I am new to the whole web design world and as much as I must admit I am really enjoying building my site I am having the odd frustrating issue...mostly with I.E.

I fixed most of the IE issues with a series of separate IE style sheets, the code as an example is:

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/iestyles.css" />
<![endif]--> The problem I have is that IE chooses only to read certain parts of the IE specific style sheet and seems to at it's own choosing take certain aspects of the style sheets from the non IE style sheets.

This has become a real pain with shadowing pictures and certain text align issues. My question is does anybody know the reasons for this and a possible fix. This is a real issue for me as over 80% of my users seem to be using IE.

My website www.flightserviceaviation.com is still a work in progress. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

IE chooses only to read certain parts of the IE specific style sheet and seems to at it's own choosing take certain aspects of the style sheets from the non IE style sheets.

No it doesn't. IE reads what you give it.

You have this in your code:

<!--[if IE]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/iestyles.css" />
<![endif]--> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/base.css" media="all"/>
<!--[if IE]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/iestyles.css" />
<![endif]-->

Your IE stylesheets MUST come AFTER your main stylesheet. Your IE-specific stylesheets must also ONLY contain those rules necessary to combat IE's bugs and other vagaries. You appear to have duplicated most of your base stylesheet and that's not what you should be doing.

You also need to differentiate for the VERSION of IE - IE8 will render most like Firefox, whereas other problems exist in IE6 and 7. If you use just ONE IE stylesheet, ALL versions of IE will read it and then you have all kinds of issues.