Newbie- site okay in FF, but disaster in IE, but why?

The explanation is that IE is the worst browser ever created and it interprets valid code in ways that no other browser does. If you will take just a few minutes to look through some of the previous questions on this forum, you will find that this is the single most common question asked and answered here, repeated ad nauseum literally thousands of times. No need to go through it again.

IE sucks, and uses a different rendering engine, and it sucks at rendering valid codes.

lol!!!
thanks chrisber and visal_hd

i did see that there is a ton of discussion around this, unfortunately most is tailored to real programmers (not me!). would you all have any advice for someone completely new to this to learn something really basic – like why in IE6 the content appears under the left nav rather than in the middle of the page (as it does on other browsers). i am usually ok and muddling through things once i get a start, but i figure there is something in this theme that is missing so IE6 makes the “middle” content appear under the left nav as opposed to the middle of the page. for something like that i search and search, but cant seem to find an easy answer. any direction would be a big help! but of course til then i will absolutely keep searching the boards – thanks!!!
oh, and though i havent been doing this very long, im starting to really hate IE. i wish people didnt visit my site using it! maybe i should just block anyone from visiting who is still using IE6
haha ??

The main issue is that IE interprets the total width of your page elements incorrectly and causes an overflow situation since it believes that everything adds up to more than the specified width of your page. The easiest solution is usually to adjust the width of your content and sidebar areas slightly to correct the overflow.

Or serve an additional CSS sheet containing slightly different widths to IE using a conditional comment:

https://www.elated.com/articles/internet-explorer-conditional-comments/

thank you for the help!
i think i will start by trying to adjust the widths (and making different r_sidebars for each template). then if that doesnt work, tackle the conditional commenting – that sounds like it might be a bit advanced for me (creating another css sheet, though maybe i can figure it out – if i do that do i copy all the code from my main style sheet and put it into the new css sheet along with conditional code? or does that new css sheet ONLY have the conditional code? i didnt think it was clear from that elated.com page but maybe i overlooked)

thanks again everyone – i *really* appreciate it.

The new sheet is called by a conditional comment that is added to header.php. I normally add it just after the call to the main style sheet(s).

The new sheet would only contain the amended CSS widths. Nothing else.