Redesign your site for Firefox now
If you are looking for arguments to convince your marketing department that you need to use web standards for your company website, Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now (Yes Firefox) at MarketingSherpa.com is a good read.
The article brings up the major marketing and financial benefits of using web standards, and can be summed up as marketing speak for “Rebuild your website with web standards to make it more profitable”. It’s nice to see an article like this written specifically for marketers.
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Comments
A nice article which will probably help Firefox gain momentum in a professional guild which is rather resistant to W3C standards evangelists, but I consider it misses the point with the second half of its arguments.
They are absolutely right with their assumption that coding cross-browser compliant javascript is an issue which adds revenue possibilities to a site.
The other claimed benefits are largely stemming from redesigning a site without presentational markup using CSS (especially items 1, 4, 5 and 6 on their list: search engine friendliness, savings on bandwidth, reduced download time, small screen / portabel device display) and can not primarily be attributed to a design geared towards Firefox or any other standard compliant browser.
One can easily build a perfectly standards compliant website using old-style tag soup and table based layouts, and this site will exhibit just one or two of the claimed improvements.
Hehe. I think my site needs a face-lift for Internet Explorer. But yea, I get the point of the article :)
I currently have a 30% share of IE users.
Oh, and btw, this statement in the article:
Well, technically, that's not really true. But cute. Good looking sites on Firefox != Good SEO. Nonetheless, I'm some project manager will pick this up and think it's true.
Just like Jesus said:
Oh. One final thing. Roger: I'm really starting to get pissed at this comment form. You must have disabled the word "In-dia" (minus the dash)from your comments. Thus I can't plug in my email and website since it contains Dust[in-Dia]z.com (purposely marked up with extra syntax to get it by).
The article is meant for marketers, remember ;-).
Dustin: Sorry. Should be fixed now. There's been a lot of spam about india this and india that lately.
Posting comments here is not as easy as I would like it to be. Maybe I should just give up on the idea of commenters being able to use any kind of markup.
I don't have the time to upgrade or change the CMS (Movable Type). I also can't remove my spam filters since I'd have to spend hours every day cleaning up comment spam.
If anyone has any good ideas on how to improve things, I'm all ears.
If only clients would read this type of thing, but from my experience they would need some kind of translator.
"What the hell is a Firefox?"
"At home I go on AOL"
"I use Internet Explorer to explore the Internet, why would I need a Firefox?"
They just don't know what it is, sadly.
BTW, some uggly news about Firefox 1.5 memory usage.
Great link.
If you look at this infamous link: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/ and go to the third page or so, it has - basically - the same information.
Also, there is an icon and link that Google will supply Web masters and others who manage sites that, once clicked, will give the referrer one dollar. The link is for people to change their Internet browser from IE to FF.
It's not great, but it's a start.
Hmm.. V-E-I-N - as in what your blood flows through ?? The word is V-A-I-N ... mangling the English language in a marketing article is really sad.
I design my sites using Firefox as my main test bed, so they are already 'Firefox friendly'. I'm glad someone besides the techy magazines and the web standards groups are saying something like this.
Is it worth mentioning that the nice people at MarketingSherpa don't practise what they preach? Table-based layout and the lack of a declared language leaves me with those irritating little black diamonds all over the page.
I'm concerned that the world will fall into the same trap as before: browser-centric design. FireFox is not the only modern browser, and modern browsers are not immune to bugs.
Yeah, you now really need to redesign for Firefox 1.5. considering some new CSS bugs. Just look at this form in almost any browser and Firefox 1.5 and compare results.
Scott: That is definitely a scenario I don't want to see. But the chances that a site designed for Firefox works in other browsers are much greater than if it had been designed for IE, like so many current sites are.
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