I remember the very first adult site I designed for myself. To say it was simple and nothing fancy would be an understatement. I used Dreamweaver to design the site and then tested it with Firefox. After several days of intense labor, I was finally ready to put it online. So I uploaded everything then visited my site using Firefox and everything looked great.

I sat back and marveled at my first porn site. It was a thing of beauty! Looking back on it the site was actually pretty lame — but that's another story.

Anyway, so then I went to one of my favorite adult webmaster boards and told them about my website. I asked them to check it out and tell me what they thought. After a few minutes I got an email from a veteran adult webmaster who informed me that my site looked like shit. He said he couldn't even read the thing and that I was embarrassing myself by keeping it online.

It turned out that adult webmaster was using Internet Explorer to look at my site. I'm not sure what kind of webmaster uses Internet Explorer, but nevertheless I'm glad he was.

I fired up my IE and sure enough it looked like shit. The fonts I had chosen didn't even show up on IE and the basic layout of the page was a total disaster.

I ended up having to redesign everything so it looked right in both browsers. When this happened Firefox was only a tiny percentage of the browser market — now they're a large chunk.

It never occurred to me at the time that a site would look any different under IE than Firefox — but it sure as hell did.

Since then, I've made sure to have a copy of all the major browsers on my PC for testing purposes. I recommend looking at your websites under IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome.

You definitely do not want to lose a portion of your potential audience over something dumb like browser compatibility.