When designing web sites, it's easy to get caught up in your design process and the anticipation of publishing the site. One of the dangers of this is that you might forget to complete some important testing to make sure that all users can see your content as you intended. Here at WeCre8, we test for compatibility with the major browsers for every site we publish. We test Internet Explorer versions 6-8, Firefox versions 3 and 4beta, Google Chrome, and Apple's Safari browser.

Recently, I've had a situation that again proved to me the importance of this process. As I blogged below, Facebook integration has become an important part of many web sites. When we initially added the FB_Social Plugins module to our site, it worked and looked great in my favorite browser (Firefox), but for some reason, I was not able to see the "Like" and "Facebook Connect" buttons in IE. Further research led me to a coding problem that made our Facebook integration incompatible with IE. A couple of quick tweaks to the template file quickly solved the problem, but had browser testing not happened, I might have never caught the fact that IE users weren't able to see the work we had done. So when choosing a web designer, make sure you ask them about their browser testing.