http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

You got a little off target there, Matt. And I don’t disagree that my site needs rebuilding. Rather it is for that very reason that I detest IE6. Moving out of the dark ages (tables and flash dependency) shouldn’t be like moving right back into the dark ages (CSS nightmares due to IE6 noncompliance).

At the very least, I would expect that web designers who choose not to support IE6 are at least building sites to modern web standards.

You can’t really have a strong position on this debate if you’re not.

When you’ve rebuilt your site so that it’s accessible, table-less, validates and works if Flash is disabled, please come back and let me know so we can discuss your views in more detail.

Group 1 and 2 need to get off the stick and upgrade.

Local government has a set pot of money. They also tend to end up with legacy systems (usually databases running core systems such as procurement, auditing, payroll etc) that partially interact with IE (partially, but it’s an important part) that don’t play well with new browsers including IE7 and upwards.

There are potentially new updates to these legacy systems, but with a set pot of money that comes out of tax-payers pockets and often those updates not offering much more fnuctionality, it’s very clear why such organisations don’t jump to upgrade to the latest browser, and in a lot of cases have a 5+ year plan that they have to put in place before making a switch, and these database systems can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds – that’s your money going into something that may be slightly older than the latest web 2.0 doohickey built by a bedroom coder, sure, but it works fine for them and may not need to be upgraded for many years.

Now imagine each local government in the UK has at least several hundred employees using such software. Now times that several hundred by the several hundred local government offices there are in the UK. Lots of money huh? Your money as well.

Now you see the problem with this misleading form of upgrade message?

On my own website I used a little bit of Javascript to display a customised message in the body of the homepage. It warns that they’re using an out of date browser and that there are potential security issues sure, but it doesn’t pretend to be an authority and clicks through to an info page telling them why they should consider upgrading and giving some info on the potential alternatives.

If I had a website selling software to organisations such as local governments, I’d probably still have the message, but tone it down considerably to be friendly and more of a suggestion (like when you visit Google in IE6) so as not to panic hundreds of office workers who don’t know any better and can’t do anything about it on their locked-down PC’s anyway. I’d also personally be selling the upgrade message on the back of something like a free upgrade in my software that makes it compatible with IE7 and that’s easy to implement.

The reason that this doesn’t happen in general is that database systems that interact with the web generally don’t have the web-facing aspects of their systems designed by a designer, but rather a programmer who may not know his web standards from his packed lunch. From past experience, those sorts of companies also don’t like to give out updates for free as that’s not how they make money.

So in my local government scenario that almost certainly applies to a stack of other business types, so would you really want to be scaring workers poo-less and taking potentially hundreds of hours country-wide away from them doing their jobs, tying up support departments with requests that they can’t do anything about when it’s the tax payer who’s actually going to be paying for the panic or even the costly yet unneccessarily upgrade? Really?

Before anyone mentions security, I’d like to mention that in the scenario above the web-facing aspect of the important bit of software is actually completely internal (intranet-accessible-only) and that there are plenty of other systems in place taking care of IE6’s security issues.

Going back to a designer’s viewpoint, I recently updated a website that gets a few hundred thousand hits a month and in excess of 17,000 unique visitors. I decided initially not to cater for IE6 as Google Analytics was telling me that IE6 was only used by 5% of the visitors to this particular website. When I thought about it again after designing it without IE6 in mind, I had one of those real “D’OH” moments as I realised that 5% of 17,000 is still 850 unique individuals, some of whom may be regular visitors contributing on the forums and thus contributing valuable content to the site that then could not use my website.

So what did I do? I left all the nice PNG transparencey images in, made sure they were all controlled by CSS and created an IE6 stylesheet that loads up a bunch of GIF images instead with no fancy effects. I double-checked all the Javascript worked with IE6 too (pretty much a given since they were all using jQuery and it’s very good at being backwards-compatible). I’m going to put an upgrade message on for IE6 users soon but I’m in no rush to do so as it now works just fine for them.

Bottom line – for a 150+ page website, because I did everything with stylesheets, making it IE6 compatible only added a day onto the development of a project that took several months to complete – that’s nothing and certainly wasn’t a waste of my time. There’s advantages for IE6 users to upgrade (the site will look nicer and there are some other fnuctions that I want to add that will ony work on modern browsers, but they won’t render the main parts inoperable for IE6 users) and I will put in a suggestion for them to upgrade, but ONLY on the homepage so it doesn’t follow them around the site and turn them off visiting ever again. 850 unique visitors is too many to be turning away from any website for any reason if you can help it.

So yeah, there’s some food for thought.

Give it a few more years, and nobody will be using IE6. Just wait it out. It’s not like it’s hard to design with IE6 in mind or even adds that much extra time if you know what you’re doing. It also doesn’t impact on the nice stuff you can give to those on modern browsers unless you let it.

One final word, if cost is an issue to you as a designer, just make sure you consider it in your quotations and timescales. Job’s a good’un.

The IE6 update wording is wrong, absolutely. I don’t think anyone here is really arguing that.

But would I use it on a professional site? No. Instead, I try to limit the technology (as I am mainly a corporate web designer) so it looks great when it can and through the use of one or two “plug-ins”, make it degrade gracefully. Why? Because the client is paying for me to make a website look good and communicate it’s message, not tell potential customers that they aren’t up to date while diluting the experience and potentially losing customers.

BUT, in saying all that, I run a club website with a version of that message running on it. Wording is similar but more casual, certainly not alarmist. I use this message because it isn’t a corporate site, no-one paid for it and no-one will lose money by telling people that their browser sucks and should upgrade.

I had a guy email me, demanding that I take down the message because “he tried updating once and it didn’t work” and that it bugged him. I simply replied (tactfully) that IE6 is old software, didn’t support some standards, had security flaws and he’d get so much more with a newer browser. I also told him (not so tactfully) that I wouldn’t be turning it off so he should try it again. He dutifully updated and thanked me profusely for pushing him to upgrade.

So maybe the question is how can we tell users without putting our clients work in jeopardy?