Check your HTML Code for Compatibility

     The real power of the internet is the ability to display virtually the same page to anyone, on any machine, using any operating system, viewing with any browser. Don't get fancy and mess this up. You might just annoy a big part of your audience. Keep it simple!

     I'm often amazed by totally unreadable web pages. Sure, must be little companies with few employees and little or no equipment. Nope, not always. Some of the worst offenders are huge companies. One such large company (shall remain nameless) even specializes in web products.

     You should always try your page everywhere you can. You don't have to have every version of everything to test a page. Try it on a friends machine. Run down to the library and check it out. Wander into a chat room at 2am and ask a new friend from Tibet to look over your page. The more variety of users tested, the better.

     Some users have their monitors set to different resolutions. Early Windows installations started out at 640 x 480, while newer installations start a little higher. Video resolutions are growing about as fast as the size of monitors.

     Beware, some people leave it at 640 x 480. If they have bad eyes, the higher resolutions may not be readable for them. Blind people are on the internet too. They use some equipment that is very expensive to upgrade and they might keep the same equipment for awhile.

     If you use a lot of graphics, measure the page. Make sure the page does not force itself to over 570 pixels across. Windows has the ability to handle pages larger than the screen, it just adds those slide bars to the side and the bottom. People don't seem to mind a long page, but if you make it wider, it becomes annoying as we must slide back and forth for each line as we read the text. I keep an old machine around with the settings at 640 x 480 just to test this.

Check your Links

     You should read all of your text for grammer and spelling. Make sure you are saying what you wish to say. It certainly doesn't hurt to run your text through a spell checker too.

     Check your links to make sure they work. You can do this manually or use a good tool like Net Mechanic to check your links quickly and simply. It even checks your spelling for you. You can even set it to check your site automatically once a month.

     After you have run through all of these checks, have someone else run through and check it for you. After awhile, your code starts to blur and look perfect. Fresh eyes can spot a whole new set of errors.