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On Monday I mentioned that we had just completed a major site for a client and had managed to keep the navigation throughout a complex series of categories and pages quite simple. Something else we needed to do with that site- because the text was often folded around some background images - was to make sure that the site looked the same in all the major browsers.

You may think that each of the browsers displays web pages in exactly the same way but that simply isn't so. You would be surprised at just how much variation there is between Firefox, IE and Opera even though a page may be written in straight HTML.

That's pretty much how we wrote this site with only the simplest form of CSS to govern font sizes, we didn't use CSS to position content on the page and we didn't use any fancy hacks either. Yet we found that variations in line spacing and the actual sizes that the text was displayed in meant that we had to carefully check ever page. Lines of text that were neatly wrapped around those background images in IE were spaced differently in Firefox and looked plain ugly in Opera.

In fact in Opera some of the words ran over the top of the background images and were unreadable while they were spaced well away from the images in IE and Firefox.

Of course it would have been far simpler to design the pages to look good in Internet Explorer and let the devil take care of the rest. That approach might have worked in the past but these days that attitude is just plain short-sighted because IE no longer has a strangle-hold on the browser market and the hold that they once had is becoming weaker every single day.

While Safari and Opera may only have four percent of the market between them ... with Safari having most of that four percent ... Firefox and Netscape continue to take large chunks out of the near-monopoly that IE once had. These days some figures put the percentage of Firefox/Netscape users as high as 25 percent for the general surfer population and as high as 35 percent for those who are more tech savvy and those figures represent a lot of potential customers.

Out of the remaining 71 percent IE6 is still the version of Internet Explorer that most people use although the numbers are steadily declining. Steve is one of those who still cling to that version for some tasks but I have a suspicion that even he would change if he could just find the time to install IE7.

So from those figures you can see that it is definitely worthwhile checking all of your sites in the major browsers. It's not something that takes a great deal of effort when you're building the simple sites that we usually build here in adult and if you don't take the time to check you could be shutting out a large proportion of your surfers. And who wants to do that when the people who use the less popular browsers are just as likely to spend money as those who use IE?

Free stuff
One of the biggest hassles that newcomers to this industry have is how to make their limited budget go round. Obviously you're going to have to buy content and after that there's not much left for other important things like a decent office chair, a proper desk and even some extra computer equipment.

All too often newcomers decide that they'll just not bother with an office chair or a desk and they struggle on with clunky old equipment that could fail at any time. They either don't realize how important proper office furniture is to their wellbeing and how important reliable equipment is or they simply can't afford it.

Well here's an opportunity for every one of us to pick up office equipment, better hardware and just about anything else we might need for free. Yep this stuff genuinely is for free; sometimes there might be some conditions attached but they're not the sort of conditions you might expect.

To find out more about it just go to freecycle.org and you'll see how the system works. Even if you're living in some out-of-the-way place go and check it out. There are freecycle.org groups all over the world - even here in the town in Australia where I live - and most of them are very active.

It's a great way to pick up all the things you need to get started in online marketing - or any other small business for that matter.