My theme: Firefox looks great, IE is crap

Web developers have forever been fighting IE6, so this is not surprising. Good luck.

well, you can always try IE7…. ??

coz WordPress sites look better in IE for me, especially the admin panel. lol.

While I can’t say what’s specifically wrong, I can say that your site doesn’t validate and making it valid might fix some problems:

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnewyorktraveler.net%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

There is a set of tags to ‘sniff’ for specific IE versions that allow you to provide a special style sheet just for them. It’s a nice clean solution.

Place the following code inside the head tags in your header.php page. This example will check for IE prior to 7. (IE 6 is still used by many and very non standards compliant.)

<!–[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”
href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’);?>
<?php echo ‘/ie6.css’ ?>” media=”screen” />
<![endif]–>

Put the ie6.css stylesheet in the main theme directory.

Hope that helps!

Codecottage

Thank you for responding!

The validation results tell me I have 134 “errors” but as far as I can see, they all relate to changes I’ve made (for example, adding a header picture, adding a meta tag for search engines). I haven’t seen anything there that can help me fix the IE6 thing. But I didn’t understand half of the validation stuff.

As far as the code, codecottage (cute name), it didn’t work. I did as you said (I think) and put that code in the header.php. I don’t know what you mean about putting the ie6.css stylesheet in the main theme directory. What is that?

Thanks for your help.

Creating the ie6.css (or whatever you choose to call it) and placing it in the main theme directory is the meat of the matter.

You need to know how to modify style sheets and you need to know how to ftp into your account.

If you don’t know how to do those two things, it is always possible to make a compromise version of the main style sheet. Back it up and play with the padding and widths of some of the main page elements until you arrive at a reasonable compromise between the browsers. IE 6 renders differently from IE 7 so you may need to check in FF and 2 versions of IE. IE 7 renders pages in a more standards compliant way but you still have to pay attention to IE6 because the majority of users are still on it! Yech!

Hope this helps.

Codecottage
(I started freelancing in a small house hence the name!)
??

I would go through your code and fix those errors so the page validates. It may not fix display issues in IE6, but if your code is not valid, then you shouldn’t expect it to display correctly in any browser.

Well, the solution is finally here. What apparently was happening was that a large widget (a Blogrush widget) was too wide for the sidebar. Firefox managed to balance the sidebars so that the widget fitted. Internet Explorer was more rigid, and bumped everything else in the sidebars over. As soon as I fixed the Blogrush widget width, IE accepted it and the page looks fine.

I’d never have known! Firefox seemed to manage it just fine.

But there’s a tip for anyone who has a similar problem in the future. Thanks, guys, for your help. I learned a lot, too. ??