When I was still blogging in Blogger, aside from XHTML validation issues, I was also having a difficult time making my website appear correctly in MS Internet Explorer. There were problems with alignment, image transparency, color inconsistencies, and a few coding errors. Although I knew that some of these were not browser-related issues, and considering my newbie skills in blogging, I came to a point where I told myself to just concentrate on a Mozilla Firefox-using audience, and just forget about those people who use IE. It turned out that this was a very big mistake.

During my random wanderings, I came upon this website, W3Counter:

You shouldn’t need training to figure out your web stats program. W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.

I would have signed up for a free account, but I am already content with FeedBurner’s services. But one particular service of the mentioned site that caught my attention was the monthly Global Web Stats. These delivered global web stats including browser market share, operating system market share and screen resolution statistics. Here was the March 2008 stat that trouble me:

This table alone shows that more than 60% of users browse the web through IE (6.0 and 7.0). For those web designers who have web sites that are highly compatible with most browsers (including myself, thanks to WordPress), this shouldn’t be a problem. But for one who concentrates only on Firefox, such as my old Blogger, this presents a major problem. Beware: A little over 28% only of users browse with Firefox.

Here are the stats for screen resolution usage:

This one shouldn’t be an issue. My blog is perfectly displayed on the standard screen resolution, 1024×768, which constitutes almost 50% of users. It also displays well on the other resolutions.

Here are two other important statistics. View the W3Counter: Global Web Stats site for your monthly free updates. I hope it helps.