As you have discovered, you are winding up with lots of tables.... and if you use the typical WYSIWYG html editor, you will probably wind up with spaghetti code. Personally, we'd approach it with CSS. Cleaner and easier to change (particularly if you are talking about multiple pages). If you want to do the sliced images and html, depending on the look you are going for, this article might give you some ideas :
http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/imageintable.asp
HTH