The Importance of Cross-Browser Website Design
The are hundreds of web browsers throughout the world, but only five important players: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari (for Mac users), Google Chrome and Opera. Each browser implements the code used to create web pages [such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript] a little differently.
Why should you worry about differences in the way websites display in various browsers?
If your web designer creates a website and only checks the way it displays in Internet Explorer, the chances are, that when someone using one of the other popular browsers views your site, it may not be diplaying correctly. Some differences may only be cosmetic - the page looks different in IE and Firefox for example. Other differences can break the webpage and you may find that some important features of your site do not even work.
Statistics from www.w3schools.com show that, at the beginning of 2010, the most popular browser was Firefox, with 46.9% of internet surfers using this to browse web pages. That could mean that 46.9% of visitors to your site, do not see it as the web designer intended if they have not checked cross-browser compatibility.
Browser Statistics January 2009
2010 |
IE8 |
IE7 |
IE6 |
Firefox |
Chrome |
Safari |
Opera |
May |
16.0% |
9.1% |
7.1% |
46.9% |
14.5% |
3.5% |
2.2% |
All our websites are checked for cross-browser compatibility.
Every website created by Chadwick Design is built to the latest W3C standards and is checked in:
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 8
- Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Safari
- Opera
What this means is that you can be confident that visitors to your website will see it exactly as we designed it, regardless of the browser they used to reach it, and that all the functions will be working as they should. What's more, because your site is built to the latest standards it will be easy to maintain and develop in the future.
If you have an existing website which does not work properly in all the major browsers, give Chadwick Design a call on 01780 740893 to find out how we can help.
