Web design help! Specific problem - need advice!?

Question

I am an amateur web designer who is having problems with one of my client's sites. I myself am having no problem viewing the site and I have checked the site from various computers, locations, browsers, etc. However, several (not all) of all my client's customers report problems viewing the site. My client sends out a monthly email with a link for the customers to follow and many reply that "nothing works" "can't click anything" "pages won't open" when in fact I know all the pages work. I don't know for certain, but I suspect the problem could be because of clicking the link embedded in the email. Telling my client to suggest to their customers to manually type in the address is not a solution because the client wants to prevent any minor hassle/inconvenience for the customer.

My question is, could it possibly be a problem with some customers' browsers or email programs? If so, please tell me specifically which browsers/programs/etc are troublesome that prevent select viewers from being able to use the site and specific solutions that can make the site user-friendly for everyone.

If it helps the website address is www.justscrappinllc.com if in fact it is a problem with my coding and not the a problem with the usability of the link as a I suspect.
I really appreciate any ideas you have!!

Answer 1

I would bet the customers having problems with the links are either receiving their email in text only format or they have a security setting set to not allow links to be followed from emails. Usually once they approve the sender this problem of non-clickable links is solved. The other is just to make sure the customers know that they need to use HTML for receiving the email letter.



Ron

Answer 2

I was able to open the html pages. The pdf pages hung for me because I don't have an updated Adobe reader so it can't read the pdf's via the web- it gave a message to download. My particular error message popped up behind what I was trying to see and I didn't see it right off hand. This could be holding people up.



Lose the wav file. First, it loads automatically, not everyone wants to hear your music - get a player that allows them to choose if they want to hear it or not. I saw no way to get rid of the music short of closing the site completely.



Second, the wav file took forever to load and I'm on a brand new computer with a good internet connection. This will prevent the page from loading immediately - on an older computer with old software it will take even longer.



Lose the framed site. Frames (the code) are outdated, though I can't speak to how newer browsers view them - could be some firewalls think they are iframes and won't allow the page to load.



Lose unnecessary javascript - I notice there are blinking stars in IE and if these are javascript it could hang some browsers.



You might consider cutting down on the size of the page - it's 114kb - which by web standards is large - optimize your images to be as small as possible.

Answer 3

Without being able to use the site to email us a link it's all guesswork, but a lot of browsers in corporate environments are set to not allow hot linking in emails - and there's nothing you can do about that. You'd at least have to get an actual raw email that didn't work to see if there's a legitimate link in the body.



Other than that it could be almost anything - there's no way to choose among the possibilities.

Answer 4

In view of the above answers, you do not only have a problem with that email, but MANY browser related problems!

- Changing the browser scroll bars only works in IE

- Many redundant, outdated, or deprecated tags

- Your tags (in the initial as well as the two frames) are quasi inexistent.

- You do not have a DOCTYPE defined (Browsers will go in "quirk mode" and be totally unreliable)...

- You have never checked your site with all major browsers, but only with IE...

etc... etc...



The links built in an email should work, IF they are correctly set-up: they should link to a FILE on your server to present an email form (don't use the bl**y "mailto()", which does not work 50% of the time!



Use a server-side script to make and send your emails.

Answer 5

That's going to be a tough one. I would start by seeing if you can find out what browser the client's customers are using. If they are using older browsers then the site might not work properly for them. Newer browsers give a lot of lee way in terms of interpreting your code, but older browsers will just break the page.



You can check how good your site is at keeping to the w3 standards that most browsers will interpret correctly by using this tool:

http://validator.w3.org/

You will need to run the test for each of your pages. Just running on main.html brought up 69 errors. If you validate all of your pages and fix them they should work a little better for older browsers.





I would also go back and look at some of your coding as it seems to be a little off. Just a few examples that might break older browsers and even might show the page incorrectly in newer ones.

1. IE. does not exist at all.

2.

You are using a custom font, anyone that does not have that font will see regular text instead and your page will not look how you are expecting them to see it.

4. You also have a lot of redundent tags:







a single will work just fine.



The whole style part is messed up at the front of the page:









And those are just a few examples of what is wrong with the page.