Getting your site to play well with all browsers

A customer is visiting your e-commerce Web site. She's decided to do more online shopping this holiday season to save on fuel and find the lowest prices. She's using a Mac running Safari, but your site is optimized for Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and your development budget is mainly focused on preparing for IE 8. She selects a few products and heads for the shopping cart, but the "checkout" button isn't available. Frustrated, she's off to another site. You've lost the sale.

IT managers are now working feverishly to avoid this type of incident, which underscores a current fact of life for Web site designers, Web application developers and your entire IT department: Web pages can look and perform differently from one browser to another.

With Internet Explorer's dominance waning and Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and others growing in market share, plus with multiple older browser versions still in use, managing browser diversity is becoming increasingly challenging. This is not your average browser transition.

The new generation of browsers signals a major change in the way browsers operate. In the future, when the entire Internet is better optimized for these new browsers, we'll all have a faster, better-looking, easier-to-develop Web site experience with more exciting new applications. But the next year or two will be a difficult transition. Not staying ahead of these changes will mean lost customers and lost traffic.

In the current economic environment, your business can't afford to lose even the smallest portion of your audience who use browsers for which your site is not optimized. In this article we'll review the significant changes in the 2008 class of browsers and detail the optimal site measurements needed to gauge the real impact on your Web business.

Read the full article here.