Sunday is football day for me, so posting on Sunday is rare… but this is really a hoot:
I was looking through my referral stats for this site and noticed a few people found my post about the teamsoftwareusa.net software scam. As I do on occassion, I went to Google and ran a quick search for one of the referring searches, just to see how the site ranked. It was 3rd or 4th for the particular search – doesn’t matter for our purposes here. Just below my site was another site that is pulling a feed from my site, www.seofeeds.com. I clicked on their link to see what they had, as I had not heard of that site before. This is what I got:
Now I love FireFox as much as the next guy, but that said I do probably split my internet surfing 50/50 with FireFox and Internet Explorer. For me FireFox takes and extra minute to load on my PC, and sometimes I’m just not that patient. But still – check out general internet usage stats and even though FireFox has really burst onto the scene, you’ll still see that 90% of people are still using MS Internet Explorer. FireFox gets roughly 8-10% with a very small percentage (maybe 2% or so) for Opera, Safari and other browsers.
Why in the world would you design a site that is only compatible with FireFox? You’re missing 90% of the market!!!
Come on people! Shoot I’ll even give you that with that SEO-targeted site maybe that market is not like the general market – and perhaps you’ll even get a 50/50 split between IE and FireFox on that site – but still, why make the site useless for literally half or more of your audience? That’s about as ridiculous a thing I can think of.
And even if you did do that, at least let the site run with whatever small quirks it might have in IE – maybe it will look a little funny or something, but to allow absolutely no way to view the site at all using the browser that the vast majority of people use (whether you like it or not – whether its a good browser or not, you can’t debate that the market is using it) is just absolutely absurd!
My advice: Do not put up roadblocks that prevent 90% of the universe from accessing your site. If you have such a roadblock, try removing it and you’ll likely see your conversion rate skyrocket!
As a footnote, it seems as though the discounter online/teamsoftwareusa.net scam post, the video professor scam post and my MySpace selling for $580 Million posts have drawn likely 75% of my traffic the past month or so. Shows that controversy and community are where the online traffic is at. No real surprise there.