Having made quite good progress developing a site, I added a right float to an image only to have it disappear completely in IE6 (running on a Windows 98 SE Virtual Machine, if you’re interested 
). After a bit of Googling, I discovered that the simple solution was to ensure that all images had their position set to relative in the CSS file. I.e. all that was required was:
IMG {
position: relative;
}
Credit where credit is due, I found the solution on this blog.
Yup, I’ve hit this one multiple times before
You’ll find that a lot of weird positioning issues in IE6 are down to the containing element somewhere up the chain not having a set position.
Just in case you don’t know about these, here are a few top tips for tools as you’re getting back into web design!
- For PHP, consider a templating system like Smarty (http://www.smarty.net/) which will allow you to separate logic from content, and do funky things like change the look of a site in future without changing the back-end code.
- For JavaScript, consider jQuery (http://jquery.com/) which makes JavaScript so easy it actually feels wrong! ExtJS is also good for components but I use this sparingly as it’s quite a big library (http://extjs.com/).
- For developing, Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) is my tool of choice. A free, open-source IDE which can essentially be used as a glorified text editor if that’s all you’re after. You’ll want the PDT plugin if you’re developing in PHP and the WebTools plugin for HTML.
- I’m just getting into this one myself, but I see a lot of promise in the MVC (model-view-controller) programming pattern for PHP. There is a great article if you use the Zend Framework (free) as your base for this, here: http://framework.zend.com/docs/quickstart (also a good intro to the Zend Framework).
You may have heard of some/all of those, but when I first started out those are the ones I wished I’d known about before writing a truckload of code!
Mark.