A Simple Two-Column Layout
Step 1 - No styling yet - this is the default layout. In this example, we are going to use absolute positioning to create a two-column layout, which is perhaps the most common page layout you will see on the Web. This format enables you to follow the widely adopted convention of placing navigation in a vertical "stack" on the left side.
The content area - the second column - is typically much wider than the navigation column, as this is where the real infomation of the page goes.
The most important decision in a design like this is: will one, both or none of the columns change size to fit the width of the browser?
In this case, we'll fix the width of the navigation column and let the content column fill the rest of the browser's width.