Before you put your site on the web, you want to be very confident that it will look as you intended for most of your viewers. There are a lot of variables you have to keep in mind.
- Browser type - is your visitor using IE? Netscape? Opera? AOL?
- Browser version - are your visitors up to date?
- Screen size - how big can your visitors open their windows?
- Colors - how many colors do your visitors have?
If you have only looked at your site in IE, take a peek at it in Netscape. Sometimes you will forget to close a table tag. IE will forgive you and display the page anyhow. Netscape will show a blank page. There will usually be a noticeable difference between your page in IE and Netscape. Make sure you know what it is.
You may have a recent version of your browser, but a lot of people don't bother upgrading. If you've done some fancy stuff on your site, check to see that it's not too fancy, or your visitors may not see it at all.
Screen size is very important. If you've got a high resolution on your computer and make your page viewable on 1024 x 768, most of your visitors are scrolling to the right to see the whole thing and won't be able to fit your page in their window. There are a LOT of people set at 800 x 600 out there, so it's always good to check your page to make sure it all fits.
To check the size of your page, just go to your Display settings in your control panel. On the Settings tab, shrink yourself down to 800 x 600 and look at your page.
Colors doesn't seem to be as big of a deal as they used to be. Most people have decent monitors, etc. However, there are people surfing with only 256 colors - your colorful page may just look gray to them. If you're worried about this, just make sure you use dither-proof colors. See my links on the resources page.
If you're wondering how the bulk of your visitors are configured, get a web counter that will tell you! The one we've been using is NedStat, but please let me know if you can find anything better!