I’ve been writing about my switch to textpattern for the past week or so and have been playing around quite with the functionality and design of this site. After using a temp design by Stuart I finally got around to setting something up on my own. After getting it all setup on my Powerbook G4 in Safari and Firefox I went live and boom! sure enough it looks like crap in IE.

I should have known that a few things wouldn’t work right, but I didn’t expect to see it that messed up. So here are the things that I saw right away.

1. PNG graphics are totally messed up. The rendering of transparent backgrounds in .gif’s isn’t the best thing on the planet so I opted for .png’s. But the .png graphics looked horrible!
2. CSS  - My styles were totally messed up! Borders look horrible in IE. They look great on my mac, but oh my, on a PC it’s a disaster! The colors don’t render correctly (that’s my fault for not using web safe colors), the nav bar just flat didn’t work and thats just the beginning!
3. The nifty rounded corner script I’m using didn’t work correctly on the main content window
4. Spacing and margins are messed up..
5. The list goes on!

So here what I did… I added a designed for Firefox and Safari at the bottom of the page, fixed the nav and decided to vent about it on the home page! I’ll get around to making a few things look better in ie over the next couple of days, but I’m not about to redesign the whole thing! I guess that’s a good lesson to us “programmer” types, design is harder than it looks! I’ll probably switch to regular borders and do a few other cosmetic changes, but beyond that switch to Firefox or better yet, Get A Mac!

Categories: Web Development