Getting your website to work well across platforms and different web browsers is horribly complex task. Something can work fine in one browser and then break, for entirely arcane reasons, in another. A fancy trick will delight 10% of your customers using a decent browser, but cheese off the 80% using Internet Explorer.
In short, buildings websites is tricky work - and, as technologies change, it's getting no easier. So I was interested to see this article on designing your website for all browsers, over at the bytestart.co.uk website... until I read it.
First, I couldn't understand why the story didn't mention Firefox - the hugely popular new(ish) open source web browser that's putting up a big challenge to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Around 20% of website readers are using something other than IE these days - roughly 15% of the audience using Firefox, with others like Opera and Apple's Safari making up the rest. Contrary to what this story says, the old Netscape doesn't really figure the figures I've seen recently.
Reading on, the piece seemed stuck in a timewarp... talking about testing your pages on Windows 98 and 2000 (but not XP) and mentioning that 12% of browsers use Macs (today's number - unless you're running a site devoted to Macs, or Linux - is less than 5%).
Why's all this stuff in a story published only earlier this week? A Google search, as ever, provided the answer... I suspect this story has been given away "free", and has been around a while, being published all over the web, including on this rather ugly page and this Christian website design tips site.
It seems to have been written by someone at this internet advertising and search optimisation business, which maybe explains why it was done in the first place - all those links (at the foot of the story) back to that site will do wonders for WS promotion's Google ranking.
Good for them, perhaps, but utterly useless if you're looking for sound advice on what to do online. And, the ultimate irony, the site where I first saw this story doesn't display properly in Mac browsers...
