Hi Mark,
You're in the same spot I was maybe a month ago. I asked the same question (if you do a search you'd probably find that thread). My advice is stick with tables for now. Maybe at some point in the distant future CSS positioning will render layout with tables obsolete, but that day is not today. So now I'm using CSS for some things for which it works reasonably well, e.g. text properties like you, and certain other things like TD background color.