A Simple Blog Mistake To Avoid
- November 19th, 2008
You’ve finally added the last little detail to the design of your blog and just got done uploading the last plugin. It’s time to launch your blog and show the world your hours of hard work. There isn’t a single doubt in your mind that this blog is going to make it to the top of the search engines and land you a spot on the top 100 list of Technorati. Everything looks great until you get an email from a friend letting you know the blog appears to be broken; how could this be when it looks just fine on your end?
Does this scenario sound familiar to you? Well it’s exactly what happened to me when I launched all 3 of my most recent blogs. I’ve been using Mozilla FireFox for the past year now and haven’t even thought about opening Internet Explorer since making the switch. I went through the design process of creating this blog, FullGlassLiving, and DivineSteals using the FireFox browser. All of the images, side bar menus, headers, and plugins looked great at launch time. It wasn’t more then a couple of days after having the sites go live on the internet, when my mom sent me an email asking why they weren’t finished. I was clueless when she told me about the errors she was seeing on the blogs. Finally I jumped in my car and drove to her house to look. I felt like a complete blogging novice when I realized that she was using Internet Explorer to view the blogs and I was using FireFox. To my surprise the sites looked terrible. IE had broken text and misaligned menu bars not to mention some missing features!
Needless to say I learned a valuable lesson, always look at your blog through the eyes of both Microsoft and Mozilla. You might be extremely surprised at what you see! This might be seem like a simple and elementary tip, however I’d have to believe it’s easily overlooked by many bloggers. If you have any other common overlooked tips such as this I’d love to hear and learn from them as well!
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Hi Rachel,
Yuk. That happened to me, too. I was happy as a clam, all thinkin’ I’m da man. Someone said, “Why is it all broken up and mis aligned?” Huh? What? That can’t be!
Well, it was. Ya gotta love Microsoft sometimes. As it turns out, when you cut and paste, especially from a MS Word doc, there are style elements embedded. Who knew? Thank goodness it was an easy fix and that nearly 90% of my viewers are using Firefox.
The next easiest fix I guess is to encourage folks to dump IE! Firefox rules!
Great post. Thanks for putting that out there.
Cheers
George
why does that occur? How can that be avoided?
What a been there, done that post. And… I still do it, even though I have plenty of browsers to try in- IS, Firefox/Flock, Safari, Seamonkey. I forget to check, just so anxious to get it up and move on.
I have a checklist of what I want to do when I launch a new site/blog, and this is not currently in it. It will be added by sundown.
Oh my god! You just got me all up in arms about this again. I am a firefox user to and have been for years. I absolutely hate internet explorer. It’s a web designers worst nightmare. Because everything looks good on firefox but once I go to ie it gets all messed up. I wish IE would just run on the same platform as firefox already.
Great Advise Rachel!
I always check my site in IE, but have only recently started using Firefox (I’m slow to jump on the bandwagon sometimes) and realised that thing look very different with Firefox, always test your blogs and websites in different browsers and on different size sceens, something that has a great position on your screen, might be hidden on a smaller screen.
this is one of the problems I had when I was starting out, great post, very useful to the novice. its a bit frustrating at times, but I just don’t even pay attention to IE anymore, firefox and safari for LIFE!
@Laura-Whateverebay:
Hi Laura! It happens because IE and Firefox, as well as others, run on different platforms. So HTML code means different things to each platform or program. It’s really pretty confusing and when rolling out a new blog you’re best of checking it on as many platforms as you can.
@David:
I agree, I’ve been using Firefox for over 6 months now, and have only opened up IE once or twice since.
You may also want to take a look at your website through Google Chrome too…Chrome is eating into some market share among PC users, and from my stats I am seeing more and more Chrome users. I noticed some formatting problems when I analyzed my site through Chrome, but I think they are working to ensure any “bugs” are fixed immediately so maybe it won’t be an issue much longer.
Just my 2 cents,
Matt
Hi, Rachel. This post is too funny, sounds like it happens to a lot of people. I asked my daughter to critique my blog after I was up and running for a couple of months and she had some surprising tips regarding formatting. What a world of difference with IE sometimes. I was completely shocked. I still have an issue with my “recent comments section” it shows up centered in IE but justified in firefox..so annoying.
I run into this issue all the time. I can’t stand IE. And I was working on a theme today, read this article, and realized I hadn’t yet checked it in IE. Thank goodness it looked good – I was mentally preparing to start screaming internally.
There are a lot of browsers out there and it may be difficult to check them all. I use a free service http://www.browsershots.org to check my blog design. It gives you choice of 70+ browsers and you get screenshots after 20 minutes. It is always better to read comments on the template/theme before you apply it.
I have faced this problem only with Internet Explorer. Many sites like http://finalsense.com have templates that look weired in Internet Explorer. It is best to stay away from them!