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Should I layout my website for all browsers? By Jakob Jelling Gone are the days when Internet was used just for establishing communication between the two far off friends!! It is more than a simple connection establisher for it forms the major information resource, and thus an aid for everyone. Well, by “everyone” I mean the students, researchers, children, and the entire corporate world. Yes, the internet has privileged the corporate world to start, expand and grow its business. Undoubtedly, websites are the tools that help him to do so. This simple sounding involves the accounting of several issues, the primary being how to design your website so that it reflects your business at its best. Perhaps, the first doubt in the designers mind might be “should I layout my website for all browsers?” People all across the globe don’t have same browser so one application that is running successfully on one browser might not run correctly on the other one. So you should try to design your website such that if not all than most of the browser should correctly layout your content. The benefit of doing so lies in the fact that as more and more people will be able to view your site you will definitely have more publicity. But the application designed for one browser might run absolutely differently on other so what you should try is to make it such that it can run properly on all the browsers. But it’s easy said than done. It requires quite a lot of skills and knowledge of the subject. The very difficulty that the designer faces while doing this task is that the languages change from time to time and so it’s very difficult to come up with a design which all the browser will translate as same. As an example the older version of browsers didn’t used dynamic HTML but today you can’t even find a single site without it. Therefore the web applications might not run on the older browsers. As a solution to this type of problem the designer usually develops different versions of his code each suited to the requirement of a particular browser. When a visitor hits their site they first analyze the type of browser used by him or her by some special language such as JavaScript and then choose the code depending on the type of the browser. The very point in this regard is that not all the web browser conforms to the norms of the World Wide Web and even those who stick to them don’t implement them correctly. So it is always advisable that before you launch your website you first test them by viewing them in the most popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc. A recent study shows that about 65% of the internet users use internet Explorer, about 20% uses Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Netscape Navigator and the rest 15% uses other browsers so if you are not making your website compatible with other browsers than you are loosing this 15% of the population and that comes out to be quite large. Therefore you should try to make a layout for your website which is suited to almost all browsers.
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