bobble14988

Many thanks for your input, guys.

The distinction you have mentioned between a web designer and a marketing advisor is interesting. I studied computer science, not design. Although I have an eye for good design, I have never considered myself a designer - only a software engineer - and as such I find it challenging coming up with original and creative designs for sites. Usually, would site design (i.e. the look and feel of the site) be "farmed out", as you say, to a professional designer or would it be more common to see the person who is scripting the site also designing it?

While working on a few sites, some in my spare time, some at work, I regularly have the problem of not knowing what to write in spaces reserved for text. I'm sure there are some people who will say, "Well, if you had a good enough understanding of the business you were designing this site for, you'd know what to write and how to write it." My argument against that is this, I am not a writer. I may have a very good understanding of the business from the point of view of designing software to meet their needs but I'm not a PR professional. So how do you pros do it? Do you just write it yourself and tweak until the client is happy, get the client to write it or hire someone with advertising/PR skills? Cheers.

In the interest of completing this discussion, for anybody who stumbles on this thread, a single line of code has resolved my problem (for IE9 at least). <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> Reference here: http://davidwalsh.name/css-rounded-corners Including that above where you import your stylesheets should fix most problems. Why you need to do this for IE only is still totally beyond me but I'm happy that I've learned from this frustrating experience.

I coded the site with xHTML validation in mind. It is an ASP site so it doesn't pass W3C validation but the xHTML is correct.

I guess this is the best response so far. But, after doing some research on the subject, it is nice to know that I am not the only one caught out by Microsoft's lack of standards compliance. Also, after doing research, it is nice to know that poor coding isn't the root cause of the problem.

This is some good discussion on the topic and I appreciate the feedback. However, my question still remains, why do web developers continue to target a browser which seems to be working against their best efforts? I understand the argument for not wanting to alienate a portion of users but, as IE becomes less and less popular, won't developers want to target that browser less and focus more on "better" browsers which help make their lives easier? Edit, I found these two articles on the topic interesting, maybe a little bias but still make their argument well. Suffice to say, this is not an isolated problem only I'm having and not necessarily down to poor coding. http://www.theregist...mozilla_on_ie9/ http://www.devprocon...ernet-explorer3 Also, Mozilla's comparison of IE9 and their browser http://people.mozill...ie9_vs_fx4.html This points out many, many things which are missing in IE9.

I guess the crux of my issue is, when my site (and I'm sure many, many others) work automatically in ALL browsers except Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer is becoming less popular by the day, what incentive is there for me as a developer to target that browser? Poor coding, maybe. But, as I said, I'm not an expert and still learning. It'd be nice to know, however, why you put a text-shadow property, which is supported across all browsers except IE, down to poor coding?

I am, by no means, an expert web designer or developer. I am primarily a software engineer and work quite a lot on server-side code of web applications. But I've been wondering about this question for some time and I've tried to find somewhere appropriate to post this question as I'd like to see some discussion so I apologise if it is the wrong place. My parents have been running a business for almost 10 years and have recently asked me to redesign their website. I've been looking to build up my portfolio so I thought it would be an interesting side-project. After many hours of planning the design and laying out the basic structure of the page (testing only with Chrome, for now) I ended up with a solid design I (and my parents) liked which was ready for content. I felt proud of my first website designed from scratch and could see myself doing it more often. I typically use Chrome so, after installing various other browsers, I started testing the site for cross-browser-compatibility. The site looked exactly the same in all browsers except Internet Explorer. The CSS rules for my titles don't have text-shadow, the divs didn't have border-radius and the positioning was all over the place. The my frustration was palpable. I know there are tricks for creating IE-only stylesheets and so I was expecting a few issues but not to have to design the entire site twice! There are many articlesabout Chrome overtaking IE as the predominant web browser in use and, at its current rate of decline, Firefox may even be more popular soon, so why oh why are web developers still going to all the effort of designing websites for the ugly ducking which is Internet Explorer?! Would it be the case that, if no new website targeted IE and only the "good" browsers, then IE would simply die and Microsoft would have to replace it with something which conformed to the standards of other browsers? Or are web developers destined to design two sites for two different class of browsers? Is it worth going to the effort, or should I simply include a check when they load my site which redirects them hereif they're using IE? I assume that experience is key to designing a site with perfect cross-browser-compatibility and I will know for next time to take this into consideration earlier in the process. Thanks for reading