Hello - I have a site that I received some comments on usability on, saying that the site does not come up at all for some people. Through browsershots, I determined that the site does not come up at all for WinXP users who are using IE7 ... I believe that is the only platform/browser that has the problems - here are the details on my site: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=789788 Has anyone ever heard of an issue that would cause the site to work fine on other browsers/platforms, but not on that one? I don't even know where to start troubleshooting! Please help - thanks!
Who are the people complaining? What exactly are they seeing, a completely blank screen or are they seeing some text? Just checked with WinXP SP2 with IE7 native (non-Tredosoft) and I see everything, though your h1 is positioned incorrectly (sitting underneath/below the bottom bar of the header/Cartier flash and being cut off by the white background of the welcome text.). You have quite a few errors here any one of which could possible send a particular browser into teh sh*ts while the others cope. I think the header (h1) text doesn't line up because you haven't zero'd out margins and padding on everything (unless I missed it): * { margin: 0; padding: 0; } Some of your errors might have to do with the Flash-- you might as well ignore them unless you want a Javascript Flash loader, but stuff like unclosed tags are easy to fix. You're using XHTML doctype but you haven't closed tags the way XHTML needs. All tags that are considered "empty" or "replacement" (the ones that don't have an </end> tag, like meta, link, img, br, hr, etc) need a space and a slash. The space s for the browsers, the slash is to close the tag. <meta blah blah /> <img src="blah" /> <br /> And so on. Those shouldn't be causing trouble with IE7, but they're good idea to fix. I wonder if there's something being blocked on these people's browsers, but I don't see much except the Flash that could possible not show (if the flash didn't show, there'd be this big empty white area at the top of the page.... are they seeing that?)
Same observations as Stomme Poes in terms of rendering, the 'more brand names .com' text is having it's top chopped off, the cartier text doesn't have the top margin I'm seeing in FF or Opera. ... and as pointed out, the 148 validation errors COULD have something to do with your problems, since that pretty much means the ENTIRE DOCUMENT isn't even valid markup, and as such in the browsers it is rendering 'correctly' you are relying entirely on said browsers error correction to do so... Which with error correction NOT being the same between FF, IE, Opera and Safari, it's a miracle it renders at all the same in ANY of them. Though it is absolutely MIND BLOWING to see the validator reporting 148 errors in only 4k of code. That's an error for every 28 CHARACTERS?!? Though a quick glance at the code shows all sorts of dated outmoded markup - stupid 'target' attribute, use of 'entity' spaces for padding apart links, double div wraps on elements that could probably be styled directly, presentational classnames, placement of comments between floats possible causing IE to screw up with the dissapearing content and/or double render bug - in fact - yup. Half the welcome text is rendering under that ring image instead of in it's column here in IE6. Of course, the fixed width layout targeting 1280 width (since I seem to be getting scrollbars at 1024 in testing), absurdly undersized illegibly tiny fixed metric fonts in the content and menu areas making the page useless unless I zoom in 200% (praise be for 'fit to width' in opera)... with the bloated/distracting flash rubbish in the header being icing on the cake. Sorry if that sounds a little harsh, but I'm not going to sugarcoat when there's this much wrong - better you hear the truth now than be led down the garden path by the folks wearing the rose-coloured glasses.