Skylight Studios

On Friday 6th of March, at work we have noticed that a few of our sites were not working. After a few checks we found out that depending on the area the site would work fine or will not display at all. At first we assumed it could be our local name server list in our DNS settings but when we researched the issue we found out it was not just us that had this problem.

On the BT forum some other web design agencies were having the same problem, and not just with BT, Virgin and Orange seem to be also effected according to some reports. While the issue is beyond the control of the people managing the DNS records for the client we could be held responsible for the downtime of our clients sites.

While this is a temporary issue it still affects area of website ranking, businesses that rely on their website for income and the confusion of Google knowing if the website has been taken down.

Hopefully, whoever caused the problem within the nameservers, the issue will be resolved as soon as possible but I am quite shocked how this problem has been kept quiet and expecting us to ignore the problem not just for the developers but for Internet users.

Cross browser checking, is probably a web developer’s worst enemy. With so many browsers with different versions, different formats. I always dread checking on our system just in case Internet Explorer decides to throw a wobbler. So how important is browser testing? a while back everything was for Internet Explorer and it was a pain visiting a website which disallowed you to view the site without the appropriate browser. While this is till done today it is very bad practice.

At work we not long dropped support for IE 5.5 and now google are now dropping support for IE6 is a very big thing but still government bodies and local councils refuse to upgrade due to the cost of upgrading or just being lazy but they also say that their version of IE6 is more secure because of how the system is locked down restricting what the user can do on the computer.

Luckily now most browsers work pretty much the same within a basic structure. At uc4 ltd we test all browsers from IE6 to FireFox 1 which causes us grief even still. Most audiences now work on IE7 but when creating a site think about your audience, most government, council websites have a  standard specification on what is required when developing a site and also the most strict due to guidelines.

To improve cross browser compatibility here are a few tools which can help….

MultipleIE
Stand alone IE browsers to help check capability though,  has a few issues with javascript

IE Tester
A tool to check multiple version of IE in one interface