Site not working in older IE browsers

[Paul Cooper]

Hi, I ventured maybe unwisely into having a go at customising our site. Now I am happy with the results and it works fine in the latest versions of the top 6 browsers. However, in IE 7 it has a few problems with displaying some of the images in the left / right hand side bars but is usable, in IE 5.5 & 6 it is completely unusable. The mods I did were to change background colours and to incorporate boxes around each page element such as the shopping cart summary, Secure Delivery etc..

I'm pretty sure I have messed up the code somewhere as the code I used was kindly donated by another actinic users and their site works fine.

So my question is, is there a tool that will help diagnose the problems (firebug comes up clear for Firefox) for IE 6 & 7? Last year nearly 30% of visits were made using IE 5.5 and 6 so it is something I should try and get right. The alternative is to engage the services of somebody who knows what they are doing - unlike me.

I did all the mods using FF 3.5 as the browser and was quite pleased with my handywork until reports came in of the problems with IE 6.

Thanks

Paul
http://www.technobots.co.uk
V9.04

[Duncan Rounding]

You can use Firebug in IE, Safari and Opera:
http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

It requires you to temporarily add some additional code to the page to use it but it should help.

[Paul Cooper]

Thank you Duncan. I actually found a plug in for IE http://www.debugbar.com/ along with an IE emulator http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage from 5.5 upwards that has proved to be rather useful. Diagnosed the problem to be the use of <center> in a div class to centre header text, changed this to a text-align: center; in the CSS and all is much better now. Still some tweaking to do as IE 6 does not recognise some of the CSS commands but is now usable.

Paul