Testing in IE

[TimmyC]

One of my biggest weaknesses in web coding is testing it for Internet explorer. I havn't done it much and to be honest I dont really know how to go about doing it.

I have these two landing pages that my client designed and I have coded.

http://www.leicestercleaners.com/carpet-cleaning
http://www.leicestercleaners.com/carpet-cleaning

When testing in IE they just look awful! In firefox they look great.

How do I go about finding out whats wrong with it on internet explorer? And what debug commands can I use?

[djb]

Validate everything first and get the code perfect then that’s one less thing to worry about:

The W3C Markup Validation Service
The W3C CSS Validation Service

Then for me if it’s not working now it’s a case of trial and error. I use Adobe Browserlab to preview websites in different browsers as I only have a mac at home.

[TimmyC]

One of my other questions was how do people test sites in IE without a pc.. im just working from a mac then loading it up and looking at it on a pc. Cheers for the tip. Maybe i might have to do some exclusive ie markup? :s

[Corrosive]

These probably aren't helping;

<a href="img/1.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]"><img src="img/one.jpg"></img></a>

Image tags are self closing. Overall though the code looks OK so agree with djb, it is validator time!

[Corrosive]

Cheers for the tip. Maybe i might have to do some exclusive ie markup? :s

It's a possibility and a great tool to have but that page is really broken in IE so I think this goes a little deeper than just some conditional comments and an IE stylesheet.

[djb]

One of my other questions was how do people test sites in IE without a pc.

I use Bootcamp on my Mac to see what things look like on a PC/IE but, to be honest, after validating it thoroughly and with a little tweaking using Browserlab to sort out any CSS problems, the worst the PC will show up is text overflowing (and occasionally colour differences) so I only ever need to do this once just before the project goes live.