It seems that those of us who are looking for the shiniest new technology objects seldom look back at the applications we have kicked to the curb. So it is with web browsers. I have been addicted to Google’s amazing Chrome browser for quite a while now. I browse in Firefox occasionally, but Internet Explorer? Didn’t everyone leave IE behind years ago? To be honest, I have only used IE for the proprietary Realtor tools that, for some reason, are written to perform only in IE. Otherwise, I doubt if I would have would fired it up except by accident.
The other day, I accidentally brought up the new version of my real estate site https://spake.com in IE, and I was appalled. A site that looked pretty clean in Chrome and Firefox, was distorted as a website Picasso might have designed when displayed in IE. (Too bad I didn’t get a screen shot) To my surprise, Google Analytics told me that 35.56% of my site visitors this year used a version of Internet Explorer. Time for panic! Over a third of the visitors to my business website, were getting unformatted, and partially unusable content. No wonder IE generated the highest bounce rates of any of the major browsers opening spake.com.
While I was waiting for the experts I had frantically texted and emailed to have a look, and during a break from reading everthing I could find on the web about how WordPress interacts with IE, I found the problem in sidebar widget that had messed up a large portion of the style sheet. What a relief.
This post is not intended to be a slam of Internet Explorer – I love Microsoft. It’s just a reminder to those who have blogs or websites to take the precaution of checking them in other browsers. I feel embarrassed that I didn’t take care of this simple step. Hopefully I haven’t lost all that 35,56% of visitors forever.
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