Layout broken in Firefox 3

[Florian]

Ooooops...

My site layout looks fine in IE but is a complete mess in Firefox 3 (just installed to test it).

Had a look around the forum and a search - can't find anything obvious and my design skills are not quite up to scratch to sort this one

Please could you have a quick look at http://www.between.co.uk/acatalog/index.html and see if there's anything obvious as to why it works in IE but breaks badly in Firefox.

Many thanks in advance!!
Florian

[pinbrook]

Actually its broken in firefox 2 aswell.

Looking at it its becasue the table widths, columns etc are too wide. This is a common error and there are plenty of solutions already documented in this forum

[peblaco]

Looks like there are wonky table tags too.

[Florian]

Hmmm, looks like more needs to be done than just a quick tweak....

Our site has evolved from v3 all the way to v9, always upgraded and never completely rebuilt - I guess the fact that it is still up and running (with IE at
least) must be a compliment to the Actinic site upgrader.

Still, all these upgrades, combined with some of my own rather amateurish dabbling seem to have now resulted in a bit of a mess.

I think the best way forward is probably to start again, somehow export all my products and images and then start from scratch with the original, unchanged template and re-import the content and then re-apply all the design changes. I've never done anything as drastic as this and don't really know where to start with exporting all my info. I guess snapshots won't do it as they also contain all my layouts, don't they?

I need to have a deep dig around the forum to see where the answers are - in addition, any quick pointers would be really welcome.

Thanks again for looking!
Florian

[jont]

Try changing themes .. that will blitz everything back to factory default... there are some much better themes now for SEO (and design) and that should set everything back to an even field.

Note if you then change back to the theme you had this is not reset to factory default... to do this you need to go through the library and reset... so probably easiest and better to simply swap to a better theme.

[Florian]

Hi Jonty - working late too?!

When you say 'better', which design do you mean? If it's one of the plain CSS designs then I'm a litte scared as I'm yet to be really comfortable with CSS. I've always relied on a little hand-holding from Actinic by using one of their (admittedly sometimes rather awful) supplied 'styled' templates. I'm not a web guru but happy to try my best as funds for e-commerce are somewhat limited.

Unfortunately, this has now landed me with a site full of 'wonky' table tags (thanks, Louise ) and completely broken in Firefox - rather embarrasing!

Thanks
Florian

[jont]

Always working late

The CSS layouts are inherently better than say the SMART theme which passes the main left hand navigation through the cgi-bin (although Google is getting better with this form of navigation lately) The CSS layouts are just as the other themes but are laid out with CSS and tend to be a little plainer - giving you more to work with. Once the theme is set you do not need to know CSS at all. CSS looks scary but is far simpler than messing around with tables.

The design wizard is worth checking out as this brings in the code from the other themes and mashes them up to suit your own needs in terms of positioning etc.

The Executive theme from v8 proved quite popular and currently the reflective is the theme of choice - although Chris Dicken noted the other day that this too threw a slight wobbly in Firefox v3 but not to the extent your site is currently doing in FF2 & FF3.

If you set say the Executive theme this is readily tweaked and there is lots of existing support in v8 and also in v9

[Florian]

Thanks for this Jonty, quite a lot of info in your post. I'll have a look at the other themes tomorrow (well, that's a little later today then!) and see what else is lurking in Actinic's box of tricks.

Thanks again, with your number of posts, you must be logged on 24/7 !!

Off to bed now, leaving for a trade show at 7am.....
Florian

[jont]

I'll have a look at the other themes tomorrow

So long as you take a snapshot before testing the themes you can easily roll it back if you don't like (or quicker to duplicate the whole site contents to a place outside of the Actinic folder on your hard drive so you can copy and paste it back again if it goes awry)