Have you ever had someone say to you that there’s something wrong with a site (or even your site?!) and yet when you check it out, everything looks just fine?
Often the reason for this is that you’re using a different browser to that “someone”, but we seldom think to check that basic fact!
Recently a client complained that there were some weird grey dots around the blog posts on her site, but I couldn’t find the darn things… until *light-bulb moment* I thought to try a couple of other browsers! And in Internet Explorer I could see those weird grey dots too…
That was great – if you can see a problem, you can often fix that problem!
There’s a very handy tool that will do a lot of the hard work for you: go to http://browsershots.org , select a few browsers under “Windows” and “Linux” (I normally only check the “Big 4″ – Firefox, IE, Chrome & Safari), fill in your website URL and click “Submit”. (If you choose too many browsers it takes too long.)
I selected 17 browser options (different versions of Firefox for example, under Linux and Windows), which took quite a while (I would allow about 1/2 an hour for this) – you can just let it run in the background. Remember you only need to do this on the odd occasion if you’ve made some big changes to your website’s appearance – not something you have to do every week!
A few notes:
- the images are in landscape, so may appear a bit “stretched”, so just check that the main things appear to be OK.
- If you have a pop-up optin form (like I do) it may obscure some of the screenshots!
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Thank you for your reply, Tracey. As I am technically handicapped when it comes to most things about WordPress, I guess I will just have to keep tweaking my site and hope that it will show up fine in the most commonly used browsers. BTW, I use Firefox myself.
Hi Elsie, Firefox is a good default to use – but always worth checking any changes in Internet Explorer as that’s where I’ve found the majority iof differences….
Hi Tracey
Thanks for the link. I often get comments from visitors complaining that my site does not show up correctly in their browsers and never know how to check it.
How do we fix these problems though? Would you care to explain a little more, please?
Hi Elsie,
I know that older versions of Internet Explorer can be a real challenge, so I’ve gone down the route of explaining that people need to get newer versions of IE, which fixes the problem fairly regularly.
In the example of the weird grey dots, from my post, I actually had to reinstall some code I had removed, and find another way to NOT show what I’d been trying to remove – so it seems it very much depends on the system you’re using, and in some cases the theme too (for WordPress) so there’s not one catch-all fix that I’m aware of.
Good luck!