Marketing Geek Show 68
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Phil shares his recent bombardment of questions about emails that don’t work and how your domain name might be the reason.
A discussion about domain names pursue and Ailsa again gets to whinge about losing one of her domain names to Russia.
The problems with the domain name and hosting one stop shop.
Ailsa speaks about the changing face of marketing and the impact it has on business administration.
Phil has an ‘idea’ about Internet Explorer 6 and how to overcome some of the limitations with it. View this site with IE6 to see if it works.
Ailsa reveals some dodgy practices for people jumping website development band wagon and encourages people to be buyer beware!
Best Job in the World Competition – applying social media principles to gain traditional media exposure.
What’s the latest? Ailsa and Phil discuss how everything has a lifecycle and Phil talks about a new search engine tool, Wolfram Alfa, that uses semantics and the impacts this might have.
Opening and closing music by Velvedene.
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Just a comment on IE6. As someone who does do website design and coding, I really don’t like IE6, however I do appreciate why people may not be able to upgrade. A site that I am designing at the moment is for the datacenre industry so are extremely high tech and security conscious. However the site still has 15% using IE6, neither high tech and the least secure browser.
The reason people are using IE6 is that they tend to have had developed internal applications based on the quirks of IE6 when it was by far the dominant browser. These people still have to use the same application and they can’t use any other browser but IE6 to access it. Microsoft in it’s wisdom also ensures that you can’t have multiple version on your system which means that they are stuck using an out of date browser (incidently all support is being dropped for it this year).
Sadly The people who have these applications and are using IE6 tend to be the corporates so are often the best customers which means that love it or hate it, we still need our sites to work with IE6.
There has been two approaches to handling older browsers recently. Graceful degredation ensured that on older browsers the content was still okay and the site was still workable. In a slight spin of this the latest buzz words are ‘progressive enhancement’ which means that you design for the low end, then add features for more capable browsers. Personally I think these approaches are actually just the same, as I don’t think anyone these days would start off with an IE6 design and add features.
Anyway, hope this is helpful. You are probably aware of all this and frustration has just set in!
btw IE8 is not without it’s issues. I have a problem at the moment where locally a site previews fine, but when I upload it the navigation breaks! Seems like from the web something is reinterpreting the CSS for IE8!?
Thanks for the comment Funky, (Mr Gorilla).
The reason I mentioned IE6 was that it is now worth checking stats to see how many of your users are still on it.
It seems a rapid decline is underway and as they fall below 10% there is a real chance to deal with it differently.
We do have code on the marketinggeek site that will disallow IE6 entirely. It throws up a screen and links to updates. The assumption is that users may be able to use Firefox or Safari.
If everyone did this there would be more rapid progress towards web standards.
Most of the problems are not styling issues which can be addressed, they are more coding errors so it is near impossible to support at times.
IE8 is an attempt to address the issues but the explaination was too “geek” for Ailsa and beyond the scope of this sites viewers I fear.
However this article may assist you in dealing with IE8.
http://farukat.es/journal/2009/05/245-ie8-and-the-x-ua-compatible-situation
Wolfram Alpha is a good news in the area of search engines. It has some advantages compared to the other search engines. Still, it is not the competition to Google or other search engines, since it uses totally different approach. It is more like dictionary or encyclopedia than search engine.
Internet Explorer 8 is very good because it is as stable as Opera. I hate the previous versions of IE like IE6 because it hangs frequently. |