Design for grandma too!

So I proud myself that all websites I develop for my clients are cross browser. I usually test them on different platforms, different screen resolutions, different browsers. I use my own resources to do that, or I use online businesses that provide exactly these screening services so that you can test your site on more than 50 browsers.

However, there's a point where I stop looking back. That is IE 5.5 for Internet Explorer, Firefox 1.5 for Firefox, and so on. Yesterday I took a look through one of my site's logs and I have found that somebody visited my site using IE 2. Yes, I am not kidding. The operating system was Windows 95!

You would lie yourself if you'd say that such antique operating systems and browsers are not in use anymore. The fact is that they are. The basic question is have you ever thought how your site looks on IE 2? Or some early versions of Firefox? I haven't done so until yesterday, but I will now try to get my hands on some PC that I can use to make those tests for IE 2 and alike.

And what if you site is not even readable on such a browser? Of course the percent of such users is under 1%, but what if that was a client that would have bought services of thousands of dollars? One solution I think that could work is using a design similar to one generated for printing the webpage, but applied by default for old browsers. Using javascript to check the browser wouldn't probably work, because javascript was invented in '95, and I highly doubt that '95 browsers use it.

Conclusion

Perhaps you shouldn't design for browsers that are this old (more than 10 years), but I think that 30 more minutes to develop a style sheet that will make the site usable for such browsers is time well spent. Overall, this will only show your professionalism.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know what you think about it in the comments. If you liked this one, you can stay updated to upcoming articles via the rss feed.

Published on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:13 am in code, usability.

About Bogdan Pop

Bogdan Pop is a young Romanian entrepreneur who runs WebRaptor. He is a web developer with awesome design skills, who enjoys writing about everyday's work and usability. He relaxes by taking photos every once in a while and by mixing french electronic music. Connect with him via Twitter.