Working on our own site

Have been spending time lately working on our own website… the design is coming along but the content is, well, nonexistent at this point. The business got off to such a quick start that our own site was put on the back burner. Now that we have a lull to take advantage of, it’s a good time to get back to the M2 site. Though technically it is “out there” (and not particularly hard to find either), we can’t actively use it for promotion until it’s ready to be seen by the world.

One thing causing an issue is the old browser compatibility dilemma. We know that the majority of our users use some version of IE, so as much as we personally love Firefox, we have to consider the IE users first. It still seems that IE isn’t playing nice with CSS. We have so far been able to get away with using a single style sheet for both browsers by using the “*” (asterisk) hack — we prefer to call it a workaround 😉 — to distinguish IE properties.

Most of today (or more accurately, yesterday) was spent working on the M2 site design and making some use of the “*” to keep the site looking consistent between IE and Firefox. For instance, the header has to be 748px wide in Firefox but 754 in IE so that every element lines up properly in both browsers, with no odd gaps. ‘Course, I’m doing all this on our staging server, so the real site still looks bare for now.

Hopefully we’re not missing some new CSS development that would mean we wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble. All the major browsers try to promise standards compliance, but apparently that still isn’t happening fully. We’ll keep holding our breaths… not.

*** Update ***
While reading up on CSS issues in IE, it came to my attention that the star hack does not work in IE 7. Great.
(Going forward I’ll have to be more vigilant about testing in IE 7 — oops!!)