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Looks great on Explorer but all overlapping on Firefox, Google Chrome, and perhaps others

My websites look fine on Explorer, but when accessed from others, such as Firefox and Google Chrome, they are all overlapping and unreadable. I'm told it has something to do with W3C coding? I am not familiar with this. Is there anything I can do, short of hiring a website designer?

There are three websites:
http://gettyequinenutrition.biz
http://horsesupplements.gettyequinenutrition.biz
http://feedyourhorselikeahorse.com

Thank you!

Browser: Explorer

Re: Looks great on Explorer but all overlapping on Firefox, Google Chrome, and perhaps others

Yes, that's a common problem. It's common to get everything working in one browser and then find out later, it doesn't work right in other browsers. Personally, I design for Firefox, and then make adjustments for IE. But your problems are enhanced by the fact that your pages were initially created in the Website Wizard, and then you switch to using the Visual/Text editors. Starting with a Wizard creation, and then switching to the Visual/Text editors is almost always a disaster.

Most of the problems are caused by the Visual editor. By default, Wizard creations include a "DOCTYPE" tag as the first statement in all pages. This defines to the visitors web browser, the level of HTML/CSS interpretation. The outcome of this tag is usually code that displays very much the same in all browsers. But the Visual editor does not recognize the "DOCTYPE" tag and erases it when changes are saved. Once the "DOCTYPE" tag is gone, browsers are on their own. In many cases, the HTML specifications are vague enough to allow a pretty wide interpretation. So, none of the browsers are really wrong. They are just doing it their way.

Basically, if your going to use the Wizard, stay with the Wizard. For beginners, and users that really don't want to deal with HTML, the Wizards will do a reasonable job. But if you feel the need to be away from the Wizards, also stay away from the Visual Editor. The "DOCTYPE" issue is only one of it's problems. You would be better off using a off-line web page editor, and uploading your completed work.

But there are a lot of other issues with your pages. For example, why are you forcing the pages on "gettyequinenutrition.biz" to be 1300 pixels wide and 3263 pixels high. There is no need to specify the height at all. A browser will generate a scroll bar so that everything is displayed. But 1300 pixels is too wide. On my laptop screen, which is 1024 x 768, I can't read a whole sentence without scrolling left and right. That would make most users leave right away. Your also forcing the visitor's browser to resize your images, instead of making them the right size to start with.

As a Ph.D., you need a web site that looks professional, but with a little home made mixed in. It should be viewable easily by anyone in any browser. Right now, that isn't the case. The only real answer is to rebuild. Here is an example of what can be done - Nutrition Test Page. I used the text and coloring from your original page. I got a little creative with the header and resized most of the images. I made your picture bigger, because after all, you are the target of the web page. I may have left a few odds and ends out, but this is just a test page. The basic layout and navigation menu is from Dynamic Drive CSS Library. There are several layouts available, if you want to make your other sites look a bit different (i.e. three column as opposed to two column, etc.). But different content, coloring, fonts, and images is sufficient to make them different.

To create the test page, I used HTML-Kit. HTML-Kit is a free text based web page design tool. This is a great editor, if your familiar with HTML/CSS coding. If not, you might want to try KompoZer. KompoZer is a free graphic based web page design tool, that's pretty easy to use. I use the stable version, V7.1, but there is a newer Beta release available, V8b3. KompoZer has built in upload capability (FTP), making it simple to update your site off line, and then just upload it to your web site.

Other users often recommend "Nvu". But if you go to the Nvu web site you will find that, the last release of Nvu was June 2005. And that, KompoZer is really a updated version of Nvu.

Browser: Firefox, Netscape, Sea Monkey, Internet Explorer, .....

OS: Solaris (Sparc,x86), Linux, XP