DIG 3001 : Principles of Digital Media

Amanda Kern | akern@valenciacc.edu

The scoup on the bugs with the simiosys site

November 25 , 2006
In the last few weeks I have completed the template for the simiosys web site and have shared it with our team so that each person could contribute to this project. Along the way I have encountered a few bugs in developing the web site that I thought I'd share.

Internet Explorer is a joy to work with

One of the biggest frustrations as a web designer is testing and developing web sites that work across multiple internet browsers. I currently use a Macintosh to develop my work, therefore, it's usually I'm pretty confident that web sites I develop will work on Safari and Firefox internet browsers. However, it's tough to neglect Internet explorer on a PC, especially seeing how it makes up nearly 65% of the population using the internet. The source of the problem you see in the first bug example is due to the box model where margins, padding, and borders all add up and if they exceed the width you've defined it will do exactly what you see on the right. My fix was to use a background image repeating for my navigation rather than setting large borders and padding.

Now I can't say I live to work with a PC, in fact I currently don'ty have one so I instead used browsershots.org to see how my web site would view on the PC browsers.

More fun with Internet Explorer

After fixing the bug you see in the first example I felt somewhat relieved until I again tested my site in internet explorer. It looked much better but there were still some small white spaces. Due to the time alloted for the project I decided that our team should move forward so that the project could be completed. I'm sure it again relates to the box model, which might have a solution with many bottles of tylenol and a few sleepless nights of looking at code and devising hacks and work arounds. Our team project depends on moving forward and improvising as needed. This bug would be look at closer once the project is closer to completion.