Strategy on designing web page

[Francesco Giacanelli]

Dear Web4Libbers,

I would like to have advice from you about designing web page with Netscape Composer. I use Composer to design the web page of our library but what I am experiencing are problems in visualizing the pages with different browser. 

Paragraph which seems to be correctly formatted in Netscape, receive more space e.g. between each other in MSIE. If I open Wordpad and work directly on HTML code I notice a lot of <BR> tags I suppose inserted automatically by Netscape; tables are bigger in one browser than in another with problems with the readability of the page.  This sound simple problems with HTML, but I waste a lot of time also for inserting simple textual news. I know that perhaps is better to work directly on HTML code, but as I work as solo I don't have so much time.

Are HTML editor so unreliable? (I tried to open a page with FrontPage editor and it looks completly different formatted as in Netscape). Is a question of validation of HTML code?

Any advice on strategy for designing web page will be appreciate.
Best regards
Francesco Giacanelli