When you design a page in MS Word and send it to your printer, everything stays where you put it. Not so with HTML web pages. People are viewing pages with a variety of web browsers. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera and then there are several versions of each. Not everyone upgrades their web browser. What is their screen resolution set to? 1024 x 768, 800 x 600?

Pages are designed to be viewed without scrolling left and right on a screen set to 800 x 600 resolution. A viewer at high resolution (1024 x 768) will see more white space on the right hand side and images and text will appear smaller. A page can be designed so that it stretches to fill the screen no matter what the resolution is set to. This will fill up the white space on a high resolution screen but it can be very tiring to read text that is stretched that far across the screen. A background can be used to fill that white space with color. Click here to view some sample screen shots of the same page displayed at different resolutions.

Netscape follows standards much more closely than Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer will ignore some bad code and display a page with no problem. View the exact same page in Netscape and you can find a total disaster. Internet Explorer is by far the most popular browser and many designers totally ignore Netscape. See sample screen shots of a page with missing code in Netscape.

AOL owns Netscape and will no doubt start shipping it to their users now that their agreement with Microsoft has expired. Netscape could make a comeback and should not be ignored. Download Netscape and check your pages, if they don't look right make your designer fix it!

Your web site must be tested in several browsers, including the new and old versions. Time consuming yes, but do you want to loose a customer because they are using an old Netscape browser and can't view your site?

These are just a few of the little quirks you may run into with basic HTML when building a web site. You can see it is much different than creating a page for a printer. When you get into custom programming and database scripts you have a whole new set of problems. UNIX servers, Windows servers and servers with the same operating system that are set up to handle things differently. I won't go into all that! Just be aware that the time spent testing your web pages is time well spent. Your web site needs to work for everyone.