try to work on another part of the page.  I save it and preview it, and the original work is screwed up.  Is it possible I'm going something wrong?  It seems pretty straight forward on this layout grid tool.  Any ideas?
I've also noticed that my banner is 960 px wide and the layout grid inspector is NOTORIOUS about mysteriously resizing itself to 961 px makes me nuts!
Again, I'm assuming Adobe products are of higher quality than some other vendors, so I'm thinking it's me, but for the life of me, i don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Please help,
Thanks

Answer 1

Your question: does GoLive work okay - is it me? is tricky for me to answer as the question straddles that line between being wysiwyg or understanding the underlying code.
I don't know if there are kinks in the layout grid/CSS functionality or not. I use to place things on the grid and fuss around trying things randomly until I resolved problems but I didn't know why the problems resolved. When I went to writing my own CSS code I didn't use the grid at all and I don't use it now. The flow with CSS is basically to plop everything on the page first, then style it.
With HTML, everything defaults to one long row. Header art, text below, then a photo below the text, then more text, etc. So you put it all on the page. Then you go to the CSS editor and start creating the "rules" for the various parts of your page. Then you go back to the html source code and apply your rules, which then manipulates the text, photos, etc. You can do that in Golive without using on the grid. As I mentioned before, you can't totally rely on the Preview when you do this. Depending on how complex the layout is, Preview goes from being pretty accurate to completely useless. Regardless, you constantly need to check what you're doing in a browser.
This process is the opposite of the way I used to work when I laid out using tables. It's much slower for me, at this point, but the programmers love the final product, and you get SEO benefits because you reduce a lot of the coding on the page, the pages load faster, and the coding follows "rules". (Table-based layouts break "rules".) You make it easier for blind people to navigate your sites, etc. There's all kinds of stuff out there about the benefits of CSS-based layouts. (Not to say that CSS is perfect, though. There are times when you'll really miss tables. Sigh.)
The big problem for me was that I stared out life as a designer, and I had no interest in learning ANY code. I ADORED Golive because I could use it and NOT have a clue what was going on under the hood. Not to say that Golive didn't have challenges -- it's a deep program and there was some learnng curve. And, over time, I learned how to mess around in the HTML because I connected a site to Paypal, or had to connect to a javascript, etc. And there were the challenges of forcing tables to do things because of different browser behaviors, etc.
BUT! I would not have been able to code a website from scratch. And, as it turns out, I mis-used some aspects of HTML because I didn't know any better. As long as things appeared okay in the browsers, I was satisfied.
Now, I could code a site in a text editor and I would know what I was doing (pretty much.) And instead of wondering about whether to switch to DW, I'm thinking about learning HTML 5 and maybe some javascript.
At this point, I plan to use GL as long as I can because of all it's terrific site management tools and connection to other Adobe programs. But I'm using it as a CSS Editor now, not as a wysiwyg tool.
And if I eventually HAVE to retire it because of OS changes or whatever, I'll be looking for a program from the perspective of Site Management and CSS tools, NOT because it lets me build sites without having to understand the coding.
You can certainly learn to use GL, but you do need to know that it's days are numbered. It may be functional for some years yet, but not forever. Depending on whether you want to work professionally or as a hobbyist, you can decide whether to bite the bullet and learn HTML/CSS or not. If you're a professional, I would bite the bullet.