Hints on developing sites for different web browsers - April 28th, 2006
Following on from Tim’s blog yesterday on the technical differences between web browsers, I will now give a few tips on cross platform site development.
Far too many developers get into the habit of testing their web pages in one browser. Being a Mac user, I have found it extremely important to check how things look on windows based PCs in both Firefox and IE as well as OSX’s Safari. As many developers will know, they all handle default settings differently.
Make sure you remember to define where you want things to sit inside a table cell. Don’t leave the alignment settings as default. Safari and Firefox will display (as default) a left alignment, however IE defaults to a center alignment.
Be sure to set the horizontal and vertical alignment settings to a defined position as the last thing you want to have to do is sift through countless web pages making adjustments that could have been done at the start.
Don’t forget about image borders. Unless, like me, you generally use CSS to insert images (unless working with dynamic image placement) you must remember to set the border settings to “0″, otherwise (again) IE will display a default border around any images you have forgotten to do this with.
You can imagine what it would do to a menu built from nested images!
Using text in your web pages is a necessity, so make sure you view your web page on all platforms, using as many different browsers as possible as text size is displayed differently across all of them. You can get round this by giving your text a defined point size, such as “12px”. However, you will fall down on accessibility levels as the browsers visual impairment settings will have little effect on increasing the size of the text in relation to the rest of it.
You can use text sizes as small, medium, large, etc… all you have to do is bare this in mind when putting your design together and build your site carefully around it.
When we build sites at Just Search they are built to work with our optimisation programme. We have to ensure our sites look correct across all machines as part of our web service is to get as much traffic as possible to the site. What good is a website that gets 2000 visitors a day due to exceptional listings in the search engines when it doesn’t display properly in IE?
We aim to get all of our sites to work to full efficiency in all browsers as to fit with our business ethos and SEO expertise.
Tom Tong
Web Developer
Just Search Ltd
