Internet Marketing Course BLOG

Part of the 999 Internet Marketing Tips Series

By Dave Ingalls
January 1, 2011

Internet Marketing Tip #5: If you have NOT installed “Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer” on your computer, STOP EVERYTHING AND DO IT IMMEDIATELY.

Oh Oh! That’s two “Stop Everything and Do It Immediately” Internet Marketing Tips in a row! What’s going on?

Why do you need to download/install this application? Because Version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser (“IE6″) will just not die!

Even though Microsoft has discontinued support for IE6 and introduced much improved IE versions 7, 8 and 9, IE6 continues to be used, mainly by some of the largest corporations in the US!

Why is this important? Because IE6 does NOT properly display Web sites using the latest Web site architecture (Divs and cascading style sheets) while the newer IE versions and all other popular browsers (FireFox, Safari, Google Chrome, etc.) do display these Web sites as intended.

So if you’re building your own Web site, you better have a way to “see” how that site is being displayed in IE6.

I just found out about this Microsoft application because the IE6 monster reared its ugly head on one of my recent Web site re-designs.

The Web site is for a community youth basketball league, so I thought IE6 would NOT be a problem because the overwhelming number of site visitors would be using home computers that no longer had IE6 installed on them. Wrong!

» Continue reading “Internet Marketing Tip – Install Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview”

Internet Marketing Course Blog
Dave Ingalls
July 28, 2009

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): This IMC Blog entry is a bit different. I’m going to help readers who use Joomla and/or WordPress find out if they’ve got any Internet Explorer 6.0 (“IE6″) display issues with either their Joomla Web site templates and/or WordPress blogging themes. If they do, I also outline how they can get a head start on fixing those problems by looking “under the hood” of these 2 very popular Web applications. Why am I doing this? Because I just went thru this situation myself and I thought I’d spare my readers some of the pain I went thru finding a solution!

According to Market Solutions, 2009 YTD IE6 usage still stands at 18% of all Internet browsers. IE7 (42%) and IE8 (6% and climbing rapidly) are both taking share from IE6, but at this writing, IE6 is still the THIRD most popular Web browser in terms of usage.

So why worry about high IE6 usage by Web surfers? Because IE6 is NOT the same as IE7 or IE8. Without getting into the details, let’s just say that IE7 and IE8, along with all popular versions of the Firefox Web browser, know how to correctly interpret and display the latest underlying HTML, CSS and XHTML code that most popular Joomla! (content management system) Web site templates and WordPress (blogging software) blog themes use. IE6, however, was developed before these new browser software standards were adopted by all browser manufacturers. And with almost 20% of Web browser usage, IE6 can make your Web sites and blogs look more like a Picasso painting (no offense to the master) than the beautiful sites/blogs you see in standards compliant browsers to 1 in 5 Web surfers! Not a good situation!

What did I do about this potential problem and why did I care? Because this Internet Marketing Course Blog uses WordPress and my Internet Marketing Course Web site uses Joomla!

Here’s what I ended up doing after much surfing and trial/error.

» Continue reading “IE6 Problems-How to See Them-How to Fix Them”