Why Should You Care – Browser Specific Web Designs
Having a great looking website can make you feel proud, as it will represent you and your company the best way. Especially with the millions of website around the Internet, having a website that is professionally designed and that is presentable is an important feat. In fact, many people may choose to look at your website due to a good design, instead of your competitor’s website.
Thus using flashy graphics and even audio files may be part of your web design strategy. You might have animations, flash files or even Media Player files on your website. You might even have a very cool navigation theme. However, you should stop and think about how your website looks on a different browser. No matter how well your placed your intentions may be, perhaps the end product may not look like what it looked like on the designing board.
In many cases, many web designers realize to their horror that their well designed web site just looks very different on different browsers and in some cases on different computers as well. Even the change in the monitor type or the change in the downloading speeds can affect the performance of your websites adversely. However, one common problem that many web sites face is the problem that some browsers may interpret some commands differently and thus you may end up with a totally different looking website. Furthermore, some commands may not function at all in some browsers or they may cause mayhem with different results than expected.
In fact, these problems are a more common occurrence than you may think. Unfortunately, most of the Internet technology is centered on the Microsoft products and hence around the Microsoft’s famous web browser “Internet Explorer”. Thus, due to this fact, many web designers base their end products on the Microsoft Internet Explorer and thus they end up testing it on the Microsoft’s browser. However, especially in cases where flashy graphics and special animation / video player plug-ins are used, you may have a problem having your website function the intended way on other browsers like the Mozilla Firefox or on the Opera. Of course, Linux based web browsers must be mentioned as well, since a considerable portion of people have been using them for the past few years as more people are trying to get away from Microsoft products.
Especially in the last 3 years, there has been a great expansion of other alternative web browsers instead of the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Especially the Mozilla Firefox browser has been expanding its growth in the last 2 years. Thus, if you are a web designer, you must not get fixated on a single web browser and you should think about designing different versions of the same website for the various other browsers. You can put emblems for various other browsers at the intro page or you can even use specific programming to detect the browser and deploy the appropriate plug-ins and the relevant version of the web site. This way, you can make sure that everyone can see your website the same way and thus your professionalism will be awarded.
There is a good website to test the compatibility of your site in most versions of Internet Explorer.
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php