The Web Authority

Nancy’s post for today is found at Web-World Watch and is on the topic of testing in Firefox.

Firefox has moved out of just being considered an alternative browser. Now Firefox has real market clout and a loyal following.

WC3 reports that in January 2008, Firefox had cornered 37.2% of the browsing market. IE still dominates with 54.7% of the market. This is a huge drop for Internet Explorer. When I first started designing websites seven years ago, Internet Explorer owned 98.9% of the market. Now if you are note testing your website for compatibility with at the very minimum on Firefox, you may be in for real problems.

If we look at the break down in Internet Explorer, we can see that IE 6 still has a strong following with 32% of the browser market wit IE 7 only cornering 21.2% of the market.

Here’s my tip for all website owners:
1. Test your site in Firefox. Make sure that you have a relatively good match with what viewers using Internet Explorer will see. Although you cannot match appearance exactly in many cases between the two as these two browsers identify the box model differently, you should definitely not see a broken layout.

2. Make sure to test your site in both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. I personally was surprise to see that Internet Explorer 7 had not been widely embraced, and so it is still a very important browser for testing.

3. Make sure that not only your website looks good in Firefox and IE, but make sure your programatically rendered website sections like client order areas look good in Firefox as well. Don’t just review your front end, but your store, client’s area, and all customer use areas look good.

If you don’t know how to set up a Perl script to process forms on your website, if your web host does not have an easy to use script library, if you are not a programmer and you cannot figure out how to get contact forms working on your website, I have a solution for you!

My Contact Form is a great service that I have been using for over a year for some clients. I only use it when I just can’t get a contact form to work or if programming would be too expensive. We always select the Pro version that is ad-free, and boy it works great. I have been able to configure the form to be seamlessly integrated into the website and the form works great.

Not only will it email the information to you in the premium addition, but it will save an archive of completed forms online. Great for when you want to make sure that forms don’t land in your bulk mail.

There is no coding involved, just questions, choices, and then copy and paste in of the completed code. Once you have the code embedded if you really feel like you want to style it more, you can jump into the code and tweak the look of the page.

I would highly recommend My Contact Form to you for situations where you just can’t otherwise do a contact form.

Now you can easily set up a member’s area for your website, take pay subscriptions to view your content all without advanced programming or database knowledge.

Check out Sentry Login a very easy to use online application that even integrates with PayPal to help your website earn money for you!

Here are the good things about Sentry Login:
1. Easy to implement
2. You can control pages that specific users arrive at as their first page
3. Integrates with no brainpower used to PayPal
4. Allows you to easily manage your online database of users
5. Costs only $4.95 per month

Here are the things that I wish were improved:
1. Wish I had the ability to customize the subscribe message and auto messages sent to a new user on set up
2. Wished the landing URLs could be masked to match my domain

For non-programmers this is an elegant and easy to use application that you may want to consider for your website or blog.

It is easy to add YouTube videos to your blog. Click our post title to visit the video that we have embedded to get the code yourself. The video that I have selected is George Bush being interviewed on the threat of Zombies.

Look to the right of the video for a field labeled embed. Copy the code that is in that field. Go to your blog and put your cursor where you would like your movie to go. In Blogger click, Edit HTML in WordPress click the tab called code. The paste in the code, go back to Compose view in Blogger or Post in WordPress. Voilà you have a YouTube movie in your blog! You will see the movie when you publish. Don’t worry that you see a box with a red X. Your movie will show when your post is live.

Nancy’s post for today is found at Web-World Watch and is on the topic of website search engines. Read her review of FreeFind.