It is not a convenient truth, but your web site looks different on every monitor, browser, and operating system combination.

When I first released Small Farm Central [1], I sent out an announcement to the mailing list, was listed on the ATTRA [2] weekly newsletter, and had a news segment in the New Farm [3] magazine, so I was getting decent traffic to the site. I started hearing complaints that the navigation was impossible to use on certain pages and other fairly major problems.

The site looked fine in the browsers I was testing in – Firefox [4] and Internet Explorer (IE). When I finally got to the bottom of the problem, I realized I had the newest version of Internet Explorer installed and the site was badly flawed if viewed under the previous version of IE.

As a web developer, I knew that I should be testing in multiple browsers and configurations, but I allowed myself to make the mistake that if it looked good in one version of Internet Explorer it must look fine in the other versions. Wishful thinking.

It is a tough lesson to truly learn until you have a serious problem like I had when I put the first incarnation of the Small Farm Central site live.

When you use a service like Small Farm Central [5] to develop your website 95% of the necessary testing is completed before you start working with your site, but it is still important to look at your site in different browsers to make sure there are no problems.

It is most important to test your site on as many different browsers as possible. The following image from Wikipedia shows the general distribution of browsers.

Internet Explorer (IE) users are the majority and they are about evenly split between version 6 and version 7, so it is important to test in both versions. Among web developers and web designers IE is known to be the most pernicious of browsers, so be skeptical and test in both versions. To find out what version you are using, click the help menu and then click "About" when you are in the IE browser. Find a friend with the version that you don't have because it is very difficult to have both installed on your computer at once. The services listed later in this article also help you with this.

Arugula’s Star Farm [6] had an issue like this last week because they developed their site using Firefox and as soon as their farm was getting publicity in the local paper they noticed seemingly random fonts and text sizes in different parts of their site. We were able to fix these problems easily when the control panel was opened in Internet Explorer.

If you do not have one of the major browsers installed, you can use one the services below to view you website in multiple operating system and browser configurations. All you have to do is type in the address of your website and it will do all the work for you.
http://browsershots.org/ [7]
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ [8]

As a person who makes a living with web development, browser testing and the inconsistencies that cause these problems is one of the most frustrating and necessary parts of my work. Testing is never the flashy part of this work, but following up on these details is the difference between having an amateur site and a professional site that brings customers to your farm.