Does Your Site Look the Same for Everyone?
August 29, 2009
Don't be fooled by by low-cost web developers. Yes, some can offer what looks like a great web site for cheap, but don't you get what you pay for? In short, yes. Let us explain.
Did you know that more often than not, web browsers display the same web site differently? Did you know there are more than 5 different major browsers and some of those browsers have more than 9 major versions? So how do you ensure that each browser correctly display your web site? The answer: standards compliance and testing.
Standards Compliance
There is a group of industry professionals that develop HTML, the mark-up language used to write web pages. They also set forth standards by which web developers should use HTML. Further, the companies that develop web browsers have traditionally tried to make sure that their browsers display HTML in accordance with these web standards.
The idea behind web standards is that web sites will look the same in all browsers and will look the same in future, as yet undeveloped browsers. That means web sites that are standards compliant should look the same in, for example, the current version of FireFox, 3.5, as they will in the currently-under-development version, 4.
It would then seem reasonable that all web developers would create web pages using standards compliant HTML, right? Wrong. Writing standards compliant HTML takes time and experience. Most of these low-cost developers employ inexperienced, often untrained kids to develop your site.
What about us? We use only experienced developers and always develop our sites so that they are standards compliant.
Testing
Because there are so many different browsers and each browser has so many different versions, great web developers must test the sites they develop in the most widely used versions of each browser. That means that great developers need access to a network of computers where they can test the sites they develop on each version of each browser.
We test each site we develop in the three most recent versions of each web browser, i.e. if there are three versions of that browser. If there are problems, which there almost always are, our developers will alter the HTML so that the site will display correctly in each browser. This is often very time consuming because once it is fixed for one browser it often breaks for other browsers. Our developers won't stop this testing and development until the site looks virtually identical in the browsers that we test for.
Why Bother?
Sometimes the differences are very small, often imperceptible, other times, the site is totally unusable. Our commitment to standards compliance and testing means that we can give our clients peace of mind that their web sites reflect how great their businesses are and will make great impressions on all of their site visitors.
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