Not sure if this is the right place for this or if I should be in HTML. Apologies if wrong.

I've just had my site reviewed (thank you) and people with Mozilla, Opera and Firefox are seeing dreadful things - underlines where they don't exist, different colours, displaced search box. This is a continuation of a nightmare that's been going on for months with IE.

My neighbour and I have the same browser (IE 6), the same Op system (XP), the same updates, the same boxes checked in every area we can think of. Only different graphics cards and pcs. When the search boxes on my site looks great on my neighbour's (and all other IE pcs), they look dreadful on mine...and vice versa.

I have tried to find a solution in books (obviously the wrong books), and on the Web (not asking the right question perhaps), but I am stumped. The people kind enough to review my site probably think I'm lazy or ungrateful just ignoring their comments.

I use e-commerce software (HTML) and Dreamweaver, when I get things looking good in Dreamweaver and copy the HTML back into the e-commerce software, everything moves or changes. It seems I must make my changes in the html for the e-commerce software only....but how??

I want to be able to hold my head high in multi-browser world, and if I can get that pesky search box looking good on my pc and everyone else's then that would be fantastic.

One other thing, how do I get my pages so that they fill the whole pc monitor and not just half a page??

I'm no techie, so please, idiot proof answers appreciated.

Thank in advance

First of all make sure your site is valid.
http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html

That usually weeds out some differences. There are still some differences in the way browsers render things, but they're usually pretty easy to fix (tip: there's almost always more than one way of acomplishing something, if one way causes browser differences, try a different way). If all else fails, you can use browser sniffing to give different bits of code to different browsers.

If you want your pages to fill the whole browser window, there's a number of ways. If you use tables for your layout, set the table width to 100%. If you use DIVs, use a combination of %, absolute and fixed positioning.

Hi Minaki

Thank you ever so much for your reply. Validator is brilliant as a start point - it found 146 faults on the homepage alone. Should help to fix one or two errors.

I don't understand browser sniffing?

My tables are set to 100%, but with my e-commerce software you do not work with the entire page - it's split into the body, header, side bar and footer..... I think it must be an instruction hidden in the bowels of my e-commerce software.

Thanks once again.