website doesn't work - but only for some

[doyle9732]

I work on a website that a handful of (different) people are periodically complaining that they are having trouble with the links or getting to the page (loading).

http://www.boxerrescueontario.com

I can't think of one reason why it would work one day and not the next for a handful of people (who notify me....who knows how many are having troubles)

Facts: mostly html, some javascript, I use SSI for the header/menu.

Anyone have any ideas?
thanks!

Stephanie

 

[WizyWyg]

Nothing wrong here. Loads fine.

 

[doyle9732]

yup, on my machine and work laptop too. Makes it especially hard to troubleshoot !!!

But, in a group of 50, 4 have emailed me to tell me that they can't get on. The next day, one emailed me to say she was back on.

They don't have the same internet providers (and they get to the page, the menus just don't work), they have different o/s (one ME, one on a mac).....and interestingly enough, someone told me that it didn't work on IE, but did work with Netscape (isn't it supposed to be the other way around???!)

The only thing I can think of is that I have a missing (non-essential) tag missing in my ssi file....and some systems are periodically complaining about that....although so far I can't see anything missing.

Does any of this ring a bell for anyone? We're a rescue/registered charity, so it's pretty important that everyone can get to the site.

thanks!
Stephanie

 

[philote]

I just tried the site and couldn't get on at first (couldn't find the host). About a minute later I tried again and it came up. Maybe its a an issue with your DNS server?

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[xWastedMindx]

Works fine for me. But I'd agree with philote on this one. It's either a problem with your DNS.. or maybe even the server itself, wherever the files are being hosted.

"Hey...Where are all the chicks?" -- unknown

 

[doyle9732]

we have the $11.95 package with Yahoo. The price is right!

I did email Yahoo, but their reply was that they too, had no difficulties.

The complaints I'm getting are that the top nav menus work (some get all working, some get just some working) but the left side nav menu seems to not be working for everyone having difficulties. Did you experience that? Did you actually get an error message? Could you copy and paste it for me?

thanks!

Stephanie

 

[philote]

Sorry, once I got the page loaded it worked fine in both IE and Mozilla.

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[Vragabond]

It works for me, but note that your left menu uses javascript to navigate. Thus, anyone with their javascript turned off will have the left menu just pointing to the top of the current page. If you can, change the left menu to have normal <a href=&quot;page.html&quot;> links and it will work for everyone. Or instruct your users to enable javascript, but really, the first solution is better. Hope it helps.

 

[ChrisHunt]

It works for me too, though it takes a while to load.

Hard to see what's going wrong amongst all those acres of Javascript - do you really need it all? For example, you've got a huge slideshow script to make the (rather irritating, in my view) changing dog picture in the top-right. Have you tried using an animated gif to do this instead? Gifs aren't usually all that good for photographs, but it's worth trying. Personally I'd use a random image picker to display a different dog picture on each page the user visits, rather than flicking theough them all.

You should move all your javascripts into seperate files - replacing
[tt]
<script language=&quot;JavaScript&quot; type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;>
<!--
img=new Array(12);

// ... long expanse of Javascript code here! ...
//-->
</script>
[/tt]
with this
[tt]
<script language=&quot;JavaScript&quot; type=&quot;text/javascript&quot; src=&quot;/scripts/myscript.js&quot;>
[/tt]
The advantage of this approach is that the visitor's browser will cache the script files on the first page they visit, so they don't have to reload the whole thing on every page they visit. Your problem may just be people on dialup connections lacking the patience to wait for all that Javascript to load before they see anything.

Another thing you should do is get your page to validate. Go to

http://validator.w3.org/

and type in your URL. As you'll see, it needs a lot of work!



-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[doyle9732]

thanks! I volunteer to do this page.....so I appreciate the advice....it's safe to say that javascript isn't really my forte. I'll head over to that validator link now!

Stephanie

 

[doyle9732]

Chris....

I went to the link, put in the URL but it said it could not validate it.....did it work for you? what am I doing wrong?

Stephanie

 

[ChrisHunt]

You need to specify a DOCTYPE and character encoding in your page - otherwise the validator complains. Put this as the first line of each page:
[tt]
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC &quot;-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN&quot; &quot;

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd&quot;>

[/tt]
and put this in each page's <head> section:
[tt]
<meta http-equiv=&quot;Content-Type&quot; content=&quot;text/html; charset=iso-8859-1&quot;>
[/tt]
Then the validator will pick up both values automatically.

In the mean time, you can pick the doctype (&quot;HTML 4.01 Transitional&quot and encoding (&quot;iso-8859-1 (Western Europe)&quot from the drop-down lists shown on the &quot;I Can't validate page&quot; and revalidate. You get this:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...nsitional&charset=iso-8859-1+(Western+Europe)

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk