Shouldn't we ignore IE6 and IE7 users?
- by Sebi
Lately I created two webpages with a simple CMS for a a small club and a private person (http://foto.roser.li and http://www.ovlu.li/cms). I dont really understand much of HTML/PHP/CSS and all this web stuff, but it was enough to adapt the stylesheets and add some javascript functions and so on to make the pages to look more or less nice in firefox and IE8.
Nevertheles, if you open the pages with IE7 or IE6, particulary the second home page really looks terrible. So what should I do know? I don't have the know-how to adapt the stylesheets so that it looks good at such browsers. However if I check the statistics of the pages, i noticed that almost half of the visitors uses this kind of browsers.
I could put much effort in adapting the stylesheets to look good at all browser but while thinking about this I'm asking myself if this is really the best way. If all developers put effort in providing solutions for really old browsers (like e.g. the IE6), then people who use these brwoser dont have any incentives to update their browsers. Naturally, I as a provider of information should present the content in a readable form to my users, but were should i draw the line? I also saw that some users are visiting the pages with even IE5 or IE4... but I really can't think of a way how to adapt the content in a suitable form for these very old brwosers.
I would appreciaed any hints how to handle this balancing between putting much effort into developing a version for very old brwosers and the necessity of providing content to all users which want to visits my homepages. Im also interested in your thoughts about they idea that putting effort in adapting the content for old browsers prevents the users from updating their browsres because they don't see any need.
