[COLUG] Ubuntu / Firefox / Web Design

[Mark Erbaugh]

I have volunteered to help my church with their website, but I am not a
professional website designer. I am working with another volunteer who
is somewhat familiar with Microsoft Front Page.  The website is just a
tool to provide information and consists of a bunch of static HTML
pages.

Two parts of the website need to be updated on a regular basis: The
monthly newsletter and the weekly calendar of events.  The church
secretary creates both of these using Microsoft Publisher because the
primary destination is printouts.  She is not familiar with other
programs, so she would prefer to keep using Publisher.  I'm new to this
church and not ready to start pushing for wholesale changes to Open
Source.

Microsoft Publisher has an option to save the document to HTML. However,
it doesn't do a very good job. It seems to have a problem with the
flowing of text around graphics. While things look fine in the printed
output, the text runs over the graphics in HTML, and there are other
problems. Obviously the export to HTML was an afterthought in the design
of Publisher.  I did some web research and discovered that Scribus will
not import Publisher files.

The other volunteer loaded this HTML into Front Page and rearranged
things to clean up the overlap. He had everything looking acceptable
with Internet Explorer, but when I looked at the website with Firefox,
there were several places where the text overlapped other text or
graphics.  This overlapping was present with Firefox on both Ubuntu
Dapper and Windows XP, but was worse on Ubuntu.  I had the other
volunteer go back and add some additional spacing until there was no
overlapping in Firefox.  The website is usable, but not what I would
consider attractive.

I've visited lots of other websites with Firefox and not noticed this
overlapping. I thought HTML was HTML, so I am suprised that this website
that looks acceptable in one browser looks bad in another.  Is there
some sort of magic bullet that is needed to make websites compatible
with both Internet Explorer and Firefox?

Could this be an issue of not using 'standard' web fonts? Are there
fonts that we should use in Publisher so that the HTML looks better?

Note: although we used Front Page to edit the HTML, we are not using
Front Page Extensions on the website.

The problem pages can be seen at  www.chimes.stjohnslondon.org 

Thanks,
Mark