Designing Web Pages

[kenix41]

I really need some advice and I would really appreciate if someone could kindly help me.

I'm trying to design a web site and I'm using Internet Explorer to preview it. It looks perfectly fine, until I preview it Netscape and Mozilla. The whole format changes (looks like a mess at times!) and I don't understand why. Is there a way where I can make the web site look roughly the same ( ie format) on all three browsers? Is it simply try and error when designing?

[pyro]

Your best bet will be to use valid (X)HTML, and set a valid DOCTYPE (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/). This way, browsers will parse it in standards compliant mode, rather than quirks mode. In quirks mode, browsers are free to parse and display the HTML as they see fit. Having said this, IE is not known for it's standards compliance. I would develop your site by testing in Mozilla, and then use whatever hacks you need to get it to work in IE.