Onsharp

If you have an older website,you might be surprised to see it as your visitors see it.

Now, your visitors may view your website on their computers, using Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or Safari, or Opera, or Chrome. All of these are browsers, systems that look at the special code your web designer uses to tell the computer what a web page should look like, and interpret it. A page may look different on a Mac than it does on a PC, or it may work well when someone visits it with Firefox, but not when someone visits with Opera.

What's more, people may be visiting you on their phones, or with their Playstations. A Playstation 3 will browse the web just fine -- but it won't understand frames correctly. So a site built with frames won't show the pieces in the right places on the screen when someone visits it with their Playstation.

Naturally, a web company building your site in 1990 wasn't planning ahead for it to show up right on a Playstation 3. 

How can you tell if this is an issue for your particular website? There are basically two things you need to know. First, how long ago was your site built? If it has been five years, then you should probably have it updated. Things have changed  enough since then that any site built in 1995 had better be updated.

Equally, if your bookkeeper's nephew built the site after taking that web design class in 1995, you probably need to have it updated. A site built recently, but with old-fashioned methods, will be just as old-fashioned as one that was built years ago.

The second thing you need to know is how people are looking at your site. If you check your Google Analytics, you'll find under Visitors a button to check Browsers. This will tell you whether you have visitors using Blackberry or Playstation or Opera Mini on a phone. Some businesses do, and some don't. If your visitors are all using Internet Explorer, you may be able to hang on for a while longer before you update your web site.

However, you may still have disabled visitors using special devices to read the screen. It may be worth updating just to make sure that your site is accessible to all your visitors, including those with limited vision.

When you have your site updated, or have a new site built, be sure to insist on code that complies with current standards. This ensures that as many people as possible will see your site the way you want it to be seen. Onsharp websites are always standards-compliant. Make sure yours is, too.