Forums

1. Create different versions of a site for different display resolutions. Ie, 800x600, 1024x768 only sites. (What you should do is design your site so that it will collapse or expand cleanly for everything between 640x480 to 1600x1200).

2. Use pop-up windows for sub-content.

3. Try to manually force a window into the resolution you want. (Related to #1)

4. Have your index page launch a large pop-up window that all your content is browsed in. (See all previous)

5. Mention that the site is enhanced for one particular brand or version of a browser. Though as a general rule it should be made to look it's best on whatever version is most widely used at the time, it should also look good on everything else that has ever been made that may try to browse it -- including WebTV's and text-only Lynx. Often this is of course impossible to verify as there are just too many variants on a practical level allow for such verification.

6. Flash splash screens. Need I say more? Everyone hits SKIP INTRO anyway.

7. Make a site that ONLY runs for certain specific browsers. All the links of this site are auto-magically maintained by personal bookmarking app written mostly in ASP (and using a C++ COM object I wrote) (It was originally in ColdFusion). It identifies itself only as "Intrafoundation.com (TCPClient 2.15)". I find it amusing that more than one site will STOP you from browsing them completely unless your UserAgent header string has certain magic words within it. And one wonders if they really have thought this through -- the entire point of building a website is to attract as many people as possible to it. Or at least it usually is.
If you were wondering what you should do -- you shouldn't build a site in the first place that won't work at least partially for every browser out there.* But if you already have, then simply having a subtle message warning them that their browser may or may not work on your site will suffice. And then let them browse on their merry way. (Of course, if you do, you'll have to be constantly updating the site once or thrice a year when new versions of your "supported" browsers come out -- so if you get paid for it, it might not be such a bad idea.)

8. Use the same title string for every single page on your site. This tends to making referencing your site on a search engine rather problematic... for the same obvious reason you don't normally name every file on your hard drive the same thing as well. Generally the title should be the name of the site, then the name of article, etc the the page contains.


*Unless your pointy-headed Dilbert-type boss says you have to.