Posted by on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 1:46 pm.
Any website design professional will tell you of the importance of ensuring that your website looks exactly the same, regardless of which web browser your visitors are using.
There are many types of web browser that are freely available for you to use, so it’s important that you consider at least the most common of these when checking for consistency.
Here are list of some of the most popular choices, that I would be recommend you test for you to ensure compatibility of your website design.
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer, versions 6, 7 and 8
- Safari
Checking your designs using websites
If you are using a Mac to for your website design, then you may struggle to check the Internet Explorer browser due to the facts that you can’t directly install these using your setup. Other than using a windows emulator, you don’t really have any other option than to check these on a PC.
There are several online resources, which can help. The following sites all require you to enter the URL of your web page, and it will render an instance of that page as a simple screen shot. This is not ideal for deducing the potential cause of your browser compatibility issues, but will certainly help you to identify them.
Channel
on March 3rd, 2010 Says:
How accurate do you think these emulators are?
Do they give a really good sense of how your design will look on other platforms?
With one web team I worked with, we deliberately kept old machines (PC and Mac) and had a variety of hardware to try out the design e.g. various mobile devices, laptops, netbooks etc.
Of course, although you can NEVER get your design looking perfect on every platform, actually seeing how it looks, for real, on another browser or at a different screen resolution, can really make a difference to the effectiveness of the site.
A useful list of tools by the way!
on March 4th, 2010 Says:
Hi Andrew,
Yes I agree, ensuring your site is compatible across platforms is crucial for maximising business, and certainly not an easy task.
I generally tend to use netrenderer, which basically takes a screen-shot from the chosen browser, so is pretty accurate. The limitation of this, is that if the element of page you wish to check is further down the page, then it will be out of range of the captured image. You can’t really beat having these platforms at hand like you mentioned as you can actually navigate and use the sites as your potential visitors will be.
Have a quick go with Netrenderer, and see how you get on. You don’t even have to register!
Michael.
on March 4th, 2010 Says:
A useful list of tools by the way!
on March 5th, 2010 Says:
Over on the Tips for Web Designers Blog, we wrote a similar blog post back in December which reinforces this, so feel free to check it out if you’re looking for further resources:
http://www.crearedesign.co.uk/blog/web-designers/cross-browser-tools.html