div style and background image

hi,

i'm new to html and been fumbling along.

i'm creating a page which shows a rough site layout with temperatures in
boxes.

initially i drew the whole thing in word but it took ages to refresh (the
source code was a mess!! lol)

next i thought i'd draw the layout in paint and save as a jpeg and use as a
background image.

problem was the page is set to refresh every 5 secs and it takes 1 sec to
reload the page so it looked crap.

i stumbled on < div style ............. > to make text boxes which i could
position nicely on the screen at will........ great!

when testing, i noticed that although there was some load time with the jpeg
image, the div style stuff was immediate??

i got rid of the image and tried to recreate the layout using empty text
boxes.

nice...... reloads immediately. is this css? is that why its quicker?

just one problem though.. i'm struggling to recreate the layout using solely
div style's. i end each div with a and start a new one.

but it seems (as far as absolute positioning is concerned), the preceeding
div has a bearing on subsequent div's positioning.

basically i was hoping to draw a big rectangle and in that have others....
and in the others would be the text boxes with temps.

can i achieve what i want with div's?

is there a program where i can draw a basic line layout and is be converted
to div's?

or can i instruct the browser to download the background image once and
refresh only the textboxes with the temps etc in?

thanks

neil