Hi all,

I'm relatively new to web design - know enough to make mistakes I can't fix. As I know nobody personally who knows anything about web design, I find my mistakes to be very frustrating because I don't know enough to know what I did wrong. So, I appreciate ANY help/advice I receive here.

I'm not even sure where to begin. I had started to design a page with header, left fixed-width column, right liquid content, footer. Created all the graphics I needed to make "pretty" rounded corners on many of my elements. Seemed easy enough. I had to trash the "liquid content" design as my layout would fall apart even in Firefox if I didn't set a Min-width (which I learned the hard way isn't supported by IE6). So I went back to the CSS-drawing board and created a centered fixed-width layout with left column for navigation. Firefox and Safari play nice. Validated (x)html and css at w3c. Everything seemed good. Opened page in IE, and wanted to cry.

Here's a link to my page:

http://www.queencitycgfox.com/new_mcs/newmcs.html

It's just a mock-up - no live links, no real text, just wanted to see if I had things right.

My questions are why IE adds padding (?) at the bottom of my light orange content boxes and thereby breaks my rounded corner effect? Also, my orange menu box's links should not be underlined unless hovered on. Plus, there Link #4 should be gray to show it is the "current" page. Text in general is also overly large from what I'm seeing on my Mac.

I don't know how better to articulate my questions except to say "Why doesn't IE render my page like Firefox? Where did I make my mistakes and how do I avoid them in the future?" I have a total of 3 sites to re-design/keep updated. I think I bit off more than I can chew, but actually seem to enjoy the agony this this puts me through...it's better than most jobs I've had.

Any help would be wonderful...I've tried books and online tutorials (not this site though as I just found today - but I plan to), but unless I'm creating THOSE specific elements/sites my questions aren't answered by these resources. Hopefully someone can shed some light. Sorry for the long-winded query...I'll stop now.