Soldiers' Angel - Holly Aho

The hardest part of designing a new website is making sure it looks correct in all internet browsers. Not only that, but making sure it looks right in all versions of all internet browsers. It's a pain in the butt, but doable, with the exception of Internet Explorer.

Without alot of workaround nonsense it's not possible to have more than one version of IE on your computer at a time. The problem is that there is a huge difference in the appearance of websites between IE6, IE7 and IE8. They might as well all be considered as different browsers, since they share little in common other than a name and sloppy coding.

I have two incredible time savers and helpers for making any website look as good in IE as it does in Firefox. First, use Firefox to develop the design of the website. Most designers pick a browser to start with, create a design, and then view the site in other browsers. They make changes or add special files specific to each browser in order to make the look cross browser compatible. For the first fix, start with any browser other than IE to create the design. I use Firefox.

Once the design looks right add this code between the and tags of your template or webpage.

Here's a link to more information about the above code - http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/.

This particular fix does miracles!! I no longer have to create separate CSS files for IE (or each version of IE), and the code above will even make transparent PNG images (with alpha transparency too!!) work correctly in IE! No more weird blue boxes in Internet Explorer where your cool transparent shadows and images used to be.

Now that you've created a great design and have added this handy code to make it look nice in IE too you need a way to make sure it looks nice in all versions of IE. How to do that? This website - IE Net Renderer - is FABULOUS for just that purpose.

It's free to use, and it's FAST. No waiting for a screenshot or an email file. It's as close to real time as I can think of. From their website:

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed datacenter located in Germany. Just type in a URL in the field above and try it out - it's free!

Unlike other screenshot services, we are able to process a large number of capturing jobs in parallel and in realtime, making it the fastest service that we know of.

Hope these help any other developers our there that have spent way too much time in the past just to play nice with IE!