Customize Sidebar

Hi All,

Recently, I made my first wordpress theme, but the sidebar is giving me a real hard time! For some reason I am unable to modify my sidebar. This is HTML only example of how I want it to look like and I already have CSS for it:

http://artmak.net/blog/wp-content/themes/artmak/

But now the sidebar looks like this:

http://www.artmak.net/blog

For some reason, my sidebar.php file only has this code:

<ul id=”sidebar”>
<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’)
|| !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<li id=”about”>
<h2>About</h2>
<p>This is my blog.</p>

<li id=”links”>
<h2>Links</h2>

• Example

<?php endif; ?>

But displays a lot more information than this code!

Can somebody point me in the right direction, how to modify sidebar.php so that CSS can kick in and make it look nice! I am confused, should I be modifying the sidebar.php in my theme folder, or in the main root directory of the wordpress??

Also, why does IE display my header so wrong?? Firefox is fine and also any other browser is fine, but IE is really bad.