My mind keeps drifting to two topics as I read around the ol’ internet. CSS3 and IE6.
It’s “So Awesome!” and “Shoot me now.”
One (CSS3) represents all that is good and holy about the future of web design. The other (as well as its counterparts IE7 and IE8) represents the reason we can’t actually take the future and make it present.
But both have something in common: the need to let your site analytics do the talking.
Feel free to use CSS3 all you want. By all means, don’t support IE6. You’ll get no argument from me as a user.
But as someone responsible for a website, there’s a greater obligation.
Every user matters
Every user matters no matter what browser they come in with and you have to ensure their experience gives them a chance to be apart of the overall goal of the site. If your design is less optimal for IE6 users, then conversions will probably be lower at that level. After all, your design is built with a purpose and every flaw that gets introduced to that design represents a loss in business.
Are you willing to live with that? Take a look at your analytics and find out.
I’m currently working on a project for a site that has 68% of all users in the past 3 months using a version of IE. What’s worse is over 13% are using IE6. Wow! That’s a lot of people coming to the site that I have to consider whether I like it or not.
As you can see, if I don't support IE6 for this project, I'm ignoring a significant amount of traffic. For example, if the site in this example was converting 10% of all visitors, that's 17 lost leads per month. Given the value of one lead for this business, it's a huge deal.
It’s virtually pointless to use CSS3 and ignoring the layout in IE6 is like saying, “no, I don’t want the money represented by 13% of my potential customers.”
Now, I know if I wanted to use CSS3, I could use alternative stylesheets or just let the design degrade as gracefully as possible, but I see no point in fattening the site because less than 1/3 of the users would benefit.
And with IE6, the choice is either let it go or start hacking. In this case, I’m hacking. For another site, I might say let it be. Whatever the case, the analytics will make that decision for me.
Note: Before you get all huffy and say, “your site looks like crap in IE6!” just know that’s a personal choice I made. If the analytics start to tell me to reconsider, I will. I actually just need a solution for all the .png files I used and it would be fine. In fact, I actually switched a couple to jpgs because of problems in IE7 and IE8.
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