Is Your Website Cross Browser Compatible?
I recently wrote a blog posting about a website I visited that didn’t look the same in Internet Explorer 8 as it did in version 7. The blog article was about making sure your website is capable of handling different browsers. Cross Browser Compatibility is very important for every website, no matter how big or small it is.
Making a website available for as many browsers as possible is a tremendously necessary part of designing a website. Imagine your customers come to your website to find out information about your services. However, when they get there they can’t see some of the information correctly because things are in the way. Maybe parts of the site don’t sit in the same place on Firefox or Safari, but they look fine on Internet Explorer. Wachovia’s website has issues with Internet Explorer 8. I found that transferring money between accounts is nearly impossible because the account selection box moves behind the navigation bar, blocking itself from being selected for transfer.
You want your visitors to come to your site and interact with it the same way across the board. You should ensure that your website is designed to accommodate as many people as possible. We do that using the often mentioned web standards.
Best Viewed With….
Don’t expect your visitors to use the same browser you do. I typically use Internet Explorer, my wife uses Firefox. Most of our visitors use these two browsers as well, but there is a good percentage that comes to our site with Apple's Safari browser. We don’t expect our visitors to use something else to view our website. In some cases, they can’t.
The Nintendo Wii uses the Opera browser. Anyone surfing the web with the Wii must use the Opera browser to do so, and if a site doesn’t render correctly on Opera, they have no choice but to look elsewhere. If you are a chiropractor with website that isn’t cross browser compatible, the person who can’t see it will look elsewhere for chiropractic services. That’s not what you want at all.
Use Web Standards
Web Standards are the set of rules defined largely in part by the W3C that describe how elements should be coded. If you differ from this coding, browsers may not react the same. In the case of the site I mentioned in my blog posting, the footer background graphics did not remain at the bottom of the page. Instead they moved up the page behind the text, making the content of the pages unreadable. It became (and continues to be) a mess which could have been avoided.
A good way to make sure you're sticking to the defined standards is to run your website through the W3C Validator. The online tool will scan the code of your website and look for errors. If none exist, you are given a green response page and links to images you can put on your page to show it's validity. On the other hand, if errors do exist, the red response page will show you where the errors are present so you can fix your code. This has been a great help to web designers who don't want errors.
The use of web standards can greatly improve your websites visibility. You’re essentially opening your site up to more visitors. With any website, you want traffic and the best way to get it is to make your site accessible.
The purpose of this article is to stress the importance of cross browser websites. You wouldn’t put your store in a building with a doggy door for a front entrance. Making your website as accessible as your physical store is very important. If you don’t, there is no telling how much business you could be losing.
I am the founder of Asheboro Creative. I'm a PHP and MySQL developer that thinks CSS is the greatest thing since the knife that sliced bread. I am a stickler for validating our websites and love to check out design galleries.
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