Welcome to Web Design Guide
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Web Page Design Class Article
As you have no idea on which browser your website is being seen, your web
design strategy must address one issue. How best my website can be displayed on
all browsers and what web design changes I have to do to achieve this..
There are many browsers around and your web design must aim to satisfy all of
them! It may not be possible at times but being aware of the display factor
helps.
There's More than One Web Browser.
If you're like 90% of web users, then you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft's web
browser. Why? Well, because it comes with Windows, usually, and it's there on
your desktop when you first want to use the web. When you're creating a website,
however, you have to consider the other 10% of the web's users – the ones who
use alternative web browsers. If you don't test your site in each one of these
browsers, you might be in for a nasty surprise when a large part of the web
can't use it. Here's a guide to the most common alternative web browsers.
Mozilla.
While Mozilla is a web browser itself, it is also an engine (Gecko) that powers
a lot of other web browsers. The Gecko code is free and open-source, created by
Netscape, and is currently Internet Explorer's biggest competitor. It works on
Windows, Mac, Linux, and almost everything else out there.
The advantage of Gecko is that if you've tested with one of the Mozilla
browsers, your site should work on all of them. The Mozilla browsers include
Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Camino, Kmeleon, and lots of browsers for the Linux
operating system. You'll probably find it easiest to download Mozilla Firefox
from www.getfirefox.com and test your
website using that.
So make sure that you test your website with Firefox and make changes in the web
design if found necessary. The popularity of Firefox is increasing.
It's also good remember that the mighty Google is promoting Firefox. So you need to take care of this fact also before you get on with your web design project.
Opera.
Opera has a sizable chunk of loyal users and your web design plan must include
testing on Opera too. The niche it has is the technical and the geek crowd.
Opera is, in many ways, the alternative browser, for people who are too odd to
even want to use a Mozilla browser. It's very much a niche product, developed by
a small Norwegian company, and many more technical users like it because of its
constant innovation when it comes to features – anything you like in another web
browser was probably available in Opera first. Opera is for Windows, Mac and
Linux.
Now Opera is a feature rich browser and many are using it. So testing your
website on opera is also recommended. Or you may have to rework on your web
design at a later stage.
You can download a free version of Opera from
www.opera.com . It has ads, but it's perfectly fine for testing. If you like
Opera enough to actually use it for your own web browsing, you can pay a
one-time fee of around $40 to remove the ads.
Safari.
Safari is now the official Mac web browser, which means that it's important to
test on it if you want Macintosh users to be able to see your website.
Unfortunately, Safari doesn't run at all on Windows.
However, Safari uses the same engine as a browser called Konqueror, which can
run on PCs on the Linux operating system. Linux is free, and you can easily
download it, burn it to CD, and run it straight from the CD. Knoppix (
www.knoppix.com ) is a popular and easy to
use kind of Linux for this purpose.
Alternatively, if you don't want to mess around with a whole other operating
system, you could try a service like BrowserCam (www.browsercam.com
). They will load your website into many different browsers, and then send you
pictures of it to let you see if there are any problems that need to be fixed.
Because of the bandwidth and the number of computers that have to be involved,
though, most of these services aren't free.
Lynx.
Lynx works on a lot of very esoteric operating systems, but works fine on
Windows too. It's a text-only browser, and it pays no attention to layout or
graphics. You can download Lynx at
www.lynx.browser.org.
Why would anyone want that, you wonder? Well, Lynx is mostly popular among blind
people who use screen-readers to turn web pages into speech. How well your web
page works in Lynx is often considered to be a test of how accessible it is to
anyone with disabilities, as well as to anyone who turns off things like
Javascript in their browser settings.
The very worst sites will come back with a message telling users to download a
supported browser when they're visited in Lynx – never do this. You should be
aiming to make sure that Lynx users can see a basic, text-only version of your
site, with easy-to-use navigation. If your site doesn't support this, then it's
probably breaking all sorts of disability discrimination laws, and you should
fix it as soon as you can.
Browsers are the basic things that displays your website. If your web design
caters to them, just change the design of your website.
For more information Lynx, you might like to visit the Viewable with Any Browser
Campaign at www.anybrowser.org/campaign .
We hope these information on web design proved to be useful to you. Many more
available on the subject of web design on this site. Feel free to read and
browse them.
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