[cenutrio]

Hi guys, apparently the more trouble I find, the more I post here. BTW, I think that that may have be a compliment to your feedback.

Anyway, I´m having trouble with a web page I´ve built in iWeb). It works in Safari and Firefox (both Mac/Windows) still, it doesn´t work in explorer.

There are two major issues I´m aware of:

1. The home page where I have included a javascript image gallery. It doesn´t run in explorer, I do not know why.

2. I´ve set up a flash animation (4 minutes) here that also, it doesn´t work.

I´m quite desperate, thus looking for some advice, anything, because i just run out of ideas.

Any help will be very welcomed. Thanks in advance.

[effgee]

Judging from the source code of the site you created (*) it looks like you used iWeb to do most/all of your HTML work. And since there's no easy/polite way to say this, I'm just going to say it flat out ... iWeb is completely unsuited for "professional" Web work where the site(s) must render properly in all commonly used browsers (including the wretched IE7, and - yes - IE6).

The major problem in creating a "professional" Web site - as you've just discovered - is that even a relatively complex layout must look the same in all current browsers, where (in general) "current" will include:

• Internet Explorer 7 (Win)
• Internet Explorer 6 (Win)
• Firefox 2.x (Win/Mac)
• Safari (Mac/Win)
• Firefox 3 (Win/Mac; and yes, it does render some elements slightly differently than FF2)
• Opera 9.x (Win/Mac)

The list above is (roughly) sorted by popularity/number of users. Depending on the project itself, the target audience and/or the geography of where the site will be deployed, this list can change significantly.

iWeb is perfectly sufficient for private/smaller sites where the owner of the site has a certain amount of control over the user's browsing environment ("No Mom, it won't work in IE - use Firefox instead."), but unless you publish your site in iWeb, fix all the coding errors by hand and never publish the site using iWeb again (because the errors you just fixed will return), most iWeb sites are highly unlikely to render properly in all browsers.

At this juncture you have pretty much two options, mostly depending upon your knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. You either:

• Fix up the code you currently have by hand using a text editor like TextMate/BBEdit/etc., which requires a thorough knowledge not only of the "languages" mentioned above but also detailed knowledge of how to fix the various rendering bugs in IE 6/7, or ...
• You re-do the entire site using a tool that creates "cleaner" code, such as RapidWeaver or Dreamweaver - there might be others but since I do 99.9% of my web coding by hand, I'm not the best source of information for this. Keep in mind though ... even if you were to re-create your site with one of those tools, there's no guarantee that it won't require manual fixes to render properly in all browsers.

I don't know how deep your knowledge of front-end development (= HTML/CSS/JS) is - I'm merely assuming that you are relatively new to this "web design" thing - so I can only imagine how discouraging my post must be but there's no other way of putting it. "Professional" web design consists only of ~75% of actual knowledge in HTML/CSS/JS ... the really important rest is knowing what browser renders what element of your design in what way and how to remedy the (nearly) inevitable quirks and issues.

That's why it's also somehwat unlikely that someone's going to post in this thread to present a simple fix for your problem - it requires quite a bit of effort ... a detailed read of the source code, identifying the problem, coming up with a fix and testing it to make sure it works in all environments.




(* - I only took a quick, three-second peek, and basically stopped reading when I saw "iWeb" in the generator META tag)

[cenutrio]

Thanks so much I realy appreciate the effort you put in your words, and do not worry, I do not find them harsh at all (graduate school and sports helped me with that), I´m just out of my field, doing some family work as pro as I can.

I´m using XHTML-CSS Validator to identify errors, and will try to find fixes.

and for my next project, well I´ll have to rely in some better software and learn from books and web sources.

Again, thanks

[Chuckit]

The XHTML-CSS validator won't help you get things working right in IE. The validator simply tests whether you're following Web standards, while IE itself does not follow the standards particularly well.

[cenutrio]

It seems I´m pretty screwed...

[andi*pandi]

you are going to have to hack your css for IE to work. do some searches on underscore and * hacking.

[besson3c]

I would suggest starting over by learning how to hand code. I would not recommend looking for shortcuts in another app like Rapidweaver or Dreamweaver in WYSIWYG mode, because you may just hit another dead end (it happens!)

Hand coding is not that hard, don't be overwhelmed by it.

[cenutrio]

Thanks besson3c,

Still, i just want to make this site as compatible as possible, forget the iWeb fiasco and do as you mentioned and learn coding. But that will take time, and this needs to be working now.

Anyhow, i forgot about javascripts. I just changed the animations to flash. So far i have embed the animations from vimeo, this is just temporal, now i have to include the flash documents in iWeb.

This apparently also needs some hacking.

Just in case, the site (www.farmaechavarri.com)

It is a family business, so they asked me.