Website Won?t Work.

[HansR]

Today I received a message from a user from Indonesia stating:


?To date I have NEVER been able to get to your home page or any other page on your site. It always comes up that the page cannot be displayed, try refresh etc. Any ideas? The site certainly appears to be working properly, occasionally I visit remotely to check in, our log reports somewhat consistent numbers of unique visitors and more telling, the church office has received no calls informing us of frustrated friends.

I didn?t have many ideas to suggest:

? Do you have problems with other pages or just ours?

? What does the error page look like? Do you see anything that says ?404 - File not found error?? Or does it give you any other indication what the problem is?

? I occasionally have problems with I omit the scheme from a URL address (http://www.[site].org vs. [site].org).

? Do you have a content filter which might be blocking our site (some filters seem to single out .ORGs).

I ruled out hardware problems with her machine/connection/provider, as I assume she is not having similar problems with other sites.

She was responding to a link in my previous message, so it?s not a simple miskey in the URL.

Is the fact she is in Indonesia at all a factor? She?s a native English speaker, so presumably it?s not a language issue with her PC. Even so, the page should load substituting my font with gibberish.

Am I missing something obvious?

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Hans,

I think you'll want to get some details about her browser. Which browser is she using (I.E., Firefox, Netscape, Opera, etc.), what version, and what computing platform. Yeah, she's probably on a PC, as opposed to a Mac, but to troubleshoot the problem, you can't guess. You need to know.

Looking at the source code, my guess would be the Javascript is causing the problem. I.E. for Windows has some security settings that include, or could include, turning off Javascript. The woman may not realize that the security settings on her browser are such that Javascript doesn't work.

On the assumption that the woman is using I.E. for Windows, I will provide some steps below for you to pass on to her to check for this possibility. But first I want to say I asked a man named Ed Vasser to read the thread and check out your site, which he was kind enough to do. He had emailed me a few days ago about the need for HTML pages to have the proper DOCTYPE and charset encoding at the top. On the outside chance this was the very reason for your problem (or hers, I mean), I asked him to check your website. He didn't see any major problems, other than the possibility of the Javascript being turned off, which had also occurred to me.

To check for this possibility on I.E. for Windows:

With the browser open, select Tools => Internet Options => Security

She'll see four icons across the top: Internet, Local intranet, Trusted Sites, and Restricted Sites. She should click on the Internet icon, then click the Customize button at bottom. Near the bottom of the resulting list of options, she'll see the Scripting category, followed immediately by the Active Scripting option. Under that, my guess is that "Disable" is selected. If so, she'll want to select "Enable."

When she clicks the OK button to dismiss this dialog box, I'm guessing she will have the option to "Apply" the change. On Windows, you often must click "Apply" rather than "OK" to ensure your changes "stick."

She should then quit out of the browser and relaunch it. If the website still doesn't work for her, have her go through the steps above again, to ensure that the new setting "stuck."

Now, at the top of the list of categories and options I mentioned, there are also settings for Active X controls. It's possible that in Windows, Javascript functions as an Active X control. I don't know for sure. If that were to be the case, then some of these settings would need to changed.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[HansR]

Thanks David!