Web Strategy and Development Blog

Out-of-date Browser Warnings

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In February we posted that with the new redesign, we would no longer support Internet Explorer 6. We will also no longer be supporting other older browsers including FireFox 2 and Safari 3 and older. These browsers have very low traffic to our site and require a large amount of effort to make our site fully functional. When possible, we will code sites so that they are still functional on these older browsers, but we will not guarantee that these users have the same experience as those using modern browsers.

<p>Out-of-date Browser Warning</p>

In order to help notify our visitors of this change, beginning tomorrow many pages on our site will begin displaying a warning at the top when the visitor is using one of these old browsers. The warning will send them to a page directing them to the proper site to get an upgrade for their browser. We hope this notice will alleviate some of the impact that the new homepage will have on users with out-of-date browsers.

University web site getting a makeover

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Missouri State is redesigning its homepage and top-level web pages. The goals of the redesign project are to increase usability, enhance marketing efforts and meet current web standards.

Over the next several months, we will post about the redesign process to this blog to help you stay informed and collect feedback. Our goal is to have the newly designed homepage and top-level pages live on August 9, 2010.

Learn more about the Web Redesign project.

Missouri State through the years

This redesign project will yield the University’s seventh homepage. We’ve come a long way since 1995, and we’ll continue to improve.

Internet Explorer 6 Must Die

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Our office has begun the process of redesigning the homepage, top level pages and base templates for the university. As part of that process we are updating many of the technologies and methodologies used on our main web site. Much of the current structure and layout has been based on the state of browsers in 2005 when that design was first launched. Times have changed.

Officially, we support the current major browsers and one version back. In reality, we strive to have our top level and high visibility pages degrade gracefully on older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6. However continuing to provide such support significantly increases the development time of a site as we work around the many bugs and limitations of Internet Explorer 6. During the past 4 weeks, Internet Explorer versions 6 and lower have accounted for less than 5% of our total traffic.

IE6 traffic to the main web site from 1/17 - 2/16/2010
IE6 traffic to the main web site from 1/17 - 2/16/2010

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.

Beginning on May 17, visitors using IE6 will receive a warning on the homepage and many of the other top-level pages. When we roll out the new site on August 9, 2010, we will officially end support for all Internet Explorer versions lower than 7.0. We have not yet finalized how we will notify users of this after August 9, but we may intercept visits to top level pages and present them with a warning page first.

There are bound to be a few issues that come up as part of this change, but the improvements we can offer to the rest of our users far outweighs these issues.