My website looks funny in IE but looks great in Mozilla....help!?!?

Question

I designed a new website and it looks weird in Internet Explorer but looks great in Mozilla Firefox. Tell me what I am doing wrong or give suggestions on the different things I need to do while programing. Here is the link to my website http://www.littlebeecraft.com/teststuff/craftroad.html

Answer 1

There is not much wrong in IE7 which cant be easily solved using todays methods.



However in your case, you have made it rather difficult for us to help you, because you are using all sorts of deprecated elements and attributes mixed with Embedded CSS Style equlivants, along with incorrectly usage of tables for layout, and a mess of nested tables. Not to mention the abuse of non-breaking spaces to force a paticuler layout, this could potintially lead to incorrect rendering of your page all-togetter, which makes it even harder to debug.



It also appears that you are using a bunch of obsolate tags, combined with the above, this indicates that you are using a WYSIWYG editor, and one of the worse of the kind. Take note that all you really need to create a website, would be a copy of notepad.





It would be far better if you started all over and based your layout on css instead, what you are doing can easily be done in css with far less markup required.



You can follow some tutorials on HTML and CSS at http://www.brugbart.com/ and http://www.w3schools.com/ But you should also remember to validate your code using:

http://validator.w3.org/ - The W3C Markup Validation Service

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ - The W3C CSS Validation Service



You cant expect to get much help when your layout is table based, it takes a significant amount of time to debug such layouts. The point is, that people insisting on using such layouts, are pretty much on their own when something goes wrong.



CSS is far easier to read and work with, then all of the deprecated attributes, along with the tedious amount of extra html markup otherwise required.



Finally HTML is not a programming language, it is a language used for Markup, and as such it is named HyperText Markup Language.

Answer 2

There's good and bad there.



The good news:



Your site design is solid and the graphics look pretty good (You could work on the tiling but it would take forever and I doubt if many people who aren't professional geeks would notice the seams). It looks fine on my IE7 but you might want to check it at other resolutions.





Now for the bad news on why it might look funny on some computers:



Have you looked at your code? Your WYSIWYG editor has added a lot of bad code. It opens and closes three unnamed fonts in the beginning of the body section and you have about three more tables than you need. Also the image on the home page is way bigger than it should be and it would take all day to download on a dial-up connection. You need to dumb it down from 2 mp to 72 dpi. There are also broken links but I'm sure those are under construction.



WYSIWYG editors are okay for quick production but everyone really should learn at least the basics of HTML if he or she wants to be a developer.

Answer 3

I run Linux, so I uh can't see your page in IE. My advice is that it's time to let things break in IE 6.0 as long as the major content can be used fine. Google's the king of this; their page works in the circa-1995 Mosaic 2.0! Netscape 3.04 works on popular sites like Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia with mangled formatting but blazing speeds on even a Pentium 100. Go for that kind of rendering; graceful degradation for IE 6.0 troglodytes, and perfect rendering for everyone else. Give a little disclaimer so people know why things don't look perfect in their ancient HTML mangler.



Sorry, but IE6 hails from 2001!



Lastly, Cherry.jpg is 2.5 MILLION bytes in size. Million! Please resize that for people on dialup and cheap DSL. You can get that to 100KB with nearly the same quality real easy by resizing it. Dillo mangled things by showing it full screen huge, so even if you don't care about speed, fixing this would help your browser compatibility and maybe even make the site work ok in IE 6.0.

Answer 4

Thats because IE doesnt really follow the rules, it doesnt parse the pages correctly to the standard whereby Firefox do.

Are you using IE6 ?