One of the basic mistakes made by many web designers is to not design their site for use in different web browsers. Whilst Internet Explorer is the most used web browser, it does suffer from certain incompatibility issues. IE is notorious for not adhering to the published HTML specifications, so CWS recommend that your site be designed to be useable in at least the top four browsers listed below. Those of you developing your sites on an Apple Mac may have difficulty testing your site in Internet Explorer as Microsoft stopped developing a Mac version after IE 5. In this case we’d suggest asking a friend with a windows PC if it’s possible for him to test it for you.

Another common mistake is to only test your site once it’s nearly finished – we’ve made the same mistake ourselves – for this reason we’d advise you to install these browsers before you start development, as rewriting an already completed site is very time consuming.

• Internet Explorer – Free -Windows only
  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.mspx

• Firefox - Free
  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

• Opera - Free
  http://www.opera.com/download/

• Safari - Free
  http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

• Sunrise – Free - OSX only
  http://www.sunrisebrowser.com/en/