Verified answer

True: a bad layout will loose you visitors. Make sure your layout is CLEAR and easy to navigate. The advices above are good.

False: there is nothing wrong with tables. Millions of good sites use tables. (even this one!) It is the coding that can make it bad.

If you want to find out how you can do good, reliable layouts that work on ALL browsers, go to www.web2coders.com and take the "table v div challenge". (Tabulated source with AJAX downloadable).

This has been designed to ask "unconditional advocates of div's who don't know what they are talking about" to put their money where their mouth is.

After 8 weeks, still none has succeeded...

Absolutely. Go for a portal look where your content resides in the center and has a linear look (not left/right/center and everywhere in the content area). Have your links in a "block" to one side and keep other special things (like small calenders, site search boxes, etc.) in blocks as well.

Also, try not to use tables in designing the layout as it causes pages to popup all at once, which means longer loading before seeing anything. If a visitor knows where they're going they'd rather see links (first, quick things that load) quickly to get where they're headed without waiting for everything to load fully just to leave the page and go to another load. This doesn't apply to small sites which have little to load so don't criticize this statement completely. This only applies to sites which have quite a bit to load.