Developing and designing websites can be hard enough just coming up with a successful design, layout, and construction, but how will your site hold up in 1 of the millions of browsers out there?  Here are a few tips that you can follow to help make your next website design/development faster and easier.

First and foremost when designing a website you need to know your target audience, and what you are looking to get from your site.  With a target audience you know what your visitors will be looking for as well as the most common browsers that will be used to visit your site.  These days when developing a site you have to work with the “Big 3″: Firefox (version 1, 2, and 3), Internet Explorer (at least version 6 and 7), and Safari (at least version 2 and 3).  You also can’t forget about some of the other popular browsers, including: Opera (used on mobile phones, Nintendo DS, Wii, etc.), and Lynx (for a text-only view of your site).

Now that you know your target audience and a little of what your visitors are expecting you need to start work on your site with a good base.  This means developing valid and compliant code and styles, and developing for the most common browsers (at least internet explorer 6/7 and Firefox, preferably Firefox first).  Firefox also has some great add-on tools that you can use to speed up development of your site (Firebug is awesome!).

You’re not done yet!  You have a target audience, and you’ve started building out your website and made sure it’s valid and works for the most common browsers, but you also need to test and track the results of your effort.  This means using tools to test load times (Firebug or Pingdom are great), validating all of your code and styles, and optimizing your site and providing alternative content as a last result to browsers that don’t support all of your site’s features (Flash or Javascript features as an example, SWFObject is great for alternate content).

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