The new Upstart Blogger design was all set to launch today. I was happy that I made enough changes to give it a fresh face while still retaining it’s minimalist design aesthetic.
At lunchtime today the design was finished. I dropped the logo idea, preferring to keep a clean text only design. Crisp dark helvetica on a white background with one highlight color, just like the page you see before you now.
Everything was going to plan until I checked the site in Internet Explorer. My clean and specifically spaced design, which looked exactly as planned in Safari, Firefox, Opera, Camino, Flock and even Netscape looked like a dog’s breakfast in Microsoft’s pathetic excuse for a browser.
The masthead zooms over to the far left of the page where only half of it can be seen, the sidebar drops below the footer, the text defaults to eye assaulting Arial and the main content column expands to the width of the whole page. This nightmare occurs in Internet Explorer 5 and 6. In 7 the damage is lessoned slightly. If news is to be believed the forthcoming version 8 will break with tradition and act like a real browser. But that isn’t here yet and I really don’t believe that Microsoft will change the habit of a lifetime and suddenly make a browser that works properly.
This is the last thing I needed with Infinite Critique scheduled to launch next week and three more blogs, using the same design but with different signature highlight colors, scheduled to launch the week after that.
My head is buried in Panic’s Coda, trying to figure out how to hack and slash my way to a resolution that keeps Bill’s browser happy. As soon as it is figured out the new design will go online.
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Oh man, you have no idea how much that hits home! I spent nearly a week just last month making tons of changes to my blog, including widgets and a new theme. I thought all was going along fine until I viewed my site in IE by accident and found it not loading at all! It actually served up an error and stopped loading. Turns out I had a widget installed that didn’t jive with my new theme. Now I’ll remember to always check my blogs out in all browsers after updates!
I encountered that same thing this week. Except I also had a background image not showing in IE. :(
Nooooooo. I hate that. I hate it so much it makes me want throw things. Hope you manage to find a way to resolve it that still appeals to your design eye.
Web designers everywhere sympathise with you… The only solace I can provide is that, unless you’re doing something very tricky (which is unlikely for a blog design - happens to me more on web app UIs) you should find some IE-only hacks that will make it look exactly the same.
Good luck! :D
I wonder how many thousands of man hours and billions of dollars have been wasted by IE bugs. The piece of crap should be put down, to boost the world economy.