Looking Good In Every Light

If you're a Seinfeld fan, you've probably seen the episode "The Strike" where Jerry meets an attractive woman at a party, but when they go on a date in a dimly lit restaurant, she doesn't appear nearly as attractive. "Two-face", as she was referred to, could look completely different in different circumstances.

Similarly, we can build websites that look terrific in our favorite web browser, but when we look at them in another browser, they can look completely different and much less attractive (like someone chewed up our hard work and spit it back out onto the page). Because of this, I typically try to keep several browsers installed on my computer to try and cover my bases. Since I work primarily with Windows, that leaves testing my pages in Mac and Linux environments up in the air.

Well, fret no more my friends, as browsershots has come to the rescue. This service allows you to select among 20+ browser and OS configurations and generate images of how your site appears with those configurations. The service can take some time to handle all the processing, but you'll usually get most of the images (which are downloadable) within an hour. For the convenience they provide, the wait it worth it.

For an example, you can check out the latest screenshots of If Jesus Had A Website.

If you're serious about making your church website to as many people as possible (and you should be, especially since the OLPC project runs on Linux) then it's worth your time to set a bookmark for browsershots and check it periodically.