I want to streamline my web designing and I read CSS will help me overall. Here's my usual steps in creation. Tell me where I could do better...
Design a nice layout in Photoshop with optional rollover graphics in layers
Take it to ImageReady and slice the optimized pieces
Output the HTML in ImageReady and open up Dreamweaver to load in the HTML

Now, where does CSS come in??? I noticed in the webs I've made that there are CSS elements within the code. What can I do from this point to utilize CSS???

Quinn

I would suggest to deconstruct the CSS that you see in your "webs" and see what they do, where do they affect on your pages. Then, you can go on to practicing on layouts that you would like to do. 3 column layout, Fluid, etc. There are a number of websites that can guide you through, just Google on CSS Tutorials.

That sounds like good advice to me, I started moving over to CSS a couple of years ago, to start with it is not easy, especially after the way you have been doing your layout.

What I would suggest is to think in terms of 'containers'. By that I mean think of the page as a whole and have a division tag for that, then other divisions within it that form the header, maincontent, footer, columns etc. It's a completely different way of thinking about pages. One of the most frustrating things is that browers don't all do what they should, and IE is the big problem. It renders things slightly differently - IMHO a MS ploy.

Get Firefox, install the web developer, html and firebug extensions then you will be able to examine and modify your CSS while watching the effect of the changes - lets you tweak things easily.

I guarantee there will be times when you hate CSS and others when you love it. I've just been through one of those, I looked at the design and decided I could have done it more easily in tables, so I set about creating a tables version - I got it on screen and found I couldn't do certain things and it was not even looking as good.