Beginner, need html help for i think a table, plz help!

I only know real basic html and I want my main page to look real nice, it doesn't right now. I want the links to be on left side of webpage going vertically up to down and the links to be picture links or just text links (pictures be nicer links but i just need links there). If somebody could provide html for me to put links up and down on left side. I just want main page to look really nice. right now i just have a table a friend made for me yrs ago for another site that i copy and pasted for new site, with pic links in middle of page.

Links I need in to look nice is a table or navbar or whatever for links. I also need a better banner, my friends doesnt look so good.

Can anybody present html i need to put on page to have links on left side of page in a navbar look, ive looked at html help pages and cant figure it out. Need it with this many links

News
Artists
Discography
Downloads
Pictures
Links

and maybe guestbook links to can be on left instead of on bottom. so that be 6-8 links. Can anybody help me with html i need to type in for that?

Short of time at the mo, so just a quick answer....

google around for "html lists" or go to www.w3schools.com and check out html and css. I would suggest that what you need for a menu down the left could be an unordered list. Put it in a div with css controlling its appearance and location and, there you'll have it.

Bazz

Nowadays, menus are usually marked up using unordered lists, since a menu basically is a list of links. A good tutorial for marking up and styling lists as menus can be found in the Listutorial (http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/listutorial/index.htm).
If you are uncomfortable with CSS positioning, or with CSS in general for that matter, you can reside to using a simple one row, two cell table to create the side-by-side effect; let it be noted however that CSS is the preferred way nowadays.

Please let us know what you're comfortable with so we can advise you accordingly.

Besides the W3Schools tuts, take a look at the HTML Dog ones (http://htmldog.com/guides/).