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Designing great websites is a balancing act of creating great design and coding that design so that it looks right for a majority of your website visitors.

Each major operating system offers their users dozens of web browser options with a endless assortment of user customizable features.  A professional web design firm like DFW Joomla Design, knows that while many users are based on Microsoft Windows XP and Internet Explorer not all of a websites visitors will have that configuration.

Research shows that  while more than 61% of Internet users use Internet Explorer that usage is broken down into 3 major versions.

• Internet Explorer V6 25.25%
• Internet Explorer V7 21.0%
• Internet Explorer v8 15.0%

Each of these Internet Explorer versions render a website slightly (or in the case of IE6 radically)  different from each other making the job of the website designer much more difficult. Then add in the Firefox and Safari browsers and the web designer is faced with a daunting task of keeping site design consistent between these different browser rendering engines not to mention the multitude of other browsers out there that have their own take on how to render a website.

The world would be a much better place for web designers if browser makers (mostly ones from REDMOND, WASHINGTON) simply adopted the accepted W3C standards and built their browser to that standard but that is too much to ask

This mix of browsers and engines is particularly confusing for web design clients that  believe that there is something wrong when their site does not render on their browser as they think that it should.  They naturally want to blame the web designer for somehow not creating proper  design when in fact the designer is doing what they can to make the clients site work under most condition.

The question is… As a professional website designer,  how to avoid this situation?  There are several answers.

An answer that comes to mind is just design the entire website in Adobe Flash and be done with it.  Nice solution but not very practical and  rather expensive and the SEO hit would be unacceptable to most businesses.

The correct answer would be to write a different stylesheet for each of the browser variants that your site may encounter that corrects inconsistencies in that browser.  Many web designers do that right now by embedding IE versions of their CSS into the website design.  This is by far the most popular technique for getting around the browser problem.  Even with this other steps are required.

At DFW Joomla Design we communicate as part of our standard web design contract EXACTLY what combination of browser and operating systems we will support.  For Instance

• IE6 – No Support ( That’s right we do not support IE6 At all.  It is way too buggy and insecure)
• IE7 Windows XP – Vista
• IE8 Windows XP – Vista Windows 7
• Firefox  3.0 Windows XP Vista Windows 7 Debian Linux CentOS RHE
• Firefox 3.5  Windows XP Vista Windows 7 Debian Linux CentOS RHE
• Safari (OSX Snow Leopard, leopard, Tiger Windows XP, Vista)
• Screen Resolution larger than 1024X768 4:3 Format 16:9 Format is a special request -  Normal font setting

We have found that this browser support matrix covers 99% of  website visitors.  Of course if our clients have a unique audience like Wii or Playstation users or iPhone or iPod we can custom tailor our design for those browsers (Yep,  the game consoles have browsers also Wii uses Opera and PS3 uses a custom Browser )

We verify our designs using  BrowserShots.

We believe that website designs should bee seen as the designer intended and not seen differently by different web browsers.  But because there is no requirement for browser makers to use a consistent standard  a website designer needs to take steps to make sure that their designs look good on as many browsers as practical.

Creating and using supported browser list is a good solution for most designers.  And keeps your clients happy.