Hello,
I’ve created a website using Freeway Pro on a mac. The site looks correct when viewing online with a mac. But on a PC with Internet Explorer, the videos don’t play and the pages are much smaller than on the mac.
Is Freeway Pro suppose to be able to handle these things for mac and pc and make them both come out looking the same?
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On 11 Apr 2012, at 02:59, bob wrote:
Is Freeway Pro suppose to be able to handle these things for mac and pc and make them both come out looking the same?
Hi Bob!
Discovering that sites look different on different browsers and different systems is one of the joys of web design. When I say “joy” I mean facts of life.
Freeway generates the code that browsers then interpret to display to the end user. Freeway’s code is standards compliant HTML and JavaScript, but there’s no guarantee the browser used to interpret that code supports all the standards properly. I’m looking at Internet Explorer at this point.
The thing is, the best a designer can do is to create a site that has inbuilt flexibility to overcome or ignore most of the browser shortcomings. There is no guaranteed way to design a site - using any tool - that will look identical across all the platforms.
All we can do is make things look the best they can. It’s not an easy task, and the designer often has to make some compromises along the way.
I hope that helps. It may not be the answer you’re after, but I’m afraid it’s the world we live in.
Cheers
Heather
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Hi Heather,
If all we can do is hope for the best, that things display and play correctly on all platforms, then why if you go to some sites you’ll find they look and play exactly the same on a pc or mac (like any well know clothing, furniture, car maker site)
A global company can’t afford to have a website that plays a video correctly on a mac but on a pc it freezes, and it doesn’t. So obvisoulsy they are doing something than more than hoping, they are doing something to make it work correctly.
I visited an art supply company last year and in their office they had 5 computers, 5 monitors with different browsers all online at their company website. They told me that they had this set-up to make sure their site looked the same, and it did. So there’s something more than hope going on, and I was wondering if anyone here on the Freeway site knew what that was these companies were doing to get past hope to a place of certainty.
Bob
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What Heather means that is that high end companies spend a lot of money adding code tweaks and fallbacks to get things looking as uniform as possible.
What you have to remember that individual users have individual settings ie a visually impaired user may have a minimum font size set of 14px. How would your site look if that was the case?
As I suggested in your other post - give us a link to your online site and we can have a look and suggest where you might be going wrong.
David
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Hi Dave,
This is the same Bob that you’re chatting with at the moment
on the topic where I forgot to put in the subject line.
My site is designsongolf.com
And I apologize to Heather, if I sounded a bit cranky;)
The level of frustration working on my site to play correctly was bubbling over.
After seeing that my site was not playing on a pc, I did hire a freelance web tech person to do his magic. And I’m still in the process of him trying to get things right. And along the way, like yesterday, he told me that he was redoing my site in html5 and that my Freeway software was buggy, and that if I want to make any future changes to my site, I will either have to learn html5 or contact him to make the changes, which didn’t make me too much of a happy camper. And even though he got my videos to play on both mac and pc, I just saw them today, the quality is degraded and the video is smaller than my version that I uploaded. He said he’s using jplayer to get the videos to play on all browsers and making multiple versions of each video. But now all of a sudden, when I went to look at my site on a pc, it’s now playing just like my mac Freeway Pro uploaded version. Don’t know what to think at this moment, been getting 3-4 hours of sleep trying to get this up and going and…I see I’m starting to babble, so I will stop, and need to do the dishes, before the family wakes up in New York time…
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one more before I get to scrapping the dried pasta of the plates I should have done last night…I’m an out of work artist, which is usually not a surprising combination and
I’m trying to market online high-end coffee tables that I’ve designed, if my site doesn’t look good on all platforms, then I’m wasting all my time trying to generate a sale
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well I’ve taken care of one dish plate and wanted to add one more…the work that the freelancer I hired for my site is working on is
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On 11 Apr 2012, at 11:22, bob wrote:
And along the way, like yesterday, he told me that he was redoing my site in html5 and that my Freeway software was buggy, and that if I want to make any future changes to my site, I will either have to learn html5 or contact him to make the changes, which didn’t make me too much of a happy camper.
Hi Bob.
I didn’t take any offence, so don’t worry. ;o)
Now, HTML5 is the emerging standard. I can understand the web dev guy pushing you that way. Freeway currently doesn’t support HTML5, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t producing good clean code.
I can’t code. Goodness knows, I’ve tried. I’ve got some great books on the shelf above my desk about CSS and HTML coding. They make it look so easy, but when I try - even in fantastic software like Panic Coda, I get easily flustered, frustrated and fed up.
This is why I have used Freeway from the late 1990s. I’m a visual designer and it works the way I work. I still have to learn to overcome the limitations inherent in the world wide web, but at least I can create a web site that works pretty much as I expect it to work. I’ve reached a point now where I design for standards, and let the browser go hang. Well, almost. I always try to let the site design degrade as gracefully as it can so it’s still pretty comprehensible to a screen reader or to someone using the latest versions of Chrome.
I can’t answer your questions about the video problem. I upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo and link using an action. That way, I don’t have to worry about the competing standards. The video is served up by a third party, and is handled however the browser normally handles video from them.
Cheers
Heather
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I did hire a freelance web tech person to do his magic. And I’m still in the process of him trying to get things right.
All I can say is that the last thing you need is to pay someone else to redo your site so you can’t update it yourself. Save your money - you need it more than him!
FW will do everything that you want it to do and with the FREE support that is available here there should be no question that you need some other dude to grab your cash.
D
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ahhhhh - mazing.
I’m not young anymore, but I’d need the money anyway. Furthermore I’m a freelancer and I have a bug-free copy of FreewayPro. I think that I’m probably just half as powerful as your freelancer so I would charge only a quarter of him.
My tools for this page would be:
centering the page,
giving bg-supersizer action a go (probably, never tested),
use a css-menu,
switch to http://sublimevideo.net/ for all your movies (actionized as well),
flavored with a bit shi-shi and lala here and there…
at least a couple of hours to go to finish.
Finally ship the ready steady built Freeway doc.
All in all I’m nothing more than we all are:
a Freeway User that would say, that there is nothing spectacular on this page that couldn’t be reached.
Just my 2ct.
Cheers
Thomas
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Thank you everybody for the support.
I know how you must feel about someone leaving good closeness of the Freeway group here. I didn’t realize that what was always in my own “backyard.”
But on the one hand, Heather is saying her Freeway sites don’t look and play the same especially videos on all browsers, and on the other, Thomas says, no big deal,
with http://sublimevideo.net and Freeway Pro your site will be the same on the mac that you uploaded it to and watch it with Firefox as well as someone looking at it on a pc with Internet Explorer.
Would greatly appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks to everyone,
Bob
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The point on video is:
A .mov requires quicktime (player or plugin) to play. My experience is (germany):
Not one lost soul of win-world can play it cause they do not care on Mac-format (but they all have iPhone :-).
Sublime shares a fall-back to flash (if it is enables and therefore the joker: All win-user have Flash enabled).
Summary:
If you want to make sure to play cross-browser you need to share the specific file-type a browser demands. This is not an issue of any app of the world.
The look of a page in general:
It’s a known issue, that 8px (Mac-World) is something about 8,75px or more) on a PC. This is the only thing I recognized. So if a text-flow looks correct on Safari/Mac it is to 99% slightly bigger and it can overflow some items below this text. I do not mind about this cause I usually do inline-constructions. But Freeway has a tool to correct this called RelativePageLayout.
But a page on Mac fine, on PC probably just the half or even much smaller I never saw in my short but intense Web-life - except, that your Browser viewing is set to 50% (by accident). If I have a chance to check on PC I’ll do and report back.
Cheers
Thomas
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and forgot to add:
It’s a pity if you do not give Freeway another go - in fact things are sometimes not to change
but I’d call it disastrous to read somewhere that
Freeway is buggy or stuff - cause this is in fact not true. That’s what I wanted to expressly underline for the above points.
Cheers
Thomas
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and last but not least:
That’s what I can see on my IE8 (VMWareFusion). Not too bad or do I miss here something?
Cheers
Thomas
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I have had a quick look with Wn7 and Explorer 8 and all seems fine.
The videos play but I do have QT installed (as do a lot of iPhone PC owners).
As Thomas has noted you might be as well to cover all bases and use the new SublimePlayer action. http://actionsforge.com/actions/view/248-sublimeplayer
You might also wish to reconsider how much of your site uses graphic text. Screenreaders cant read it, Google cant index it. And if you want your site to be found then you want it as Google/SEO friendly as possible.
I would also suggest that you change your home page so that it loads fast. Optimise your graphics and get some interesting html text on there.
Visitors are very fickle and if they don’t see something interesting quickly they wont hang about.
That along with the other things I have mentioned and you will be able to do without the PC Web ‘Guru’
D
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Thanks Dave and Thomas, great stuff which I will devour.
Just reuploaded my site with the correct way to place a background.
One thing I can’t figure out. When I first uploaded everything, it looked fine on the mac but on the pc it was scrambled eggs (although I do like scrambled eggs, just not on my webpages) and as of yesterday, my site plays just fine on the pc. Cannot figure that one out. But I am strong like bull now;) and obviously, thanks to you all out there in Freeway land, with your kind guidance I can do it on my own in my own little creative way in the program that I really like using (just gotta learn a few more things that it can do).
and it’s goodbye to pcfreelancertechperson
thanks again!!!
Bob
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Dave, greatly appreciate your thoughts about my site
and how to improve it with visitors that are quick on the button…good insights
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Hi Dave,
I let the freelancer go and everythings looking good on my site the Freeway Pro way, except today after I uploaded some changes, when I click on a menu item to go to another page, the entire screen goes green for a brief moment before going the next page appears. Can you tell me if that happens when you look at it?
Bob
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The first thing I notice on your home page is the excessively huge golfbackgroundnew.png which comes in at over half a meg!
This page appears green until it loads!
That file could be reduced dramatically - look at http://www.deltadesign.co/golfback.html
This is your image, now a jpeg and at 36k it is less than 10% of the size of yours!
D
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One more thing that you should be careful about is the naming of your files.
Do not use any characters other than alphanumerics ie (A-Z), (a-z), (0-9) and _underscores and -hyphens in your file names. If you want to space 2 words then use the underscore or the hyphen.
One of your files is called GOLF LOGO.mov - there is a space character in there which is bad. Make it GOLFLOGO.mov or GOLF_LOGO.mov or GOLF-LOGO.mov. Preferably lowercase golf-logo.mov
Some servers/browsers will trip up over space characters in file names while commas and punctuation marks will send them screaming. Except for the full stop of course.
D
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