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Smoothiee

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 12, 2010
25
0
I have been working on my website for a few weeks now for my production company and I have noticed that on other computers text boxes and pictures will have different colors or rearrange all together anyone know why is this happening?

my website btw ArchaeaProductions.com
 
I visited your site with a 2009 MBP and latest Safari. For an iWeb site, it looks pretty nice and fast-loading. I suppose, you don't care about search engines...

I would never recommend iWeb for serious work but this one looks OK.
 
yea id use to dreamweaver but Im not so sure how to go about doing. iweb seemed to be the easy route as well as the cheapest for the time being
 
Everything will be placed/moved/look different on every browser and every OS. Therefore you need to adjust the original placements and use SAFE web fonts and colors.

For example, alot of times a text box that is compact on all 4 sides around the given text may show that correctly on one line in safari but the last letter might be pushed to a new line in IE. (You can test this on your video page using IE. The "VIDEOS" text on top has the S pushed down to the next line so it looks like this when using IE8:

VIDEO
S


To fix that all you need to do is extend the width textbox.

Other tips:
- Fancy Fonts:
If you want to use a non-safe font then you would need to add a 1% opacity shadow to the TEXT and not the text box. This will allow you to use that fancy font that no one else has and display correctly in Firefox. This works because iweb turns that textbox into a image file. The downside is that the text is now an image and not text readable by search bots or user highlightable. So I would only recommend to use it on major headings, titles, Logos, etc and not you body text.

- Background color:
Your background is a different color on IE8 (PC) than Safari (mac). To solve this, use a image no bigger than 10x10, color it to your desired color and use that as a background browser image instead of a browser color and set page color to none.

- SEO Support:
Use a free utility from Rage called SEO Tool. This allows you to add site descriptions, google analytic, site keywords and page titles (instead of home, you can call it "Archaea Productions | Home") and create meta tags to images for google bots to read. This part only works if you publish your site files locally or by FTP. As you will need to redo this every time you publish. Luckily, SEO Tool remembers your previous settings and reapplies them automatically.

Other things about your site:
- There is a TEST link up top. Dunno if this is attentional or forgot about.
- I would move your logo on the home page UP and then move your navigation system UP to allow the user to better notice it. If i keep my window size the same as it always is, I barely see the word contact. And yes I would assume there is content below as the scroll bars are shown. But your average person may not notice that if their window is small and not maximized.

- Your Contact form. YAY for using Jotform. I love them!!! But IE8 and Firefox has a problem with them. They always seem to take more space vertically than they do in Safari. For example in IE8 the submit button is below the background box instead of in the box like it is on Safari. So to fix this you need to go to the original box in iweb and extend the height more. Also extend the HTML snippet. I always make my HTML snippets bigger than they need for my jotforms. Because in that same example half the submit button is missing in IE8.

I hope all this helps. Sorry for my rant. But I was on a role and I think your site is very creative. :) If you want further tips, send me a PM.
 
Oh for simpler times. Bring back Claris HomePage !

Seriously, thanks Alphakline for the detailed analysis. I've struggled with these kinds of things and it's good to see um… workarounds.
 
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