Hey! I'm new here, hoping to get a bit of help with a website that's driving me bonkers.

http://sgaa.info/

This site seems to work fine for me in chrome.. but in IE(You may have to click to another page or two) it seems to be aligned wrong, it loads all funny and looks distorted.

Now, I could care less about IE, but I'd prefer it work since the page is supposed to be out there to help new people.

Thanks for your time and I seriously appreciate any help. I've only ever taught myself what I know, so I'm not terribly experienced or anything.

Ooo! Sugar gliders! Cute!

Hm. I only have IE7. In that browser the page first looks alright when it loads and then all of sudden breaks to pieces. You seem to have som Active-X going on there. What is that doing?

But start with fixing the validation errors.

The doctype should be the very first line. Now it's in the middle of HEAD somewhere. If you use a custom doctype I think you should use "system" rather than "puplic" and the URL should lead to the actual DTD, not to your main page. You can't validate against your custom doctype without an URL to the actual DTD file. I'm guessing you don't have one, so maybe the easiest is to use one of the official doctypes.

Thanks so much! I'm a small scale glider breeder so I try to have a lot of helpful information out there if I can manage it.

Actually a friend helped me with this layout, I've edited it to change a bit though.. So I'm not sure what the Active-X is.. Do I need it? XD

Alright, the doctype I put in just to have an icon for bookmarks and such, is there an easier way to do that? And should that be right after the html tag before the first head tag?

And thanks so much for your quick reply! <3

Nope, that's not what doctypes do. It tells what flavour of HTML you use and the DTD file I talked about contains the rules for that HTML version in machine readable format so the validator can use it when it checks your pages for errors.
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html

So slop a real doctype on and remove the one you have. XHTML Transitional, I think would suit best. Then head to the validator (link at top and bottom of all pages here). You probably need to check the CSS also.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator.html.en


I'll read your site. I was tempted to get a sugar glider a while back, but the information was so confusing. Some say they are easy to handle, sociable and so on. Others that they are mean little horrors and you need to have a whole group of them and that they stink too.

Do need a doctype at all, then? It wasn't there before and the site seemed to work.. Sorry for the dumb questions, I'm such a n00b. X_x;

And definitely! Feel free to e-mail me any time, I am always happy to help teach people about gliders.

They are NOT 'easy' to care for, they require a special diet(requires work in the kitchen and ordering stuff online) and they're nocturnal, need a huge cage, etc.. but they are NOT vicious little things, they're actually terribly sweet if you get one that hasn't been abused and you're able to bond with it. But really, any time.. I'll be happy to answer any question at all, just let me know. <3

I've read your Basics page and it doesn't look like I should get a sugar glider. Too bad, they are very cute.

Yes, you need a doctypte for two reasons. The first is so you can validate. The validator helps you find errors in your markup. Since browsers recover from errors in different way, errors can cause display discrepancies. The second reason is that browsers have two rendering modes and these are triggered by the doctype your use. If you don't use a docype at all all browsers will be in quirks mode. Then they emulate older versions of themselves, which results in all kinds of discrepancies. You want standards mode (AKA strict mode). In standard mode they try to follow web standards the best they can and chances are better the page will display the same over the line.
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/