Why does it look wrong on my computer?

Why does it look wrong on my computer?

Daniel Nelson | 14/12/2009

It happens more often than you might think. You’ve spent a lot of money on a fancy new website and you’re really excited by the new designs and the added flexibility that new technology is bringing to your business. The delivery date arrives and you start looking through your new website only to discover that the layout is all messed up. It doesn’t make sense, how can your professional web development company have missed something so obvious? So you call them up and you enter the murky world of slicing for different browsers.

Slicing is the industry term for taking designed pages and slicing them up into smaller parts in order to reduce the load time of a page. It is also the process by which the design is converted to HTML and CSS. One of the lesser known facts about slicing is that every web browser reads code in a slightly different way.

While there are a range of conventions and standards that most browsers follow, the differences can be small but have a significant impact. This isn’t just between completely different browsers (like Internet Explorer and Firefox) but actually also often occurs between upgrade of browsers (like from IE6 to IE8).

This is because new trends, technologies and standards are evolving all the time (if they didn’t, there’d be no need for new browser versions anyway) and it can mean that large numbers of people get left behind if they don’t upgrade their browsers regularly.

Given that browsers are a free download these days, it’s alarming to find for example how many users are lagging behind on IE6. Interestingly, IE6 is also one of the more difficult browsers to slice for because of its inherent limitations. Put simply there are things that up to date browsers do as standard that IE6 just can’t.

So when your new site looks wrong the odds are good that it’s not a fault with the site itself, more likely a conflict with your browser or browser version. Remember to check what browser you’re viewing it in – your web developer is going to appreciate the information.

tags: Web Development