Search Marketing efforts don’t end when a consumer arrives at your site. We’ll spare you the you can lead a horse (or pony) to water. analogy. You can have great SERP placement and an outstandingly comprehensive PPC campaign – but ultimately a visitor’s decision to buy or balk will be made after they get to your storefront.
Site content, and how intuitively or accurately it is displayed, is the major conversion determining factor. It is obviously very important when designing your website that you have first identified your target market. Likewise it is integral to recognize the marketing advantages tied to being aware of what web browsers your audience is likely to be using – and accomodating for as many of them as possible through your coding and design.
Internet Explorer has enjoyed a position as the most popular browser for many years. Increasingly beloved competitor FireFox, however, is making a quick and aggressive run at the crown. The FireFox elevator pitch is that it strives to interpret HTML, CSS and other languages the way they were meant to be seen and read, while IE is more likely to display inconsistencies. Which of the two remain the most loyal to coding standards is ultimately, however, open to personal interpretation.
Regardless of where your loyalties lie, design and coding elements that display ‘correctly’ (i.e. the way they were intended to appear by a developer) in IE will often times appear ‘incorrectly’ in FireFox – and vice versa. Throughout the design process, make sure to test your design and coding in any browsers that you feel your audience may use. PC browsers with considerable market share include Internet Explorer, FireFox, AOL, Netscape, and Opera. And make sure you don’t neglect to test Mac browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, and Camino. Making sure your site is appearing as intended will prevent you from having to make large edits to the site down the road or losing potential customers due to questionable browser translation.
The competition between browsing applications has been heating up lately, with Microsoft preparing to launch Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla about ready to offer FireFox 2.0, and Opera suiting up to launch Opera 9.0. All three browsers are currently in the beta testing stages and are available to download for the public to test out. The good news in all this is that developers have been making a concerted push to create uniform standard-compliant browsers. With a renewed shift towards compliance, it’s certain that creating websites with consistent aesthetic components will be less of a struggle going forward. Until that day comes, multi-application testing on both PCs and Macs is going to remain an SEM best practice.