Web design is not an easy business. With the proliferation of different browsers - not to mention different operating systems and computer types - all of which uphold different standards, the art of design is to ensure that all users experience your web page as it was intended to be viewed.

Whilst, for example, the latest version of Internet Explorer allows you to incorporate all manner of flashy effects into your site, they are not going to appear on earlier versions of the browser, let alone on versions of other browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Opera. What's more, the effects won't just be absent from the page, but will probably prevent the page from appearing correctly or even, in the worst cases, at all.

It is crucial, therefore, that your site is designed for and tested on a variety of browsers and platforms to ensure compatibility. To give you an example of the sort of steps that are necessary, lets consider screen size.

Your computers screen is divided up into a grid of dots, aka pixels. The computer can display different amounts of dots depending on your graphics card and monitor and the settings you have currently selected. These days, the standard size is 1024x768, which you are probably using now. This means there are 1024 dots across the width of the screen and 768 dots across its height. So what does this have to do with web design?

Well, unfortunately it's yet another limitation on the site. The site has to be designed to work in a number of possible sizes ranging from 640x480 to 1600x1200 and beyond. And it has to look good at all of these sizes. This can be difficult because you might decide you want a range of content which is just not going to fit at the smaller sizes. The current accepted minimum is 800x600, and your site should work at least down to this level. It should also have no problems when scaling up to larger sizes.

This is just of many factors that need consideration, others include: web-safe colours, DHTML, Javascript, Java, VBScript ... anything that depends on the web browser must be carefully considered to ensure compatibility for all visitors to your site.

Make sure you test your site on different computers, using different browser versions and ensure that you are not preventing people from effectively accessing your site.