There still seems to be a huge gap in the differences between browswers these days. When I was making pages for my employer in 2005 a lot of my time was dedicated to making sure a single web page looked the same in different browsers. Nothing has changed that. In fact, now there is even more problems with Google’s release of Crome, the latest edition to the “browser wars”.
I had the Hepburn Home Page built fresh this spring with a generic CSS template that I got from www.free-css.com called “manuscript” ( you can search by name on the site). It looked great – in Firefox. I never checked IE, since it’s been a while since “cross-browser compatibility” was a concern for me. I’ve offered to help some businesses with their web sites and even offered my site for viewing. Well, the Hepburn Home Page was a train wreck in IE! So, I quickly shut it down and put up a temporary site ( with the same content). I am now thinking I should just stick with a pre-tagged template instead of some generic template site.
What I mean by pre-tagged is this: Every blog hosting site has templates that you can choose for your web log. I am most familiar with Google’s Blogger hosting service. Users are allowed to customize their site template which requires learning the custom tags and inserting them to the template where you want them. Bloggers help pages are great, but you still have to d.i.y. I the coding, but for every hour spent customizing code, one less hour is spent on writing good content.