Welcome to APSE

Whether you realize it or not, your pet sitting website could look significantly different across a variety of user browsers.

Sure, Internet Explorer may be a very popular browser today, but many of your potential clients might also be visiting your website using Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome.

Plus, don’t forget that each browser has different versions, like IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3, 4 and 5, and on and on.

And each browser will interpret your html code by its own rules.

So how can you be sure that your content is being viewed at least closely to how you designed it to look?

Sure you can ask family and friends who use other browsers than you to give a look, or you can head over to this incredibly useful website and see for yourself.

This website does not take screenshots of your site, but rather actually allows you to quickly, easily and for free access a variety of browsers so you can see first hand how parts of your site is displayed.

Check this out.

First you’ll visit spoon.net/Browsers/ and it will display all the browser versions you can access. You’ll see Firefox, Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.

Internet Explorer used to make itself available on this site, but now there’s a little disclaimer about how IE requested off.

That’s OK, chances are you already have IE installed on your own computer.

Let’s begin the quick process.

Click on any browser to begin and they’ll ask you to download and run their plug-in file.

It’s safe to do, and you’ll only need to do it once.

Next, they will prompt you to create an account.

Again, this is quick and all you need to do is provide an email address and password, and you’re done.

I have an account so I’ll just log in here.

Once in, you’ll notice the browser buffer window appear on the bottom right of your screen.

This takes about 10 seconds and once complete, your selected full version, fully functioning browser of choice loads.

You can go to any website you wish. Here’s Yahoo, for example.

Now let me head on over to my pet sitting website to see how it appears in Google Chrome version 8.

Everything appears OK.

Now back on the Spoon site, you can also click on the browsers in the sidebar to access each individual one.

Here’s Apple’s Safari 4, for example. Click Launch Now, and you’ll see the same buffer on the bottom right side of your screen.

And just like that, the full working browser of Safari is available to me on my PC.

I go to my pet sitting website (or any other site I want to view) and all looks good.

Many pet sitters have asked me questions like ‘What causes some of these discrepancies across various browsers?”

Well, it all comes down to the html code that your web pages are producing.

It’s that very code that the browser has to interpret into visual design and layout for your visitors.

The biggest culprit of some issues will be various website builders. I won’t mention any by name here, but not every web builder is browser friendly – no matter how popular they are.

The best way to fix this? Go with a WordPress installation and find a theme you like, or have a designer build your website with good, clean code.