If you’re like me, you routinely check and double-check and triple-check how your blog or website looks in different web browsers so every visitor has the same viewing experience, right?
Or do you smack some content together in one browser and assume it looks the same across the board?
Do you even KNOW what browsers people use when visiting your site?
Because when I see web pages such as the Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development’s unemployment insurance login screen that is optimized for the “Internet Explorer Version 6 browser,” I immediately realize they don’t have the slightest clue about their visitors.
You can see my highlighted text:
IE 6 was released in 2001. I’m willing to bet most of the browsing public seeking income are using fresher browser versions. Maybe I’m wrong.
I use Google Analytics to track my blog visitors. The data is impersonal and only shows behind-the-scenes metrics such as search engine keywords used to reach a page, incoming links referring people here, operating systems and browsers used, and so forth.
Here’s a snapshot of you and your peers at AriWriter over the past 30 days:
Like 51% of my viewers, I also use Firefox. (Oh, and my visits are excluded from these charts.)
Drilling down to the 34% with an Internet Explorer browser, here’s a fuller view:
See how a mere 567 visitors (out of some 6,000 total in the past month) are using IE 6?
If I was working in the state’s IT department (err, BT department per my recent post about the name change), I’d be installing tracking code and making changes.
How about you?
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Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 7 comments }
Ari,
I visited mass.gov last month. Many of them were still using IE 6.0, as they have no control over what browser is installed on their computer….so sad, but true.
I don’t know who is the audience for the above site, but if it is state workers then IE 6 is the way to go…
Josh
Joshua Porter´s last blog post..Are Designers also Marketers?
People who use dialup internet visit my site
I thought that was the most odd fact with my data.
That’s such a simple piece of advice that I feel silly admitting I have never really thought about. I use Firefox and look at everything based off of that. There have been a few times where our company’s blog wasn’t able to be viewed on IE for whatever reason. I fixed it but was not proactive in making sure the multiple browsers looked the same. Something simple I need to do after every post, and every change.
Ari: FYI, here at EPA IE 6 is still the standard browser.
On our Web site (www.epa.gov) in Oct. , IE overall was 55% of all traffic, split pretty evenly between IE 6 and 7. And EPAers were only 6% of all traffic, so most of that IE 6 use wasn’t us.
Firefox was 11%.
Your point stands: understand what browsers your visitors are using. But I wanted to alert you not to assume your visitors are the typical browser split.
Josh, the typical viewer of the DUA page is a non-employed citizen, not a state worker.
Blabweb: Nothing wrong with dialup; my grandma used that recently to connect to her email. As the saying goes, if it works…
Craig: You don’t need to browser check after every post. Do it when building a site and when making major changes, e.g. an image may be rendered one way in one browser and transparent in another. The newest browsers typically show it the same way, but older versions and/or those who disable Javascript may have oddities. So check by the average statistic of your majority viewers.
Jeffrey: Glad to see you stop by! I wonder if those numbers would change if you remove any visitor with a dot-gov address.
One of the mistakes many organisations make is to think that they are their customers.
These organisations then design products and services based on what staff would like, with little consideration for the real customers (outside the organisation).
With an intranet your staff ARE your customers, so it should be developed to the browser standards and needs of the majority of your staff (and this doesn’t mean the Executive team).
With a website you are designing for your EXTERNAL customers – aka NOT your staff.
Therefore the browser that your staff are forced to use is irrelevant. What is relevant is the browsers that your audience use.
And if it costs more to allow your staff to access your website, your organisation needs to have a think and decide whether it should upgrade to modern standards, or invest more in the website so it is compatible with old and unsupported browsers (such as IE6).
The same goes for PDF, Flash and other technologies used by the modern world. Meet your audience’s needs, not just your staff’s.
Cheers,
Craig
Craig Thomler´s last blog post..From the TV to the net – politics in evolution
@Craig: agreed. Design for your most important audiences. That doesn’t always go with the traffic numbers, though, so be careful. For example, in a federal agency, if your congressional oversight staff can’t see your site, life can get unpleasant, even if they’re a tiny fraction of 1% of traffic.
@Ari: Only 8% of our traffic is .gov, so even if you assume everyone in .gov is using IE6, that still leaves 17% of our overall traffic using it, and another 25% using IE7. Weird, I know, but that’s the way it is.
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