In the old days, if you weren't interested in a magazine article, you just skipped it over. Publishers knew that you'd be happy to ignore what you weren't interested in. If there was a need for a magazine to have an article in French, then they could publish it, confident that if people couldn't read it, they would turn the page and move onto something else.

Using the internet brings in a new realm of choices that any creative must consider, not least that you can't count on people being happy to skip over something that they can't read and carry on with your content. The internet can be a very unforgiving place, and people browsing for information online, either through natural browsing from site to site, or more commonly through search engines such as Google, will not sit or wait for a page to take time to load, or click through registration forms or multiple pages of navigation. They'll close the window, move onto another site, and you've lost out on them spending time on your site, exploring, and perhaps becoming a regular reader.

In extreme circumstances, where a website doesn't load correctly, you might have people skipping over your site purely because it doesn't work 100% perfectly in their web browser, even if the information they're looking for is in front of them.. Woe betide you if you pop up something along the lines of ‘this is designed for a specific web browser or operating system only, please use that instead.'

The modern web is a fully inclusive place to live and work, and the expectation is that any website will work on any combination of browser and hardware. It's up to those coding the websites to make sure this is the case.

Those using the internet today typically come under three operating camps, Microsoft Windows (XP and Vista), Apple's Mac OS X, and a variety of Linux distributions, with one called Ubuntu becoming very popular. But the operating system is just half the key, because there are a number of web browsers that can be used to access web pages, and those need to be considered as well.

Most people will be familiar with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but you should remember that recent changes mean that Internet Explorer 7 (the current version) and Internet Explorer 8 (currently available to the public, but regarded as a beta ‘test' version) are radically different beasts, so web sites should work in both versions.

Mozilla's Firefox is probably now the second biggest browser on the planet, and has recently made a huge push with it's third major version being downloaded over eight million times in the first 24 hours of its availability. It's also much more popular with people who make a living on the web (as opposed to being on a family or corporate computer). Versions are available for the three major operating systems.

Apple's Safari web browser might not have a numerically high number of users, but it is still a significant percentage, and as anyone having spent any time on the web will tell you, Apple fans can be very vocal if someone hasn't considered their platform, and that includes Safari (which now also runs on Windows PC).

There's also the Opera web browser, based out of Norway, which has a small and dedicated core of fans.

Just to make things fun, while some of these browsers (notably Firefox) will run on multiple operating systems – just don't think you're guaranteed the same results from Firefox on Windows compared to Firefox on.

It should be part of any design process to consider what medium the content will be viewed on, and that's the same on the internet as it is in print publication, Radio production or TV recording. It's no longer enough to say that because a website works on one computer, it works on them all. The internet isn't one computer, it is many computers, loosely connected.

The incredible thing is that it all hangs together, even with many disparate systems using it. This is mostly through good design, and individuals ensuring that what they do will work in a standard way, over as many systems as possible.