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Do You See What Everyone Else Sees On Your Website?

Written by: Jay Hamilton-Roth

Article Overview: Your website is up and running. It looks great, and you get an email from a website visitor: “I wanted to let you know that your graphics on your site look strange…you might check it out.”

Do You See What Everyone Else Sees On Your Website?

Your website is up and running. It looks great, and you get an email from a website visitor: “I wanted to let you know that your graphics on your site look strange…you might check it out.” How is it possible that your site looks fine to you but wrong to someone else?

You would think that each web browser program (Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) take the same web page information and display it identically. Sadly, you’d be mistaken. Web pages are generally written in (a combination of) HTML, PHP, Flash, or CSS. These are different programming languages that web site designers can use to create a site. While there are standards for how these languages display information, in some cases, the interpretation is open-ended. And there’s the problem.

As a minimum, when you create (or have one created) make sure that the site looks “correct” in the major web browsers. But since each of the web browsers have multiple versions and can run on multiple operating systems, it’s non-trivial to test everything.

Browsershots (http://browsershots.org) is a free service that takes your web page code and displays it in a wide variety of web browsers in a simple format. You can click on each of the screen snapshots (and save them to your computer) to see them in detail. However, at a glance you can tell what sites look “off”.

If you have unlimited resources, then make sure your site displays correctly in all the browsers. However, if you have to pick-and-choose, focus on those browsers that are used by the majority of users. These statistics can be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers).

Also, don’t forget to look at your site through the eyes of a search engine “spider”. You want to make sure that in addition to people being able to use your website, that the site is examined by search engines correctly. One such tool is Search Engine Spider Simulator (http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php)

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Article Tags: different programming languages, display information, email, glance, internet explorer, multiple operating systems, php flash, safari, screen snapshots, search engine spider, search engines, spider simulator, unlimited resources, usage share, web browser program, web browsers, web page code, web pages, web site designers, wikipedia



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