Help identifying website issue

floppy312 · 02-26-2013, 01:01 AM

I work for a nonprofit research institution and we recently launched a website. Unfortunately, some people have reported having problems with it (slow loading times, pages not rendering properly). I have been unable to reproduce any of these issues, which makes it hard to identify the problem. As far as I can tell, it's not a server issue, and not being a web developer, it's been hard for me to figure out exactly what may be causing the problem. Is there a systematic way to diagnose these things? I have used chrome's "inspect element" tool, but I am not entirely sure what I should be looking for. If anyone here could take a look and maybe point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it. The website is this one: http://goo.gl/E2t0c

Thank you.

jerry62704 · 02-26-2013, 02:50 PM

I suggest the first thing you do is see what the web pages look like on other browser/platforms. This is easy (and free) at browsershots.org. Pick the platform and packages you think your users will use the most and try it out.

AFA design, you may want to install Firefox and Firebug while designing the pages.

floppy312 · 02-26-2013, 05:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jerry62704

I suggest the first thing you do is see what the web pages look like on other browser/platforms. This is easy (and free) at browsershots.org. Pick the platform and packages you think your users will use the most and try it out.

AFA design, you may want to install Firefox and Firebug while designing the pages.

Thanks for the help. I tried browsershots.org and for the most part, everything looks fine.

I have Firebug installed, but to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what it is that I should be looking for there. I suspect the sidebar may be the culprit, but I'm not sure where in firebug I would look to see if that is indeed the case. If you have any pointers, I would be most thankful.

jerry62704 · 02-27-2013, 02:59 PM

I don't see any problem, but then my firewall prevents me from seeing whatever is in the center below the menu.

What I do is start firebug, click the second (selector tool) button on the menu and click on the problem spot.

The html appears in the left window and the css (or other options) in the right. I then look at the css including turning off things in there.

Then I realize I've been a fool and the first thing you always do is run it through the html analyzer. Your page has 4 errors and a few warnings that should be looked at.

Worse are the 16 errors in the CSS as shown in that validator.

Fix all that and see what happens. BTW, do you know the validators?