Just a bit of a rant...

Well lately it seems I have been delving into the world of web development. In fact I recently published my first site. Well by first I mean I did it on behalf of a business, but the general concept is the same. Now certainly I knew there would be hurdles to overcome in doing this, but there were some that I found particularly frustrating and I thought I would share them and how to overcome them in order to aid future users in the same situation.

1. Cross compatibility - OK now I know what your thinking, of course cross compatibility is an issue and yes I know that... But my major issue here was with a little friend called Internet Explorer. Now we have all heard of how IE is not standards compliant, and I took this into account. However when It came to testing on previous releases of IE I ran into a problem, how can I test cross compatibility on say IE6 when Microsoft will not let me install it over my IE8 (for obvious reasons). Well this caused me quite a dilemma, from what I hear IE6 still has quite a user base (yes believe it there are some people out there who have not partaken in the sheer joy that is tabbed browsing not to mention FF). So how could I test this, well after some searching I happened upon a little program called IETester. Basically this great little program lets users test their code using the engines of various IE versions. This saved me a lot of time, and if you are striving for cross compatibility (which you should) then I highly recommend it as a testing tool
2. Dynamically Changing CSS - CSS to me is a great tool, however for a long time I was struggling with it. You see what I wanted to do was change the way my page looked based on the links my user clicked. Now again this sounds easy enough, just a matter of having a different style sheet for each page right? Well that's the catch my site was load once, that is to say all content was stored on the one page, with different parts being displayed as necessary. This of course meant I could not have different style sheets for each page, so how then do I change the page style. The solution javascript (as if no one saw that coming). To put it simply to charge a CSS attribute dynamically use the style command withing your code e.g. document.getElementById(id).style.visibility = "visible";
3. Everything Else - Use Dreamweaver! Provides code validation, cross compatability validation and much more.
   

Hope this helps someone, I know it did me :P