When designing a Web page, keep in mind that not all your viewers will be using the same browser. The majority of WWW viewers use Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, so basing your design on how the page looks with recent versions of these browsers is probably pretty safe. If you use some of the more advanced features of the latest versions, however, you may begin to create problems.

Some people will be visiting your site through America Online, Web TV, or another type of service, using a browser that does not support the same HTML features. If you can, it would be a good experience to look at your pages with a different browser to see what can happen.

In addition to different browsers, your visitors will be using computers with different screen sizes and color quality. As you design pages, you should always remember that the page will look different on different machines. Colors may be darker or lighter, text can be larger or smaller, and line breaks will occur at different points. Keep your documents flexible in order to handle these difference.

If you see a Web page with features you like, it is easy to view the HTML source that created the page. Use the View/Page Source command in Netscape to see the document that created the page. This is a good way to improve your HTML skills and learn new commands. You can copy text from the view window (with Ctrl-C) and then paste it into a Notepad document if you want to "borrow" someone else's work. You can also save an entire document in Netscape with the File Save As command. This would allow you to edit the page for your own document.