page loading funny until cache cleared?

I think my boss is crazy and I cannot replicate this error.

[dragonlady7]

Sorry in advance for the long post, but I need some help and am a bit frustrated.
I work for a small company and am a technical writer. The company wanted their site redone. I knew HTML, so they had me do it.
Now I'm ready to publish the site and they're finally getting around to looking at what i have and making suggestions (and demands!).
My problem is that a lot of the things they want, I don't know how to do in HTML and in fact am not even sure are possible in HTML. And most of the errors they find, I cannot replicate on any machine, anywhere, even on their machine. I can't fix what I can't find!

[note on site, since i can't post urls here-- the site is ~ 100 pages, mostly product pages, all within a template (DW). there are 5 tabs at the top right of the window, each leading to a different area of the site. the company logo is underneath, sliced in a million pieces (one per letter). On the left, there's a DHTML javascript dropdown navigation menu for within the section, different in every section.]

So, she was looking at the site from her home computer. In AOL 7.0, apparently, the site didn't completely load and "looked funny". She tried it in Internet Explorer too, and it looked funny the same way. (Apparently, "the page does not open completely - it fills the screen, but you don't see anything past the third navigation tab" [there are five.]) So she cleared the caches of both browsers, and then it loaded.
I don't understand her problem or how it could be. She'd never looked at the site before from that computer. So how could the cache have anything to do with it? She also says she had to re-clear the cache to load each individual page.
I can never duplicate the issues she has, any time she looks at the site. From my home computer, it all looked fine. So not only have i no idea what she's talking about, I have no idea how what she's talking about could even happen. And I can't fix it if I can't see it. So... Help? Please, please, pretty please with cherries on top, I keep getting yelled at because things aren't fixed that I still can't find!

Another less important issue is this:

They wanted the logo to be resizeable. We have a long text logo. More a company catchphrase, or whatever. So, not knowing what else to do, I used ImageReady to "slice" it into a number of small pieces so that you wouldn't see gaps when it was dragged wider. The idea being it looks good at any resolution. Yeah, well... Is there any other, better way of doing this, so that I don't have a 100-cell table smack at the top of every single one of my pages? Not only is it a lot of code for spiders (and modems) to choke on, it's also a lot to go wrong if I accidentally change one line or something and don't notice. It's just hard for me sort through to proofread.
So, any suggestions? It seems to work as it is, it's just chunky.

Thanks in advance,
dragonlady7

[rogerd]

Dragonlady, the key to troubleshooting the first part is to keep checking in different browsers and screen resolutions to see if you can break the site. AOL can be kind of weird, as you no doubt know. They may cache stuff too, which could cause some of your problems. If you can, access the site from one or more AOL machines. If you are in the same area, go to the person's house to view it for yourself if you can't duplicate it any other way.

For the logo: You definitely don't want a 100-cell table at the top of your page. Or anywhere on your page if you don't absolutely need it. I'd say what most designers would do is design the logo for a 770 width display (whatever portion of that you would expect the logo to take up) and just let those with higher res screens view it smaller. You could do some stuff with resolution testing, but that certainly sounds like overkill for a project of this type.

[dragonlady7]

an addendum:

Someone suggested it might be that I had some kind of error in my HTML that was making the page load incorrectly only in certain browsers.
So I went to the W3C's validator page.
It said I had an invalid DOCTYPE, so I fixed it.

The other errors it contains are all very minor ones-- like images without alt tags, and a horizontal rule with a color specified (yes, my css is lazy. It's just the one stupid HR in the whole site...)

So, it seems my HTML is valid, generally. Nothing to make a browser freak out.

Any other ideas as to how my crazy boss could get her crazy errors? I'm completely stumped. And yet, I can't just tell her 'you're crazy'; she wants me to fix it.

again, thanks to anyone who can help...

[dragonlady7]

keep checking in different browsers and screen resolutions to see if you can break the site. AOL can be kind of weird, as you no doubt know

Hah. Understatement. I was stuck on AOL for years. Blech.

I've tried all kinds of machines (well, Win2K, XP, Mac OS X-- IE, Mozilla, Safari) and I can't duplicate her error. I'm going to ask her to try to do it again from her machine and email me a screenshot of what it looks like, so I at least know what she's talking about. I don't have a car, so somehow finding a bus to get me 30 miles to her house isn't an attractive option.
It's possible that using IE on an AOL browser would get you something funky... I just don't know. It's bizarre.

As for the graphic, I was thinking of trying to have it be some kind of external file that can just be called once, but my leet kung-fu is not so strong. I'll probably just take the text part of the logo, fix its width, and surround it with expandable lines. (It's two lines of text with a line through the middle.)

Ah well. Thanks, rogerd, for responding, and for your good common sense. I just wanted to hear the input of someone who is not my insipid boss. She thinks she knows a lot about webdesign, and will often design me mockups of webpages in Photoshop and then flip out on me when I fail to duplicate them exactly in HTML. Yeargh. Curse this crappy economy and/or my inability to live without any money...

[tedster]

You didn't mention if you validated the CSS [jigsaw.w3.org]. If you haven't already checked, it could be worth the effort.

Also, I recently ran into partially invisible content on IE when combining tables and divs with floats. The visibility of the last bit of content in the floated div toggles back and forth as I mouseover links in the floated or main div. No elegant fix so far, just making sure the parent div content extends beyond the floated conent.

[ShawnR]

Hi DragonLady

I can't suggest any technical fixes (as you say, its hard to fix what you can't find). What I can suggest might help in defusing the issue and prevent "getting yelled at because things aren't fixed". So here is what I suggest, and my apologies if I am teaching you to suck eggs:

Keep an issues register (bug list), and publish it with status update to your boss and co-workers regularly. It could have columns like:

• webpage that exhibits the problem
  
• Issue
  
• severity
  
• date lodged
  
• lodged by
  
• date resolved
  
• Status/comment
  

The idea is this:

• You show your boss that you know of the issue and are working on it. For those that you are stuck on, (e.g. can't reproduce), the status column describes what is holding you up.
  
• You show your boss that you are getting a flood of requests/suggestions/bug reports, so she has the opportunity to prioritise them.
  
• You show your boss that you have already fixed a bunch of the issues, rather than her just asking about the ones that aren't fixed.
  
• You show your boss that she only reported bug number nnn yesterday, so she gives you time to debug instead of hassling you every couple of hours
  
• etc
  

Shawn

[ShawnR]

BTW I was talking to a woman who runs a small company, and she was complaining that her technical writer thinks she's crazy ;)

[dragonlady7]

Thanks, everybody... This has been a big help. :-)
Hm. I should keep a bug list. I took up keeping a whiteboard full of the projects I'm working on, their status, and what I'm waiting for in order to complete them. I also have developed the obsessive habit of writing down every single last thing that anyone says to me, and i have them organized and pinned to a bulletin board at the front of my desk. So every time the boss pitches another hairbrained scheme, I immortalize it in pen on scrap paper (i have a whole stack of neatly trimmed scrap paper, with three different sizes for rants, nuggets of wisdom, full-blown harebrained schemes, nutty suggestions, and naggings)... So i should add in an issues list. good suggestion.
I should also take to emailing her the stats every night, because otherwise she never gets around to looking at anything, and when she does, it's something I haven't looked at since I wrote it. Sigh.

I did check the CSS. It seems to be fine...
On another forum i post to, they suggested that simply having so many tiny little images at the top might be overloading AOL's ability to cache, thereby causing the hiccup on my supervisor's computer.
So I think I'm going to get rid of the resizeable logo, put it in at a fixed width, and have an expandable simple horizontal line there instead. *sigh* I knew there had to be a reason I'd never seen anybody else expand a graphic using that method.
It looked so good in IE on my computer... I guess it doesn't really work for anybody else. Oh well...

Of course the technical writer thinks the boss is nuts. I'm not even trained as a technical writer, and haven't done much of it so far, but it's a pretty basic job. It requires a lot of skill and patience, but it's pretty straightforward for all that. And people are constantly abusing us. (See Dilbert's Tina the Tech Writer.) Sure, anyone can write a sentence, but can you make a manual that would allow a user to use a program, given no information except several cryptic comments from the programmer who doesn't speak any English? Heaped on top of that is the certain knowledge that nobody will ever use your help system, but you can't sell a program without a help system, and if someone does happen to look at the help system and it's not perfect, you will get crucified. It's a very frustrating job and people expect us to be psychics-- both the programmers and the end users expect this. We have to both know things we haven't been told, and be able to know how to explain these things to people that we don't know. So...
It's even better in my case because the software is medical in nature, so i have to speak intelligently of processes I know nothing of. What's a Case Mix Index? I don't know, but I have to write about it.
So...
We get a little nutty, and start thinking people are out to get us. it's just the way it is. ;-)