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!