The bane of any web designer is trying to make their beautiful website cross compatible with all the different browsers out there. Of course, some don’t really care and say if you’re not using Internet Explorer at 1024*768 resolution you can take a long walk off a short plank.

But for the web designers that care, trying to have your website looking perfect in all browsers can become a little tricky, especially the more complicated your website becomes. With Firefox entering the market, no web designer can continue to hide behind the browser share statistics that used to heavily favour Internet Explorer. Firefox now has 35.4% of the market and has had over 25% for almost two years now.

Even with small market share, it can still impact your business. I’m currently working with a client whose target market is students. His current website has simple drop down menus, but they don’t work in Safari, making his website unusable. While it only has 1.6% of the market, most of that market will be students. My graphic designer uses a Mac, and a lot of young students do to.

As for browser resolution, believe it or not, people are still using 800*600. I was pitching to another client the other day and pulled up her current website to talk about it. Nicely designed website, but on her 800*600 resolution she had to scroll horizontally to see all the content. I don’t know how a web design company got away designing a website that looked crap on the paying clients computer, but that’s the industry unfortunately.

But I digress. I have to go fix my website in Firefox again, apparently some recent changes have broken it. The joy of browser compatibility.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Design, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.