[COLUG] Ubuntu / Firefox / Web Design

[Thomas W. Cranston]

Mark Erbaugh wrote:
> 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
>
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>
>   
Try learning html. It is not hard. I tried html as an introduction to 
working from the command line.
I searched the web for tutorials. A lot of them are not very good. If 
you get stuck, just go on to another one.

I found http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/ after a few failures. I 
recommend it.

Tom