Don't use tables, don't use dreamweaver. It adds so much extra guff that just isn't needed. Best bet would be to start with notepad and a browser rather than a click and drag IDE.
Use div's to layout your site and ul/li elements for things in it. Keep tables for tabular data, not layouts. Tables are also slow to load and a swine to crawl so try and avoid them.
Check out
http://www.alistapart.com/ that has some good articles and you can achieve what you want using these