Maybe, we are getting old.
I don't know why he wants another way. I think that my advise is good and simple. That's what I read it in the book last spring. I assume that he rather use hand codes. It is not a big deal as I hope that he knows the right thing otherwise he would have a nightmare to get 'stuck in the mud' and start it all over. He needed some help of how to setup colors on his cell-tables. I believe that it has to do with the CSS. I wrote my note about it, and I left it in the storage somewhere. It is very important that we should not create too much fancy on a website. Maybe, you might want to look these links about blogs:
http://www.frontblog.dk and
http://www.mikematas.com . (These are not mine.)