Posts Tagged ‘internet explorer’

Designing Your Own Theme for WordPress, part II

12Jan

Or “Site Validates, but has Layout Problems.” Artist as Designer ready to throw in the towel! (almost…) Or just throw the towel.

In the previous post, I made reference to all hell breaking loose when you miss an opening or closing div.

Or maybe not. Last Wednesday, after a small struggle getting the footer to behave, I finally achieved what seemed to be success in parsing all the bits and pieces of the css and html to the proper php files, and my pages looked pretty good in most browsers. Not IE, of course, but isn’t that to be expected?

So I tested the pages in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, IE7, IE6, IE5.5 and even an old version of Netscape, and the layout was perfect in everything but the IE browsers, so surely I have all the right divs in all the right places, right?

It sure looked that way, so I kept working on the smaller details and finished finding and creating the desired size images for my portfolio pages, and put the three portfolio pages together. I wanted to hard-code the main content portion of these three pages, and find a way to incorporate the static center portion with my pre-existing dynamic header and footers. I kept reading, researching, trying things, (and even found a big list of premade gallery scripts one could use, but none were just what I wanted). Well, I was done with that part anyway. I never did find a way to accomplish the hard-coded static portfolio content with the dynamic header and footer, though, and finally decided to put that idea aside for now, and start focusing on completing all the other niggling tasks on my to-do-before-going-live list.

Two days of efforts later, and I try again to validate my pages. Almost all of them get the same 5 errors: it’s missing a closing div tag (and I’m guessing the rest of the errors are caused by that). So I start looking around at my various php pages again, and lo and behold, I didn’t close the right-side content column after the second sidebar, so I fix that, and now, the footer is out of place on every page in every browser!

So I took all the basic parts from all the php pages, fitted them together, removed the php code, added back in a few necessaries, and tested again, and now it totally validates, but the footer’s out of place!

Why exactly did I decide to get into coding websites, and specifically, why did I decide to create my new design in WordPress? I could have been painting! Argh!

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Designing for Internet Explorer Browsers

12Jan

Whenever you design a website, whether you start from scratch or you are doing your own design in WordPress, you have to take the non-compliant browser IE6 into your design considerations — at least for a while longer. The latest stats from Browser Stats show that use of IE6 has dropped to less than 20%. But your beautiful tiny (hopefully) proper code will look crappy in IE6 if you don’t incorporate workarounds to make it look good. All of which is documented extensively elsewhere on the web, of course.

IE7 is better, but not perfect. It got up to about 27% of market share a few months ago, but is dropping slightly again.

Microsoft has finally given in to creating a standards compliant browser with IE8. I’ve tested it a tiny bit, and so far, my sites look the same in IE8 as in all the other (good) browsers. Yeah! I’m looking forward to the official release; maybe then IE5.5 and older can finally die their long-overdue deaths.

I’m officially giving up forever on IE5.5 and earlier IE browsers. Yes, 3 or 4 people per month still visit my old design site using that horrid excuse for a browser, but at some point, it’s just not worth the many extra hours to code for. Sorry, you IE5 hangers-on! I’d really rather paint or learn something new. And really, no offense intended, but there are many excellent browsers to choose from that work very, very well. I have FOUR on my desktop that are great, and 2-3 additional ones that are better than IE5.5 and IE6.

Here are links to some of the best browsers — all FREE!:

Alas, an old favorite, Netscape, is gone for good (except for the legacy versions still installed on some of our systems :) ).

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