side-by-side layout?

I wanted to create a template in which the [Description] and the [Images_vertical] are side by side -- with [Description] on the left, and 3 images ([Images_vertical]) on the right.
This seemed to be impossible to do in the design editor, so i decided to use html, to create a table within the table, and to put [Description] and [Images_vertical] in separate columns in the same row in the table, and with a 2nd row with extra text to show successful placement, like so...

<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>[DESCRIPTION]</td>
<td>[IMGS_VERTICAL]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>row 2, cell 1</td>
<td>row 2, cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

then i hit Update and the result is that my html code seems to be interrupted strangely: after Updating, the [Description] and [Images_vertical] tags are again placed side-by-side outside of the second table, my placement row ("<tr><td>row 2, cell 1</td><td>row 2, cell 2</td></tr>") has been completedly eliminated from the code, and there seem to be extra table rows above the [Description] and [Images_vertical] tags now...

How do i achieve the simple side-by-side layout i desire?

Thanks,

Kragskov