guidelines for making a good website layout

need to make a good layout for a project and have no idea where to start... apparently tables are considered harmful, so will this just involve a lot  positioning forms and shit? because that seems annoying as fuck

>>5
oh I know it but finding all the fucking labels for what i can use on each element is a bitch, why isn't there just like an online dictionary of html elements and allowed modifiers for that tag in css