Site fine in IE, not so much in FireFox

[mbkentfield]

I know I'm far from an expert on web publishing as a self-taught user of FrontPage years ago before moving to Dreamweaver more recently. I have designed a site for my company using what limited knowledge I have with tables and such.

The site looks fine in the various versions of IE I've tried it on, but on my FireFox v. 3, the table boxes seem enlarged, thus making background photos repeat and the entire layout getting stretched out.

I'm sure there's a coding issue or many that are keeping the site from looking right across the browsers, but I'm not as versed as I should be in coding to find the errors. Can anyone help?

The code file is attached as a Plain Text file with this message.

Thanks,
Matt Kentfield
BDI Racing

matt@bdiracing.net

[Chris]

judging by your code it looks like what you have is a typical problem with WYSIWYG editors. Fixing it my recommendation would be a complete rewrite to something far less complex.

[deathshadow]

Fixing it my recommendation would be a complete rewrite to something far less complex.
Which is the polite way of saying what I was thinking. The markup is rubbish, pure and simple.

There's no doctype meaning tons of hacks needed for IE just to correct the box model - or worse designed to work in IE without a doctype meaning no chance in HELL of it ever working in ANY other browser! The CSS inlined in the header should be in the external CSS file, the class names are unneccessarily cryptic, the stupid malfing mm_ scripts basically doing with 34k of javascript and unneccessary markup what should be one or two k of css, tables for layout are bad enough, but tables for layout for no good reason with endless hordes of empty TD's inside empty TR's is nothing more than bloat. Presentational markup, image maps, spacer .gif's, and without a doctype lord knows how much invalid markup resulting in it not being HTML. As I've said about a great many websites it's not HTML, it's gibberish.

The page is too image intensive with little or no effort put towards image compression - that headerart.gif being eight times the size by itself of what I consider the upper limit for a page size. Given that at 1.2 megs in 36 files it feels like it takes forever on a 21mbps downstream I don't even want to think about how bad it would be for 768kbps users or worse, the people still stuck on 33.6K or 56K dialup.

A good indication of the 'problems' is evident in the simple numbers, 27k of markup, over a megabyte of images, 29k in scripts for less than 2k of actual text content.

Now, don't take that personally, none of this is really your fault - like a great many others you've fallen into the trap of thinking Dreamweaver lets you actually make websites. As I've said time and time again the only thing you can learn from Dreamweaver is how NOT to make a website - and the only thing involving Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Imageready that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it as such.

So as Chris said, chuck it and start over - and do yourself a favor and pitch dreamweaver in the trash while you are at it. ANY of these WYSIWYG editors qualify to me as sleazy shortcuts that simply cause more problems than they have EVER solved.

[Rupe]

Hi. Brand new user here. I've just published my site, dead simple with no flashy bits, but I'm told that Firefox users can't navigate through it. I don't use firefox myself and know nothing about it. Any ideas?
www.rupertsmithsurveys.co.uk

[Dan Schulz]

Hi Rupe,

I hate to say it, but your site isn't even using HTML. It's using Microsoft's VML to spit out code that tries to pretend it's HTML. Also given the commercial nature of your site, it's also violating the UK's online accessibility laws.

If you want the site to work properly, you're going to have to rewrite it from scratch. If you need help doing so, feel free to post here and I'll do what I can when I have some free time (my mom's currently in a nursing home for rehabilitation following a fall at her doctor's office, so I'm not able to spend much time on a computer at the moment; however your layout appears to be pretty simple, so I don't think I'll need more than a couple hours to get you all set up with a fresh new code base).

[Rupe]

Thanks for your interest Dan.
You say re-write it? Surely its only the internal links that aren't working. Is there a template bit of code to use on the hyperlink buttons?
Is there a simple to use piece of free download software that is as easy to use as Word, but uses code that firefox can cope with?
Cheers
Rupe

P.S. Hope your Mum gets well soon!

[Dan Schulz]

I'm positive that a complete rewrite is necessary. One of the problems with your code is that you're sending one set of rules to Internet Explorer (that lets people navigate through the site) and another to every other browser out there (which they cannot use).

As for simple, the simplest thing you can get is already on your computer. It's called Notepad. However, it takes some HTML knowledge in order to use. For something like Word though, the best thing I can suggest is a content management system such as WordPress (when employed as a CMS rather than a blogging platform). But to get the most use out of that, you'd have to have someone create the template for you, which would then be uploaded to the server (with the other "Themes") and then activated.

After that, it would be smooth sailing.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I have to agree with Dan - even in IE, the text is cut off on your navigation buttons.

Wordpress would probably give you a working site quicker than any other option (assuming you are not going to pay a designer to recode for you or learn HTML!) and will allow you to easily update the site content without any/much technical knowledge.