Vertical alignment issues in browser; Top margins off by 50 px

Hi, this is my first post. I genuinely tried searching for this but I really don't know what my specific problem is so my searches were coming up with things that don't pertain to me.

I'm a print designer, with pretty limited web experience. I can usually read up and find a fix for something but this has basically stopped me in my tracks because I can't go any further until I can get the design *somewhat* close to what I had in mind.

Here is my site: http://www.thewestthird.com/
(nothin like not bothering with a testing domain!)

I'm doing this in Dreamweaver and I have a couple divs there. Ideally I'd like to have a tight lockup with the line underneath the text and the smaller text on the left aligned with the top of the large text. But there is no precision at all, all the browsers seem to have their own take on what "top-margin" means.

So guess what I'm asking for is anything that will make this look right consistently! I know this is the age-old problem with browsers but maybe I'm missing something (or a few things) and I'm sure there's a better what to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Thanks so much.


Here are a couple of screen shots of what I see —*I'm sure IE and FF on Windows are different still...

What exactly is the problem you are having?

I can see various things I would change, but without a detail of EXACTLY what is wrong its hard to fix. I assume you are talking about the margin above "DUMMY TEXT"?

I would like to have it line up like in the Firefox version (the second picture), with the smaller text aligning with the larger text [or at least close enough] and the line beneath closer. Basically I just want it to look consistent between the browsers, which I know is an age-old problem but in this case they just seem ridiculously off. I could adjust it for Safari so it looks right and then in Firefox it would look totally different. I wish they matched up properly.

Well in your case I would use an IE conditional comment and change the css for IE 6/7 as needed.