Jan
Test Your Blog Or Website In Different Browsers
Written by Susan on January 13th, 2009
I submit this information specifically for those Alex Jeffreys students whose blogs I’ve visited while using IE 6.0.2. Lots of people haven’t yet upgraded to IE 7 – I personally hated IE 7 and deliberately chose to go back to my previous version. And it broke my heart to see how many of your otherwise lovely blogs weren’t rendering properly. The potential sales you’re losing because people visit your blog, see an incoherent mess on the screen, and scramble to hit the back button is just mindboggling.
You know having an online presence is a must for your business. So you spend hours of time and fistfuls of dollars on your blog or your website – maybe you hired a web designer, a graphic designer, a Wordpress expert, made sure the meta tags were in order, created landing pages, plugged in your plugins and Aweber forms, aaaaand so forth. After untold hours and days of agony, tired eyes, hair-pulling, and out-of-pocket expense, you see the final draft. How thrilled are you!
You fire up Internet Explorer (or whatever you’re using) and look at the results. They look great, don’t they? Fix this, tweak that, whoops! minor typo there…and then you’re ready to send your labor of love out onto the ‘net, for all the world to see. You can just hear their collective jaws dropping. But I’m betting you didn’t think to do one vital thing before you went live. Did you test your lovely site on different browsers?
Different Browsers?
Ok, I can hear your heads being scratched all the way from here. But this isn’t the first time you’ve cranked up a computer and hit the web – you know that Internet Explorer (or even Firefox) is not the only web browser in use out there. There are over 15 browsers with respective versions for a number of operating systems. How do you know if your website is going to render properly in all of them? You don’t know what browsers your visitors and potential cash paying customers might be using to visit your page – so you have got to test your website against all of them.
How do you test the browsers?
Relax! You don’t have to research every browser and download them all, one by weary one. Browsershots will test your web design in different browsers for you. It is a free website service that will take a snapshot of your website on a number of different browsers. After it uploads the results, you get to see on one page how your site looks in each of them.
Like I said, it’s free. So don’t waste another minute spitting and polishing a site that might still be unviewable to a significant number of potential customers. Why drive anybody away? Make ‘em feel welcome with a well designed, working site for them to want to hang around in.
Susan,
What a great post, I fell into that trap. I used firefox to set up my blog and thought I was all set. Then a few days later i went into Explorer to see how the changes I made to car audio site looked. Then it happened, I clicked onto my blog and my jaw bounced off the floor – what a mess. I was not happy, I called my webmaster and here is what he said.
Whenever you make changes to any website with text – always after writing it in
word or another program like word – always copy and paste the text into notepad to erase all the jargon that happens in word. So I went into my blog and hit edit on my post and comments and sure enough many of them has this crazy code before and after my post.
I did what he said and copy and past the post and erased the one in the blog and resubmitted it After the last one was done I hit refresh and the blog looks just like Firefox.
I am almost scared to see what it looks like in other browsers, but I will check.
Susan, Vince here again, Now I wished I had not read your post. I spent all day getting my blog ready for my marketing videos and now for some reason in the dreaded Explorer 6 my side bar does not show up in the home page but in the about page the side bar is there just a little out of shape. I am so disgusted I am going to walk away for a few hours. If you know what i did wrong please help me.
what I already did,
Was one by one checked all my post and comments. Then I deactivated all the plugins and then the widgets one by one to see if the new ones I added tonight made the change. Nothing worked. Helpless
Vince! Sweetie! Never despair.
Sorry my post caused you any grief – but of course, it is necessary information, even if it causes headsmacks and facepalms.
This is what I believe may be the trouble, at least as far as your “out of shape” sidebar in the about page. You’ve got something that’s a smidge too wide for the space. I’ve encountered this several times – either it’s a .jpg that is a fixed width that’s a few pixels wider than the fixed width of the sidebar, which tends to knock the sidebar down below the posting area, or it’s some text that is one or two characters too wide – which might not move the sidebar out of place, but will create a couple of pixels of “extra” room on the side, which makes the sidebar look like it’s not quite lined up with the rest of the parts of your page (like your header), hanging over a little bit.
So I had a look at your site, and here’s what I found.
1. On your home page, your sidebar is still there, just been knocked below your posting area. I think the reason is because of the text you have in the middle, the paragraph between the ***’s: “Wow! Huge Update” etc. You’ve put in too many asterisks, and you’ve been making your own line breaks, rather than letting the blog software do it automatically. If you look at this part of your page, you’ll see for yourself that the asterisks go too far off to the right, impeding on the space your right sidebar needs. Cut back on the width of all that text and you should get your sidebar lined up again.
2. As for the sidebar looking too wide, I suspect the problem is similar. You don’t have an image that’s too wide, but the text at the very top of your sidebar is going off too far to the right. Go into your Wordpress theme editor and check on the code for your sidebar – see what the width of it is actually supposed to be. First thing I’d try is dumping the avatar image, since it isn’t working anyway and see if removing that brings the text back into line.
Let me know how it goes.
Yeah it’s me again, Well I went on my laptop witch runs Vista Premium and I think it is explorer 7.0 and the site looks great. I checked the XP office computer and it is running explorer 6.0
I am going to leave this alone, what was strange was that when I put the Blog URL in Browsershots it came up as Malformed URL.
The Blog URL works fine ? also should I download Explorer 7, I did notice people are coming to my blog on Explorer 6 – and it is missing the whole sidebar. I personally hate Explorer – but I have to make it work.
PSYou might want to delete the middle post, (was not to happy)
Vince
Saw you mentioned Alex Jeffreys in your post. Im looking for his coaching students. Email me back if youre in the group. Thanks, Ross The Boss
Hi Susan,
This is a great article and one that I especially appreciate due to my problems with my own blog. I think I have it straightened out, but will go off and check it with the link you shared.
I stopped by because I wanted to let you know about a site I discovered a little while ago. Alex mentioned outsourcing some of our tasks to elance.com, but I found one that was recommended by someone else. It’s http://scriptlance.com and there are people asking for graphic design work. I remembered you mentioning that you are skilled in that area and thought I’d mention it.
With the great content on your blog just answering questions and offering your knowledge, you’re well on your way to your first ebook, I’d say.
Warmly,
Theresa