Cross Browser Website Compatibility Headaches - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

As web developers, one of the hardest parts of our job is ensuring that a site looks and acts the same across all the major web browsers. A web browser if your not already aware, is what you are most likely using to read this blog post – software that allows you to browse the web.

These days there is quite a range of different web browsers available, including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome and more. While they all appear to do the same thing (allow you to browse web pages) how they interpret and display the code behind a website tend to differ. For example you can build a website that looks great in Internet Explorer, but does not even display to a user using Firefox. In this example what do you think a Firefox user is going to think of your website? Users don’t stop to think about cross-browser compatibility when they see a problem on your site – they just assume your site has a problem (which in the end it does).

While creating a Google Analytics account for a client last week using Internet Explorer 8, I noticed a pretty bad issue with the horizontal navigation. Take a look:

This problem only existed in Internet Explorer – if you were using any other browser the site would of looked perfect. Being Google you almost think that this type of thing would never happen however it does and goes to show just how difficult it is to always get these things right.

If you are in the process of engaging a web developer to build your website, I heavily suggest you double check they are testing the site to make sure it works on all the major browsers. I have had times when a client will call asking why their website is not doing what it is meant to – only to find out in some major browsers the menu is missing, or checkout button does not work.

In recent times, Facebook has been at the centre of criticism when introducing new changes which included changes to the user interface as well as general changes to the core functionality. The criticism came from a large majority of their users, who really felt the new changes were not in their best interests – a Facebook group was even set-up to argue against the changes which attracted hundreds of thousands of users. I myself have liked all the changes Facebook have made to date however it was obvious the large majority of users, including some of my friends did not.

If you are a Facebook user you would of noticed recently that a new layout with a bunch of changes has been introduced, however this time I feel that there will not be so much fuss made about them as in the past few updates. This time Facebook have done something very smart, they have kept their users informed. When logging into your account for the first time since the changes have been introduced, right at the top in the prime position is a banner which explains that there have been changes along with why those changes are helpful.

If you click on the link in the banner, you are then taken to page which fully explains each of the different changes.

In any area of your business, keeping customers informed / updated should be one of your top priorities. This is no different to running a website – if people or users are kept informed they are going to be happy or at least happier then if you didn’t. I guarantee you if Facebook had of taken the same approach when rolling out their last few updates there would not of been such anger from users.

I wrote a post earlier this year regarding the use of captcha forms – my opinion was that that the majority of them on the Internet are badly designed and are also badly hurting conversion rates – nothing has changed.

I just read a great post regarding the many ways to avoid using a captcha and thought it was worth a shout.

I thought that this question was a pretty good one to write about, as it seems many web designers out there know that these tags exist but couldn’t tell you the difference between them. Using the < b > tag or the < strong > tag will seem to do the same thing, it will bold any text wrapped around the tag, so why are there different tags to do the same thing?

People in the seo world started to talk about how the strong tag had a greater seo benefit, and it was good practice to use the strong tag around keywords instead of using the standard bold tag. Thankfully Matt Cutts cleared this up by stating that Google treats the tags exactly the same.

OK so what exactly is the difference? Basically it’s called semantic mark-up – actively describing the content you are presenting to the user. W3C prefer that you use semantic mark-up, and I have to agree with them.

Building websites is all about providing a good experience to the user, which includes users with visual impairments. Without the use of semantic mark-up visually impaired users will not get the same meaning from content that people who are reading it will, which is surprisingly a large number of Internet users.

Tip of the day – use semantic mark-up.