Proffesional Layout Help

Depends on your content, I suppose a theme would be good way to tie graphics with product or idea.
Colors are another, matching with product, theme, idea etc, should all blend, or flow.
Sometimes less is more, other times more is enough.

Have a browse through older forums posts, there have been topics on such things as getting started, what to use ... even the critquic section for layouts, you'll find some things are picked up more than others, clashes colors, multi fonts ....

I'd say that a good idea would be to read and post in the critiques area. You can get a good understanding of design just by looking at other people's work, talking about what you think is good/bad and reading what other people think too.

Also check out the "non-designer's" series of books by Robin Williams. She's got a bit of graphic designer's ego but once you get past that there's some good advice.

Just by looking around the internet should give you a good idea of what's looks professional and what doesn't. I wouldn't say that there is anything specific that make a professional one stand out from a basic one. Bad colour combinations, fuzzy/jaggedy/blurry images, bad navigation and default fonts are some of the things that make a website look bad and ameturish, so if you can spot a good website from a bad one you are already half way to making professional looking sites.

ok, and another question, can nested tables be used to create nice looking websites?

They can be as long as you don't have too many nesting inside each other. It really depends on the design as to how best actually code it. I always use Fireworks to do my design/layout then slice up the graphical parts to be inserted into tables on the actual page.

i have heard of fireworks, but never tried it, what exactly does it do?

Firewroks is a web graphics program by Macromedia. It's somewhat limited in that it was designed specifically for web graphics (i.e. not good for print or photo work), but there's a lot of power in that at the same time. Download a trial version and check it out. The TWF design was done in Fireworks, actually. What program are you using to design graphics now?

Most people will design an entire layout in a graphics program first (I use PHotoshop most of the time) and then "slice" it up to be inserted into HTML. It's always important, when you're designing the page, to remember that it's going to have to go into HTML and be downloaded by a browser at some point. I've gotten myself into trouble on some occasions by forgetting that. (i.e. designing too complex layouts which would require too many big graphics).

Right Now I use Paintshop Pro 7 (aka: PSP 7)

Don't Know if that can be used to slice images and i really don't know how to slice images. or create the whole layout outta graphics......

I use PSP5 and 6, and use a program called picture dicer (http://www.ziplink.net/~shoestring/dicer01.htm) to cut up my layouts, this program does add some tags but does create .jpgs or .gifs out of .bmps (or leave as .bmp) and makes a html page with tabled layout.

If you haven't found it already here is the download page for Fireworks trial