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This I thought was enough to debug the cross browser problem.
Much to my horror today while interviewing for another contract I pulled 2 sites I had designed up and they looked terrible. All jumbled with layers and text in the wrong places.
My customers who own these sites view them every day and also have had no complaints from their customers.
So what happened? After a 2 hour interview it ended with the "viewing".
If any one has ideas or suggestions please let me know.
the best thing you could have done in that situation is to inquire about their operating system, browser, and screen resolution.
my guess is that they were not very up to date.
it is a good idea to be armed with the knowledge of user statistics relevant to OS and browser.(%of ppl using old browser, old OS's, and low res) this way you could let them know that they were in the minority of surfers and their viewing habits required special attantion on part of the designer/coder. you could then point out that your previous clients were aware of the small percentage of users using out-dated software and chose not to cater to them. however, if it were necessary that the client reach users on the lower-tech end you could tailor the web-site to their needs.
as far as suggestions, stick around this site for awhile--it is a great resource.
I check everything in
IE
Moz
Firebird
various browsers on Mac, can't remember which ones, I don't do it personally
Opera (when I remember ;))
and I check them on
Linux
FreeBSD
Windows
Mac
I also check various resolutions.
Thing is all the users and QA team are setup differently so that we get most of this done with out one person having to cross check everything themself, which is nice but took a lot of planning. When I am doing css or js I cross check everything myself t be sure.
It may be time to expand your cross browser/platform checking. There are foten things that don't work quite right but I try to find out so I am not surprised by anyone asking me why something looks the way it does. Browser stats help to explain why certain decisions were made.
Other things can affect the way a site functions as well like personal firewalls, popup blockers and other client side software. I try to test, or at least understand, as many as possible since it is always good to be armed with the maximum amount of info when going into a client meeting.
Spend a day or a few hours making a QA matrix of every possible combination and before launching a project go through the matrix.
ie know how to break your website--view in 3 different resolutions, laptop, Mac/Win/Linux, IE/Opera/Firefox, different versions of browsers, cookies/javascript/java disabled, font size small medium large, half screen/full, no images, popups blocked, ZoneAlarm ad block, etc.
Decide what is ok to break it and what needs to be fixed.
Record this in your QA matrix.
If anything bad happens at least you can show you did some due diligence and CYA. Also having the documentation itself can be impressive and show you are at least somewhat professional regardless of the end result!
When all is well in the more standards compliant browser, then I view the page in IE and on a Mac, and tweak if needed (often not needed!)
It's also important to test on different screen resolutions, and even different system font sizes -- not browser font sizes, but the Windows system fonts found in the Windows Control Panel. This can really trip you up if your test system is set to the default "small" fonts but someone else's system is set to "large" or some percentage. Some new systems are shipped that way!
You reminded me of the time I went to a prospect and they were running AOL 3 on Win NT. Forget about that!
I like cafés with wireless access. Potential client is more relaxed, neutral territory, in more of an exploratory and curious mode. If you think it might help, leave nice tips or make the café's site too.
One thing about having gone it alone in Web Development was that there was no one out there to bounce ideas off of or help navigate through, at times design stopping challenges.
Each challenge that rose up had to be dealt with only by research, books internet etc. It seems this knowledge base of experienced developers here on this forum is a gold nugget in the fast running river of developing client sites.
Thank you all again for your ideas/suggestions.
