Thursday, 10 July 2008

Disappointed with browsing

I reckoned I made the best of the dreadful weather at the weekend by re-vamping the Anarchadia website. I was pleased with the result until I looked on at my site at lunchtime using the web browser employed where I work.

I added playlists to the pages for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb and did quite a bit of tidying up. I've had a lot of problems getting things in the right places but last weekend I made startling progress in getting page components where I wanted them. I thought I was getting better at it.

Well, when I opened up my website at lunch it looked worse than ever! My two most prized pages are all jumbled up.

I've known for some time that smaller screens can jumble my web pages up and that Mozilla Firefox is the best browser in which to view them. Firefox was in the news this week as being a more secure browser than Internet Explorer thanks to regular downloaded updates. Or uploaded downlates.

So I was half waiting for everyone to buy bigger screens. Then they would see what I can see on my wide screen with Firefox. But it seems there's more to it than that.

Internet Explorer is the default web browser and it looks at things in different ways. I can't see what it looks like becasue I have Firefox and I think I've used certain positioning commands in Firefox that IE doesn't recognise.

Apparently, some websites can detect what browser is being used to view them and they can change the mark up to suit. Obviously, this means two sets of code when I've just about managed to get one looking the way I want it to.

I need to do something to my website but I'm not sure what. I've said on the home page that Firefox is the best browser to use but most people won't bother to change on my account.

I am wondering about Dreamweaver now but it's very expensive at over £300. I believe the learning curve is pretty steep, too. But it seems a waste of time to carry on as I have been. At least half of the visitors to my website can't see what they are supposed to see and probably move on quickly to another site they can view properly.

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