I am midway through designing my site, and I keep noticing that when I preview in Firefox, the look is different than when I preview in Explorer. For example, the photos in Explorer are fatter. And the text in Explorer is more on the left. I am running 64 bit Vista and just downloaded the new Explorer. In general, the preview in Firefox looks pretty much the way that it does in VSD. I personally use Explorer, and recently (a few days ago) downloaded the latest version.

I don't know which browser to aim my design toward. I am kind of trying to adjust so that all of the elements look reasonable in both browsers, but that's almost impossible.

Am I alone in this dilemna and/or what has anyone else done to try to design for two or more browsers?

The reality is your website will look different in different browsers. It might even look different using the same browser on another person's machine or on a different platform.

If you have an existing website and can access the "statistics" log, you can view the percentage of hits you get from the different browsers and platforms.

I would design my website with this target audience in mind. In addition, you will see this message on some websites "This site is best viewed using [browser name and version]". It's one method of shifting the "blame" if a page does not render properly for some users.

Different rendering in different browsers is the bain of web designers everywhere. Until IE gets its act together and becomes fully code compliant (getting there with the latest version), and the majority of users upgrade to a compliant browser we will have this problem.

Whether you need to worry about it depends on your target audience. If its just family and friends then code to suit what browsers they have, if its a wider audience then you need to take into account all the major browsers and several versions of IE (at least back to 7 and possibly 6 depending on your audience).

The other issue is to be aware that different users will have different screen sizes and resolutions that will change things so a site that will adapt to suit helps there as well.

How would I code for a certain targeted audience (browser) if I'm using VSD?

No idea Tom...thats why I use the HTML Editor mostly