On you're thinking of enlisting a Broward County computer service to handle your website, should you instruct said service to write pages for specific browsers?

Or will this potentially drive customers away?

Without question, a vast majority of procrastinators and businesspeople alike surf the World Wide Web with Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer alone.

So why would your service or web designer build a site for anything other than IE?

Many designers find that if they build pages that only view nicely when using standards compliant browsers, like Firefox, they may mess up the pages for most of my viewing audience.

It's like you have gone to a club wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and the huge bouncer won't let you in because of what you're sporting. It's not like you're dressed badly... but they won't let you in.

The point being: You don't want to turn customers away.

If that snooty restaurant isn't turning customers away, why are you? The most user friendly thing for a Broward web design firm do is to create HTML pages that best viewed with any browser.

However, the lure of designing for just one browser is strong. After all, then you only need to test once. It's easier. But what about when IE 7 comes out? It is standards compliant, and many of the tricks you created for IE 6 and below won't work any more.

So you're just making more work for yourself down the line.

The point of standards is that you can rely on them to stay the same, or at least be backwards compatible. When you build a standards compliant page, you're building a page for the future, and that will last no matter what new browsers come along.

The best way to get viewers to leave your page and never return is to put a message telling them to download your favorite browser NOW.

Instead, make them want to get the latest and greatest by giving them what they want on your page, while at the same time implying (subtly) that they get more with another browser.

Make sure if you hire a computer service or a web development company that builds a site for you, that you keep this in mind.