I think I’ve been doing a good job with my Web site designs. I make sure that my code validates, that it looks the same in Mozilla/Netscape, IE6, and IE5, and that it scales appropriately to fit different screen resolutions.

Unfortunately, I had a nasty shock the other day when, in spite of having taken all of that into account, I saw one of my sites on somebody else’s computer. It didn’t look very good. The colours were off and some of the formatting was strange. It was due to a difference in fonts (producing difference sized text) and in either their video card or monitor not displaying the colours the same way.

Now I need to add some more checks to my repertoire. Things like knocking back my colour display from 32-bit “true colour” to just 256 colours and making sure everything looks all right. Also, making sure to leave lots of space (vertically or horizontally) in any place where an increased text size could have an unintended affect on the element placement I’d been trying to get. (Which, unforunately, might make things look strange when the font is smaller.)

I know that there’s no way I can ever get things to look the same way for everybody – nor will I ever get things to even display properly, without obvious problems, for everybody – but it’s more than a little annoying when it’s the customer’s own system that produces strange results.