It’s been a long time since Microsoft defeated Netscape in the Great Browser War of the Late 90′s. Since then, different web browsers have bloomed like wildflowers along the content-rich information superhighway. So why are you still hailing IE as the reigning champ?
There’s more to the world wide web than Internet Explorer and if you have a website that’s not optimized for various browsers, you’re possibly annoying (and losing) many customers. According to the stats compiled over at w3schools.com, the most popular trends in browser usage are highest among Chrome, Firefox, and IE, with Chrome currently leading. Optimizing your site for at least these three markets is a good start.
If you want to see how some visitors may see your site, Google has a nifty tool that will show you. While this tool doesn’t necessarily help you format your page across all browsers, it can at least show you how much of your page is visible to a visitor who may be using a different size viewing screen.
Here are a few other free or trial tools you can explore that can help you establish how portable your site is across different web browsers:
- Usabilla – Helps determine problem areas within your web design
- UserPlus – Provides your site with an objective “usability score”
- BrowserShots.org – Shows how your website looks to users with different operating systems, JavaScript capabilities, devices, browsers, and screen sizes
Consider the abundance of mobile devices that require a much more streamlined version of your site in order to please visitors. If you don’t have a mobile version of your website, have you had a chance to view the full version on a tablet or smart phone? Is it hard to navigate? Is there a lot of scrolling involved? If so, you’re definitely losing out to more accessible sites in your industry.
Mobile web users are, go figure, on the go. As such, they want quick bursts of information that provide them with the most enlightenment in the smallest amount of time possible. If it takes to long to knock around in a confusing version of your full site on a small screen, they will opt against it. Be sure you have an effective mobile version of your site so that you can remain relevant to a demographic that is largely becoming the majority of web users today.
Ensuring that your website is visible across various browsers and platforms not only provides an overall better experience for the user, it increases the amount of traffic to your site as well as your potential for sales conversions.
