<div style="text-align:center;">this text will be in center, no mater what.</div>

those pages msn, yahoo or google have two type of layout,
one is wide other one is narrow. you need to be very good in css to do this and js as well

design your layout, in em and %
no pixel layouts, no pixel font sizes,
set your image sizes, in px,
and float text around them dont try to rigidly structure it
dont expect the site to look the same,
if it looks the same 2048*1520 as it does 640*480,
it will look stupid on both
just make how it does look, look good

Mozilla, Opera, IE, Avant, text readers,
what happens if the next user is on a Mac, Safari looks different on a Mac to what it does on windows

just for self confidence, go here BrowserShots and put the url of a site you think is pretty good, into the system.
over the next few minutes it will load screen dumps of the site in dozens of different browsers and resolutions
Every site looks like **expletive deleted** in some combination of res and browser

This is an example of the sort of thing I'm trying to achieve and I think it might be what theOP wants:

http://www.dannylane.co.uk/main.php#

The whole web page fits my browser window by just scaling up or down. It's done in Javascript but I think it uses an external file. I can make it work with an image file in Javascript or with frames in HTML but only pictures will resize and the code seems flakey.

Does anyone know how to do it?