How does your ADR website look in other browsers?

Browsers render your website differently from one another. Sometimes quite differently. Unfortunately.

This means that a website that looks professional and well organized in Safari, for example, can look in disarray in Internet Explorer, depending on the quality of your site design and individual browser’s standards.

There are two ways you can begin to sort out the impact of browser differences on your site visitors experience. The first is to get clear on the browsers your visitors and target audience use most. One way to find out is to use a good site analytics program, which I described in my earlier article, Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and What Do They Want?

I know, for example, that the vast majority of visitors to Mediator Tech use Internet Explorer, with Firefox a distant second and only a small number of folks using Safari or Opera.

The second way you can assess the impact is to view your site in other browsers. To do that in the “old days,” you had to download copies of other browsers on your computer and you were out of luck if you wanted to view a Mac browser using a PC, or vice versa.

Thankfully, it’s a whole lot easier now, still free, and so easy that anyone can do it. Here’s how:

• If you’re have a Windows machine and want to see how your site looks on a Mac operating system browser, try Browsrcamp.com.
• Another option with many choices is BrowserShots.org. When you enter the URL (website address) of a page on your website, a number of computers in their network load your page, take a screenshot of it in whatever browsers you specified, and upload the screenshots to the BrowserShots server for your viewing a few minutes later. Wait time depends on how busy their server is; my test took about 20 minutes to complete during morning business hours. Keep in mind that everyone else using their system can view your screenshots too, if they wish, though you may not care about that.

If your website looks pretty uniform across multiple browsers, then buy your site designer a good cuppa joe in thanks. If it doesn’t, you’ll get a sense of what needs to be cleaned up and how urgent that task is.

For example, if most of your visitors use IE and you find out that the right half of your site loads at the bottom of the screen in certain versions of IE, then you may have an urgent matter on your hands. But if your site looks great in IE and scrambled in Opera, and only a smattering of your visitors use Opera, then you have time to sort it out. Or you may choose not to bother at all.