Julie is correct CSS is a dream! What I do for nav bars is make a css command of
.nav {
padding-left: 5px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 5px;
background-color: #fafafa;
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 11px;
}
Then in your html code you would refer to the above with something like td class="nav" so it will pic up the style.
You can go much deeper in what you want to do with CSS. That way I can update one page and wham they all update. You may want to look at server side as well or shtml files. If you are just starting out I would suggest digging into CSS as the possibilities are endless!
As for borders you can achieve this with the boarder command in your table code:
border="1" or change the numbers if you want a thicker border around the table. Just make sure you use the main table code for the border command. Another option is to make the main table 2 or 3 px larger and give it a background code of #000000 so it will form the border.
Adding border around home page -- How? 
Linear Mode
