Unfortunately, websites display differently on different computers. What may look perfect on your setup, may look horrible on others. The obvious problem with this, is that many of your customers may be running any of them. Websites layout differently due do different browsers, operating systems, as well as the actual website encoding itself. Some computers support a million colors, some support sixteen. Even valid XHTML/CSS designs will jump all over the page in Internet Explorer 6.0!
While diagnosing and fixing problems may or may not be easy, discovering a problem is very easy.
Enter BrowserShots.org to the rescue. BrowserShots allows you to check your web site’s appearance on literally dozens of browser and operating systems for free. You can then either view or download JPG images of how your site lays out in all of them. It usually takes 15-30 minutes to load them, but you can go do something else while it loads.
An example of AmericanVagabondPhotography.com in the Netscape Navigator browser on a Ubuntu Linux operating system. It’s not important that I don’t know what either of those are, what’s important is the site looks clean in whatever they are….
2 Comments
That’s an awesome program. I currently have three browsers loaded on my computer, IE7, Firefox and Opera, just so I can check how the web site looks in different browsers. This would be a great time savings.
LOVE your site, will visit again
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