Viewing your website
Viewing your webpages in a browser will show you how they will look once published. This is a good checking mechanism for your website.
Preview in browser
What you see in FrontPage when using a template is not how it will look on the web. Use the icon 'Preview in Browser' in the Standard toolbar to see your page on the web, or select File, Preview in Browser from the FrontPage menu.
Web browsers
Different browsers can have radically different capabilities and limitations. You cannot assume that a user has appropriate facilities for viewing your website to its full capacity. For full functionality, UniSA's corporate web environment is best viewed with the web browsers
- Internet Explorer (IE) 5.5 or above
- Netscape 6.2 or above
You may wish to alert users to this by having 'best viewed' information on your website (perhaps in your home page) or linking to Using this website on the corporate web.
The most common web browser (by a large margin) is Microsoft Internet Explorer, followed by the open-source Mozilla browser and its derivatives, including Netscape 6.0 and later. Apple's new Safari browser is gaining popularity on Macintoshes running MacOS X, and the Opera browser has a loyal following among those who are willing to pay for the fastest browser possible, especially on older computers. The Lynx browser is the most frequently used text-only browser and has been adapted to serve the needs of the vision impaired.
Multimedia
Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading PDF files is not automatically built into all browsers. Internet Explorer will already have plugins built in for multimedia, but with Netscape these need to be added in. The latest browsers and Adobe Acrobat can be downloaded from AARNET.
Some websites try to support almost all existing browsers, while others try to support only the newest and most popular browsers. A middle-ground approach is to have some enhanced features for newer browsers, yet provide graceful degradation for older browsers. Check for compatibility with different browsers before using enhanced web components such as multimedia by
- testing your website using other browsers (an interesting exercise in itself)
- finding information on browser functionality and compatibility by doing a Google search or looking on a software company’s website
It helps to keep up to date with current trends (eg software updates), which change rapidly in the web environment. This guide will keep you informed of changes when appropriate.