In building the website for my work I’ve experienced a hiccup or two, but it is up and running (www.cibus.co.th). Since opening it up to customers I’ve disovered that the site doesn’t render correctly in any Internet Explorer below 8, and even that only works in compatability mode.
So the question I’ve been tossing around in my mind is should I bother fixing it or should I tell customers to either use a different browser or upgrade to IE8. The reality of the situation is that many of our customers are hotels which more than likely have a very strict IT policy that would not allow users to upgrade to the latest IE so I needed to consider the very real possibility of fixing it. But first, the stats.
How many people viewing our website run browsers that cannot render it correctly? According to the wonderful world of webstats that is Google Analytics a total of 27% of visitors to our website run either IE7 or IE6, far too high a percentage for me to simply ignore.
Next I was faced with a problem inherent to Internet Explorer. Unlike other browsers it’s only possible to have a single version of IE on any one machine so the development of sites that works on all can be quite involved. Enter Sun VirutalBox!
This handy FREE program can create a virtual machine that enables you to install an instance of an OS and whatever else you might desire in a sandbox environment, which is allowing me to test the site in IE7 (I’m considering ignoring the 9% of users on IE6).
