I finally upgraded the single page Melbourne IT-hosted site to a self hosted site for my business.
Because I'm a Microsoft registered partner and have access to the Microsoft Action Pack, I decided to see if I could build my own site using Expression Web. I used one of the corporate templates and was able to quickly build my site with my own content. I had installed Expression Web on my Vista laptop, so my initial design was only viewed using IE7.
I then proceeded to use Virtual PC to load up a Windows XP VM to test IE6 and I downloaded Firefox 2.0, the PortableApps version of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.22 and Safari for Windows 3.0.3. The site displayed correctly under all these browsers! For someone who's used previous versions of FrontPage, I was fairly impressed to see consistent rendering across all browsers and proper handling of hand coding by the IDE (ie, by leaving it alone!).
It certainly took me less time to get the site up using the template and modifying it than hand coding it from scratch.
My final verification was to run the W3C Validator, the Validome Validator and the WDG Validator over the site. There were a couple of problems, but these were ones that I had introduced into the site. Microsoft's claim of "Built-in support for today's modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility" - while not rigorously tested by my effort - is backed up by the browsing consistency I saw as well as passing the three validators I used.
1 comment:
That's really impressive that the template worked for all three browsers. Especially coming from something Microsoft. You would think that they'd want to encourage everyone to use Internet Explorer.
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