Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply. The table had been set up with two <tr> elements because the cells in the left column spanned two rows in the right column… which I was doing because I was having problems with getting too much space between two paragraphs in the same cell – having two cells on top of each other solved the problem. Not an elegant solution, but I did test out your suggested table code and still have the same problem with how the image was aligning (or not aligning, as it were).
In the end, I took your suggestion and used the plugin you suggested, which thankfully seems to be one of the few column-producing plugins that resizes images in the columns responsively – so thank you for that suggestion. I was still left with the issue of two much space between paragraphs, but I eventually figured out how to write the CSS for paragraph classes with smaller margins, and finally managed to get it to do what I needed, in probably a much more elegant way. Thanks for your help in getting there.