There are a lot of potential Conflicts in website design. Specifically, how the website appears on any particular computer, monitor, operating system and/or browser. It is a wild world out there and this inconsistency is the nightmare of all website designers.

One website may look great on Internet Explorer but may not work on Netscape. And then you add America Online (AOL), Earthlink, and any other myriad of Internet Service Providers (ISP's) out there and it is a bit nuts, not to mention crazy!

There is a big difference between how pages are displayed on an Apple Computer and a Windows Computer. They absolutely display fonts and graphics differently which adds to the fiasco.

Plus the various monitor types, sizes and settings make a big difference also. Some may use a 15" monitor with a 640x480 resolution. Other may use a 17" or 21" monitor with resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, or 1600x1200. Get the picture?

I do my best to design pages that work for all systems. Sometimes it is impossible, however. Since most users are now using machines that use Internet Explorer (IE), it makes it a bit easier to please most of them. I recently read (Feb. 2003) that 94% are using IE and the remaining 6% use Netscape or some other browser.

We also use web-safe colors on most of our sites. There are 216 web-safe colors. Most computers can now display 256,000 colors, so we may give up on this practice shortly, but in the meantime is is better that we do this so the colors we use can be used by all systems.

I also subscribe to AOL. Many people think I am nuts. However, since AOL has the largest subscriber base by many times - at last count, 34 million subscribers - it makes sense to learn what works for AOL users.

I know several tricks that can help AOL users overcome their defaults and will help them get much better picture quality. AOL uses the Johnson-Grace system of image compression that renders truely terrible photographs. Let me know if I can help.

If you know of anyone who has difficulty using your website that I have built, please let me know. I have placed some verbage at the bottom of almost every website that I have built just for this reason. It says:

Problems with this Website? Please contact: Webmaster.