CSS No Tables Layouts - this site has a few good samples for layouts with CSS. It was used as a reference for the conversion of this page to all cascading style sheets. http://glish.com/css/home.asp
This is also a good site for avoiding the dreaded nested table in a web design: http://www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts/
Absolute CSS positioning inside a relative positioned item: http://css-tricks.com/absolute-positioning-inside-relative-positioning/
"Fixed" removes a div from the flow completely, as if the parent div did not exist. You may want "absolute" (or jQuery) - see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7846161/fixed-positioned-div-within-a-relative-parent-div