I learned a lesson the hard way this week. I was working on another one of my blogs, Jake’s Outdoors, and decided that it was time for a face lift. I spent hours searching for just the right theme, and then worked on altering it to make it unique to my blog. I got all of my advertising set up and had everything looking and working just like I wanted it. But, I noticed that I wasn’t getting any comments, and my hits on the site were going down steadily. Finally, I opened the site up in Internet Explorer, and found that the theme didn’t work! It looks terrible in IE, as everything is misaligned on the page, and my 3rd column (the reason I wanted to change the theme in the first place) was not showing up right at all.
This was a valuable lesson, as much of my traffic still uses IE. I recommend downloading Firefox as it seems to be a better browser, and has a lot more functionality, but many people are still hooked on the Microsoft product. Maybe I will try to make the case for Firefox in another post.
This problem had a huge impact on my site. When I went back and looked at my statistics for the site, I found that about 60% of all of my visitors were still using IE, as opposed to only about 24% using Firefox. The rest were a mixture of browsers such as Mozilla and Safari. I don’t know how my site appeared to these users as I don’t have Mozilla installed, and I don’t have a Mac to test Safari.
The lesson learned is that you need to make sure that your sites look good in all browsers. Make sure that your code works the same in both Firefox and in IE, as that will be what the majority of your visitors will be using. Most of the themes for WordPress will work fine in any browser. Somehow, I managed to find the one out of 5000 available that won’t work. So, I don’t recommend the “Peace” theme for WordPress. It just doesn’t work well in IE, and I don’t like to put any kind of disclaimer at the top of my blogs, such as “works best in…” or “looks best in…”
Most sites that have themes available for download also have a link for you to test, or demo the theme. Be sure to check the demo in both Firefox and IE so that you don’t end up wasting all the time that I have over the last week!
