The beauty of owning a website is that you can reach people – whether visitors or clients – in any country in the world. The only drawback in your plan for “world domination” could be the exact thing that will also make you succeed: variety.
While considering the fact that there are millions (if not billions) of people online at any given moment, you also realize that they could possibly be using every kind of device on the market today as well as every type of web browser out there.
This means your site will have to factor in all the devices and software if it is to do what it is supposed to do: deliver information and/or allow you to conduct your business.
And then there is the matter of Google Inc. and its ever-evolving ranking criteria. Apart from things like relevance and originality the search engine has (as of this year) decided to give points for the visibility of a website depending on what the company calls “view-ability metrics”.
What it all comes down to is that your website should be as viewable as possible on as many devices and browsers as humanly possible. Therefore, let has have a look at why your website might not be viewable on all browsers because this will (hopefully) make it easier for you to make any adjustments or correct any bugs that could be the cause of errors.
The Design
A simple reason your site is not visible – whether totally or partially – could be because of the way it was designed. The golden word in ensuring cross-browser visibility is “simplicity”. The more coding is jammed into a site, the more complicated it makes rendering it – thus resulting in its poor visibility.
If you’re creating a new website go for the “clean and simple” look. Use as few elements as possible while writing your markup language. Once you’re done, run your site through some tests to validate your website coding including all HTML and CSS.
If you’re working with a site that is already up and running, you might need to create a sandbox or dummy version of it and tweak and tinker with it until you achieve the required results. Once done, you can replace the old site with the newly finished one.
Not All Browsers Work in the Same Way
One thing you need to always remember is that every single browser out there has at least one character that is unique to it. While they all try to present your website in a format that is (in their books) an optimal one, the fact remains that they are created by different companies who do things their own way.
No matter what you do, there may never be a site design that will meet each and every requirement of all the browsers out there. In that case, your best option would be to look at the stats behind your site and figure out which kind of browsers are used by most of the people who visit your site and choose to design your site for those three of four most popular ones.
Make sure you do not simply ignore your visitors who use the other browsers. At the very least use code to detect what browser they are using and if it isn’t among the ones you have optimized your site for, let them know they would be better served by announcing “This website is best viewed using [browser name goes here].”
Don’t Use New Technology Simply because you Can
One thing you need to remember is that the average person out there will not be a tech expert who updates their gadgets and software every time a new version of it comes out. Do you remember good old Windows XP? Microsoft has washed its hands of that operating system and it has been a while since it discontinued support for it. But there are hundreds of thousands of computers and laptops out there that still run that operating system because it was (and in some instances, still is) the most popular OS the company ever made.
Website design language and technology has improved in leaps and bounds since the days of Win XP. And that means any site that is created using these new technologies might not be compatible with the old Internet Explorer versions that came with Win XP. If your site was designed using any of these software or uses plugins and apps that aren’t compatible with the old OS versions, it could cut down on the number of visitors to your site.
So, just because a software company announces a newer version of something doesn’t mean you should drop everything and embrace it. Think of all the people that are still using older versions of web browsers and you will know to take it slow with technology updates.
Finally, a good way to gather some important information is to actually ask your visitors to leave a comment if they find something amiss. The feedback will be helpful in pinpointing your drawbacks. Just don’t be too slow in patching it all up.
