@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.

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

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.

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.

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?