Creating a website to look good in all circumstances can be a bit of a challenge.  Take for instance a WordPress blog, the chosen platform of millions of bloggers and organisations across the world.  It’s simple and easy to set up, you can even buy customized templates for creating a different feel.  There are thousands of these themes for things like magazines, blogs, portfolio or even e-commerce stores.  It’s no exaggeration that you can be up and running in a matter of hours with very little investment.

Unfortunately sometimes it’s not as straight forward as this – you need to check how your website looks in different web browsers.  Make sure at a minimum you check Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari – and ensure that your website looks and displays well in all of them.  If you’re using a standard CMS like WordPress and have bought a proper theme there should be no problem.  However as soon as you start customizing and tweaking display settings then potential problems can occur.   The issues can vary, but although they will be worse on complicated multimedia sites like ones which stream UK TV channels online, they can even effect the simplest blog posting site too.

Remember your visitors may come from all sorts of sources – using PCs, Laptops and Apple Macs with a combination of screen setting and resolutions.  Make sure your website looks it’s best to all visitors, or at least to the vast majority of them.  There is also another issue that you should consider with regards to display – mobile devices.

Many people now surf the internet on their phones and tablets, which obviously have much smaller screens.  Your website may look great on a 22 inch screen with a high resolution but how does it look crammed into a small mobile like the iPhone or iPad.  Even larger screens can cause display problems on certain websites.  I for instance surf mostly using an iPad, especially after my discovery that I can use a fake IP address to switch it between locations to watch Hulu, BBC Iplayer etc – look here for more information – http://thenewproxies.com/ip-address-when-online/.

Often sites can be difficult to read, text scrolling off the bottom of the page.  Menu navigation can also be a challenge particularly if you’re using a design with many columns.  So if you are getting a lot of visitors from mobile devices then you need to do something about.  You can invest in any decent web designer who should be able to convert your website to a mobile friendly version.  For WordPress users it’s even easier, there’s a simple application called WPtouch which you can install as a plugin on your site.  This plug in detects when a visitor is using a mobile device or a tablet and serves up a modified version of your site.