crossBrowser and better designing

First of all, nobody can develop a site which is perfectly cross-browser, not just you. This is because the layout engines of browsers do not strictly follow all the standards. I suspect that the standards themselves have problems, but this statement would be questionable.

So, the quick answer is: you should test your pages on as many different browsers as possible. Sorry to say so.

But let's take a look at this from a different perspective. Why would you want your page to look identical in all browsers? Maybe because your design rely on exact layout detail. If so, think about it: does it match the goals of your design?

First goal of the design is to show the content of the site. The real value is the site content, not the design per se. The content should be well accessible and clear. Most important thing is: it should be readable; and the navigation should be clear and comprehensively presented, without any kind of ambiguity. If you understand what you really need from a site, you will see: in fact, 99% of the sites you can see these days are no good at all. They are way too cluttered, non-informative and tricky to get to the information you really interested in.

So, if one of your goals is also to be different and stand out, you can get a sure way to get into a 1% of the sites. I don't say this part is the best, I only say that these are the sites who do not suck due to the problems I mentioned before. And this way is based on a simple idea: you can get there if you make the site very simple and clear. (The idea is simple, but I don't say that following it is easy; buy it's certainly easier than making cluttered pages.)

One side effect of this is: your design can be still rendered differently by different layout engines, but it can be not too sensitive to these differences.

But what to do if you also want to have your site recognizable? This is the real art to make the image of the site recognizable, and this is where some top masters of industrial design beat 99.9999% of other world. However, with clear and non-sophisticated design it's easier to stand out, not harder. You still have your unique color gamut and some pictures (the less, the better).

In a nutshell, this is short introduction to a topic where so many thick books are written, and some of them — by real masters having orders of magnitude greater experience.

—SA