Soft launch a few weeks back, hard launch next week with military and government bigwigs set to attend the event. What is there to be depressed about?
Well, since we soft-launched, Google Analytics has been the bearer of some fairly distressing news.
Internet Explorer 6.0 46.54%.
Ugh.
See, our site is primarily aimed at a military audience, and the MOD's internal systems, unbelievably still use IE6.
I'll do everything I can to try and persuade them to change their ways.
Meanwhile, here's an article I penned for A List Apart last year. They didn't publish it, but I got an enouraging rejection letter at least.
And the fact that almost 50% of people accessing my site (compared to about 1% of total web users) are still using this 12 year old browser means that, amazingly, it's still relevant.
Five killer arguments for doing things the right way
You don’t need to be told why IE6 sucks.
Whether you’ve been in the industry for years and saw it all
before with Netscape 4, or
you’re a fresh-faced youngster to whom modern web standards are second nature,
you just know that IE6 sucks and are probably counting down the days
until it disappears forever.
It sucks. A truth universally acknowledged within the web
development community for years.
Of course, the web development community != the customers,
stakeholders and business owners upon whom we ultimately depend for our
livelihood.
Whether you work independently, for a digital agency, or as
part of an in-house team for a big organisation, you’ll probably find yourself
in ‘Us and Them’ situations from time to time.
Until late 2011, IE6 was still the default desktop browser for
most staff at the organisation where I work, and getting anything else
installed required a special process and sign-off by line-management.
Fortunately we’ve won the battle and everybody is now using
a better browser, but it’s been a tough fight bridging the chasm between what
makes sense to us, and what makes sense to ‘Them’.
Because they do
need to be told why IE6 sucks.
Arguments about W3C standards, box model implementations and
the efficiency of CSS3 gradients compared to images simply won’t make sense to ‘Them’
in their world.
But by focussing on a more psychological approach, there are
a few persuasive arguments that frequently work.
Here are five I’ve tried and tested:
- The ‘technology over 10 years old’ argument.
2001 sure seems like a long time
ago, doesn’t it? Can you remember the TV you owned back then?
Yep, one of those huge, bulky things
I’ll bet. Remember how fuzzy the picture was? Who’d want to go back to that?
What about your phone? Yep,
didn’t even have a camera in those days. Probably just had a very simple monochrome
display. The only app, if you could even call it an ‘app’, was ‘Snake’.
Today we have huge, ultra-flat HD
TVs and smartphones. Would you expect the latest high definition programmes or
smartphone apps to work exactly the same on the technology you had in 2001?
That’s right - you’re a smart person, you understand this.
By the way, IE6 was released in
2001 – the technology is now over ten years old. Is it really reasonable for
users of ten year old technology to expect the best possible experience online?
- The ‘time is money’ argument
I heard we were looking to cut
costs, and thought you might like to know that it takes a long time to write
all the specialist code to make things work in IE6.
As a smart person, you’ll know
that if we stopped supporting it, we’d be able to complete projects more quickly
and to a higher standard, or operate with a smaller headcount.
That’s right, we could do things
far more quickly and cost-effectively if we concentrated on standards-compliant
code.
- The ‘Microsoft doesn’t like IE6 either’ argument
Microsoft accepts that while IE6
may have been relatively advanced when it was launched, things have moved on
significantly since then. They even employ
people with the specific remit of moving users away from IE6.
They have a guy who gives
presentations at conferences playing this self-deprecating video
and explaining that his bonus is dependent on the IE6 market share falling. Martin
Beeby, his name is. Follow him on Twitter.
He knows his stuff.
You wouldn’t want to be
supporting a product that has lost the confidence of its own creator, would you?
- The ‘Check this out!’ argument
Hey, come and look at these cool sites.
Yep, pretty slick aren’t they? You like the animation and the rounded boxes?
That’s right, no Flash required and 100% accessible.
Could we do something similar?
Hmm, well I suppose we could. We’d have to start optimising for
standards-compliant browsers though a ‘progessive enhancement’ approach, but
that’s not a problem. People with older browsers will still be able to see the
content.
- The ‘Free positive publicity from Developer community’ argument
If we develop this high-profile
site using the latest technologies, it’ll get noticed outside our industry and
could lead to some really good free publicity.
Geeks like to tweet about sites
that use HTML5 and CSS3 in engaging, elegant ways.
Yeah, we could carry on using a
bunch of old CSS hacks to optimise the site for IE6, but that wouldn’t capture
the attention of the wider web community and at worse would give us a
reputation for being behind the times. We don’t want that, do we? No, sir.
Not all the arguments will work on all the people all of the
time, but knowing how to approach browser support discussions with your
paymasters from one of these angles should give you a significant edge.
There is a bit of subtle, psychological manipulation involved
and a few weasel words here and there, but don’t feel guilty about using them.
Getting people away from IE6 is a very good thing.
About the author
When he’s not playing bass or blogging about food and drink,
Benjamin Nunn lives and works in London, England, leading the web production
team at the UK’s Money Advice Service.
He has been editing, designing and building web sites since the late 1990s but
still hasn’t figured exactly how the <cite> tag is supposed to be used.
He sports a small beard.
February 2012
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