Here’s a good article on advanced layouts using CSS. In this article they aim to create a layout which looks like the following:

“Rogelio Lizaolo improves on Kwon Ekstrom’s CSS version of WebRef’s tabled home page. Months in the making, the final design successfully duplicates WebRef’s layout without the use of tables. Numerous bugs were discovered in Netscape and Explorer in how they handle CSS, and we found some elegant workarounds to these and other problems. What follows is a step by step CSS layout tutorial that shows how we got to the final design.”
Link: Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step - WebReference.com