Personally,
I would try to start of going for css/xhtml,
the reason i suggest this is, for a while i was using tables, and just slicing sites up, but when it came to having to move to a table - less design, my old habbits where hard to break,
so now no matter how small a job is i go for the xhtml route just so i dont get lazy and fall back to the old route
just my 2 cents