We have already published some articles regarding browser behavior and browser choice: Which is the best browser to use on my PC? and Website Browser Compatibility. In this article I would like to share another browser story, make a confession as to how I was less than 100% professional today, and explain how we approach this situation here at Nottingham Web Design.
This morning I was putting the finishing touches to a proposition for a new Internet site. This was a little more complicated than some as it is completely managed by the client via a Content Management System design (CMS) however this additional complexity makes the website creation more interesting.
Using a CMS means that the number and length of the menu items is not known, and the number and length of the sub-menus is not known - the beauty of a CMS is that they can be amended from wherever you want, whenever you want, and as often as you want. The menu must therefore be completely flexible, and the website design must be created to cope with this. See just two examples of a menu structure that the web design is required to cater for:
First Example has 7 menu options with the second containing a drop down menu:
Second Example has only 4 menu options with the fourth containing a drop down menu:
I had finalised the web design and I was excitedly about to call the Nottingham small business that had instructed us to produce their business website, when I asked a colleague to see what it looked like on his screen. He did so, and it looked great. He then stated that I had of course checked the appearance in the other browsers (I develop my business websites in Chrome whereas his browser of choice is Opera). To my shame I had to reply that I had not yet performed this vital step.
Of course I knew that just prior to releasing work for client inspection, our procedures state to check in all the major browsers and screen sizes, however I was so excited at completing the web design I overlooked this step. Caught out (luckily) by my colleague, we inspected the website in the major browsers and to my horror the drop down menus did not appear for one of the browsers.
This is however the fantastic thing of working within a team and with well defined procedures - each member complements the other and each member knows every step our business follows. I had been less than 100% professional, but was compensated by my colleague being more than 100% professional and inquiring if I had followed the procedures.
Our procedures are there for a reason - I have no idea which browser the business who had come to use for his website design uses, and I have no idea which combinations of browsers the visitors to his finished site will be using. Therefore all business website designs from Net Quality Nottingham are created to work in all browsers, and checked that they do so.
Since I had spent so much time on the website, my colleague offered to find the source of the missing drop down menus and I enthusiastically agreed (I was actually still berating myself for not having followed the standards I had helped put in place). After a short time, he found the problem, fixed it, and we both sat down and checked the design again in all the major browsers…this time it looked great in every combination.
I contacted the client and he was over the moon - the website looked and worked just like he had imagined. It has now joined the many small and medium business websites from our Nottingham Web Design Net Quality that just work! And that just work in all browsers…