Some suggestions:
1. Get yourself a decent text editor (if you haven't already) -
notepad++ is a good one, there are lots of others (see the sticky), and everyone has a favourite but it's mainly down to personal taste. This will syntax highlight (change the colour of certain elements) for you and make your code much much easier to read. Anyone telling you that "proper coders" only use windows notepad is either lying or an idiot.
2. Do your main testing in Firefox and then tweak for IE - Firefox renders (displays) html in a fairly reliable and standards compliant way. If your site looks ok in Firefox, then it will most likely look ok in Opera / Safari / etc... and should only need the occasional fix for IE. If you develop for IE and then check the final result in Firefox, you may find it looks like a bag of spanners and will take a lot more effort to fix this way round.
3. Don't get tempted to go div crazy - divs are just containers for grouping other "proper" elements. If you don't need to group, you don't need a div. You can style any html element using the class or id selectors.
e.g.
Code:
<div id="navMenu">
<ul>
<li>nav1</li>
<li>nav2</li>
<li>nav3</li>
</ul>
</div>
can become:
<ul id="navMenu">
<li>nav1</li>
<li>nav2</li>
<li>nav3</li>
</ul>
4. Use the right selector - if there is only going to be one occurence of a particular item (e.g. your navigation bar) then use id. If there are (or might be) multiple occurences of an item (e.g. a news post) then use class. You can get away with breaking this rule and most browsers won't complain, but it's not a good habit.
5. Learn by doing - the best way of learning is to have a goal and keep pottering away until you get there. It's very easy to get side-tracked if you don't have a final vision for what you're doing and are just trying examples from books or websites. Choose something that interests you and make a website about it.
