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November 09, 2005

Who cares about 80 million?

I was reading an article in eWeek by Jim Rapoza called Sunny with a chance of standards who said there over 570 million web users, with up to 80 million of those having problems with some web pages.

At least, with Internet Explorer use estimated to be around 85%, that means there are a lot of people using a different browser.

I was busy working yesterday and didn't do much surfing, but did see a number of pages that didn't work well with a non-Microsoft browser.

He says:

For a long time, companies that have built IE-only sites have fallen back to the standard excuse of "Hey, just about everyone uses IE."

Well, 85 percent of browser users is not "just about everyone."

Then he goes on to say, "Internet Explorer's falling market share is good news for the future of Web design."

But a lot of the problem he says in mainstreaming another browser other than IE is that it needs to be adopted by business users and applications. He suggests it needs more support from business, and he doesn't see it happening. But lately other reports I have read said Hewlett-Packard and Compaq were both going to be offering Netscape on all new consumer computers sold next year. I think this will be a help.

The future version of IE will address some of the hacks we have been using because of its lack of support for standards, but there will still be some CSS bugs evident in IE 7 that ships next year with Windows Vista.

I'm sure as the popularity for other browser grows, IE will have to increase their support for web standards if they want to continue to be the dominant browser.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 03:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 08, 2005

The design of your site can affect your conversion ratio

I'm sure you have heard it said before that the "design of your site can affect your conversion ratio" and this is something you could be testing. Nick Usborne has an article on A List Apart that shows a three way test. The results he has published showed that one design out-pulled tow others by 15%.

Incidentally, the design I liked the best resulted in 53.28% fewer sales.

What one did you like and why?

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 03:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

IE tab - Firefox Extension

I was reading Alex Walker's blog at sitepoint.com about the IE Tab extension for Firefox. He says:

"Like the eminently useful IEView, the extension automatically launches IE and loads your URL into it, only with IETab this all happen neatly contained within a Firefox tab. In fact, the only evidence that tells you you’re not using the Gecko engine to view the page is the tell-tale IE icon on the tab."

I admit I like the idea, but...

It may be a little faulty. When I switch to the IE view, the embedded IE browser lost the images, lost the stylesheet, and some of the page formatting.

Of course, maybe this is some quirk of my computer, that it doesn't seem to operate properly. For now, I guess I had better continue to check clients pages in the real IE.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 12:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack