Whether designing a website yourself or using a theme provided by a web developer there is one critical aspect that you need to check on. That is, making sure that the design renders correctly across today’s major browsers. This is something that a lot of people don’t actually do and it is something that I admit that I have fallen victim to as well.
Depending upon the type of site that you run can greatly influence the type of browser that your visitors use. A site related more to technology will draw crowds using mostly FireFox with maybe Opera and Safari mixed in. A few of those visitors will even be using Internet Explorer as well but the majority you will find will be using FireFox. Fast forward to a more generalized site that targets an average computer user and you will find that the stats are quite different. Internet Explorer’s grip on the browser market share still holds and even today it is still the most widely used.
I recently setup a site about 2 weeks ago and while I use FireFox myself as my main browser I didn’t bother to check it out in Internet Explorer (or even any other browser for that matter). However, today I just thought about it so I went to check my stats only to find out that in fact most of my visitors are using some version of Internet Explorer. In fact, out of 840+ visitors 72% of them are using Internet Explorer! Breaking it down even further I came to realize that 64% of those visitors are using IE7 while 35% are still using IE6. I quickly loaded up IE7 and went to my site……….bad news. I am using a 3 column WordPress theme that I downloaded from the net. After a little modification to the theme to get it setup working just fine I thought everything was ok. But it wasn’t, checking the site in IE7 showed the middle column being placed under the left hand column.
Crap! This whole time 72% of my visitors have been seeing a site that doesn’t even render properly. Luckily it only took me about 25 minutes to do some quick layout changes and get it working correctly. But for almost 2 weeks my site has remained like this. For some odd reason the site has still been doing well, averaging over 4 page views per visit but I probably could have done better had the site been working correctly.
The site is more geared towards the general computer user and for some reason I hadn’t even thought about checking in other browsers for compatibility. Unfortunately, everybody that develops WordPress themes or even other site layouts for that matter don’t always check the design in other browsers. Design can be a huge factor in determining a site’s popularity as the easier it is to navigate and the better it looks can greatly increase it’s like ability. Many of today’s top sites spend countless hours and thousands of dollars testing out even minor changes in design to maximize both revenue and user experience.
Now I realize you may be saying that you don’t have the skills to fix a design yourself. In fact you might not even realize that your design could be rendering incorrectly in another browser. Fortunately, there is a great resource that you can use if you don’t want to load up multiple browsers on your computer for testing. BrowserShots.org is a site that allows you enter a web address and get a screenshot of what that page looks like in over 70 different versions of browsers. On the main page you have an input box to enter the web page URL and a list of browsers and their versions that you would like to check in. Under the list of browsers are further options such as Screen Size, Color Depth, Javascript, Java and Flash. Using the default settings should work just fine if you want to run a quick test.
After submitting your URL you are provided with a screen with further information such as the number of browsers that you selected as well as the estimated length of time it will take to process the queue. BrowserShots will even provide you with a .zip file of all your screenshots once they have completed. Wait times vary but most major browsers such as FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and Chrome take only a few minutes to process. If you are testing in other browsers they may take longer as there are not as many machines running that type of browser for processing. You really only need to worry about versions of FireFox and Internet Explorer, maybe Safari/Chrome/Opera for extra measure.
Your site’s design can have a major impact on your revenue as well as user compatibility. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for in the first few seconds of visiting your site you can bet that they are going to be leaving very quickly and not returning.
