Website Design Tips - Hypergurl

Why its important to check your sites useability in IE 7

As a website designer you will no doubt need to install Internet Explorer 7 as it becomes a major player in the browser market. Just like previous versions before it, Internet Explorer 7 has unique ways of displaying webpages that may look different than how you intend. This is also the main reason why all webmasters should have numerous browsers installed on their computers. In the very least you need to check your website design in the two most popular ie. Internet Explorer and Firefox. Each browser will display your web site differently.

Listed below are a few common problems people have found so far with IE 7 and the solutions:

1) If you've designed a website for yourself or your client and when others view it they complain that the text looks strange, blurry or odd, your first question to them should be whether or not they have recently installed IE 7.

IE 7 by default turns on what is called ClearType function which is meant to make your website text clearer. It so happens that this works great on LCD monitors and terrible on CRT. ITExpressions has a good article on how to change these settings if your visitors are complaining of bad text: Fuzzy text after installing IE 7

2) If your clients are suddenly asking why their website links have a click noise to them it's because on installation, IE7 automatically turns on the Windows Explorer click sound. To prove that it's not a website add-on you've recently installed, asked them to follow these steps:

Go to Control Panel.
Click on Sounds and Audio Devices.
Click on Sounds tab.
Select “Start Navigation” in the Program Events selection area.
Select your sound of choice as "None" from the drop down menu below.
Click “OK”

3) CSS Compliance problems. While IE was one of the first browsers to support CSS it didn't always require your code to be compliant with standards. Unfortunately this often led to sloppy CSS code. Webmasters are now finding their designs are being displayed in lots of weird ways due to Microsoft finally jumping on board and becomming more compliant with the current standards. There is no quick fix to solve this problem other than to back track over all your CSS code and neaten it up to the current CSS standards as set by W3C.