Looking at Things from All Sides

I've been working on the Community Housing Network project over the past few days. Among other things, we're completely revamping the look of the site. My graphic designer came up with a beautiful new look and now I just have to make it work within the Drupal framework (Drupal is the content management system which CHN uses on their site).

This stuff is actually pretty fun for me. I treat it as any other puzzle and just have a good time coming up with tricks and techniques to make things work the way I want them to. There is one tiny little challenge, though, that really gets under my skin.

I have to own about nine different computers to adequately test everything.

After I've done all my work, I have to test the system on a variety of different operating systems and browsers. What looks perfect under Firefox running on Linux (my main desktop machine) will likely look slightly different from a Windows box running Internet Explorer 7. It in turn will look different from a Mac running the Safari browser.

It's a small thing, but to really have a professional site, you need to take this into account.

Fortunately for me, someone else must have been having these same problems, because theres a site now which will test your pages under all combinations of browsers under these three operation systems. It's called Browser Shots and it's a tool any good designer should have in their arsenal.

At least until you can afford to own nine different computers!

So, how well does your site stand up to different platforms and browsers?