For you border problem, IE has this horrible thing where images wrapped in links have a border set. You should be able to take care of this by specifying "border: 0" on the image.
As for the images not appearing, it seems you're using a "section" tag. In theory, this HTML5 tag works in IE8. However, theory has not always worked as Microsoft would like to think. I'd suggest one of two things:
1) Try simply !DOCTYPE html rather than DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
or 2) replace the section tag with a div.
One of these should resolve the issue.
As an aside, I notice you're a designer. I'm not sure if you're aiming for web design work, but if you are I'd highly recommend trying to do the majority of your HTML and CSS by hand. Doing so helped me learn how to do cross-browser CSS, HTML, and javascript much faster than depending on a WYSIWYG editor.
Hope this helps!
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