You can learn a lot from observation too. Make sure you have the web developer plugin for firefox, it enables you to dissect pretty much any web page allowing you to systematically enable and disable tags so you can learn how things are placed etc. There's a button you can press to indicate the bounding boxes of tables and divs etc.

Drule is quite right when he says don't use a layout editor like DW. You're just setting yourself up for a lot of confusion later on when your layout randomly shits itself. I started with WYSIWYG but matured to raw code. Notepad++ with port of ruby blue theme is my weapon of choice. There's an FTP plugin for it too although Filezilla is a lot easier to set up and understand if you're new.

I don't know about how good this code is or if it follows good form or w/e, but I more or less learned CSS from looking at the layouts on this site.  It has really barebones templates for a lot of the layouts people want and, although I can't tell entirely based on what you said, I think it has what you're trying to do.  Either way it might be good to take a look so you can see some simple CSS in context.