Website Designing with Browser Compatibility

In the early days of the Internet, many sites advertising "Best viewed with Netscape" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" or the like. These days, such labels seem to be rarer. Web designer today put an inordinate amount of effort to promote their sites on the search engines.

The principle of designing the page for compatibility with different browsers, operating systems are as follows.
1. Screen Resolution Issues
Design the site with fixed widths. Designing for the 1024x768 screen resolution, will force almost half the visitors to scroll the screens horizontally to see the entire page. Horizontal scrolling irritates a number of people hence many sites try to avoid it. They do this by either designing with a fluid design, where the page automatically fits whatever screen resolution the visitor uses, or by designing it for a worst case screen resolution (either 800x600 or 640x480). Never design the pages more than 800x600 display resolutions. Doing so will probably displease at least half the visitors, who will have to repeatedly scroll horizontally (back and forth) to read the sentences on the page. If, despite this, you feel that you need a fixed canvas larger than 800x600, use a trick: put optional material (like advertisements) in the rightmost column of their web page. This allows visitors to have smaller screens to ignore the rightmost column; they can read the main content without having to scroll horizontally.

2. Color Limitations
A color code like #F2C3BC results in different colors on different systems, depending on the number of colors that exist in visitors' color palettes, their monitors, etc. For example, a color that looks good on a 24-bit color system ("True Color" on Windows, "millions of colors" on Mac), and the visitor goes to your site using a 256 color setting on his system, the color will be dithered to fit into the more limited number of colors in his palette. Use the next lowest denominator, the 16-bit color setting. The 16-bit color palette is not a subset of the 24-bit color palette: apart from black and white, the colors in the two palettes are not identical.

3. Frames
Frames can be explained in two points of views: screen resolution and people who browse your site using speech software.
One common complaint is that designers using frames usually forget that visitors don't have the same large screen resolution that the designers have when they created the web page. Sites with frames tend to provide a smaller area for people to view the main content of the site, since the outer frames occupy some of the screen real estate as well. If the web designer has not checked the site using a lower screen resolution like 800x600 and 640x468, and tested its usability with those lower resolutions, the designer may not be aware that the site is difficult to use in such situations. Visitors may have to scroll horizontally and vertically continually to read the content. The situation is worse if the designer removed the scroll bar and visitors find they can no longer scroll left/right/up/down to read the content.

Kyle Newton is a professional internet marketing specialist and can launch and manage your complete web presence from Web Design to SEO with professional results that make your projects, services, or products a success on the web.