Client and website help

[zaktoo]

I am going to se a client in a little while about getting more value out of his website, getting more visibility online etc. I am not pitching to do the site for him - just help him get onto Google, pay for some AdWords etc. So I pull up the site - in Firefox - and it's broken. Kaput. Useless. It works in IE - I saw it briefly on his PC the previous meeting I had there, as we got to understand the issues etc. I had no idea it was completely unusable in anything other than IE.

This presents a serious issue for me. How do I broach the subject that he's paid for something that isn't working even though it appears to be, and that he will need to spend more $$$ just to get it to the point where I can step up to help? Knowing that he has actually hired someone in-house to do it (I assume after having the site done "professionally", how do I tell him that they have all fallen short of acceptable in terms of delivery of product?

If you think I'm exaggerating, please email me for the site's url (don't want to paste it here in case client sees it)...

Thanks!

Ciao

Zak

[Liszt]

Just advise him that you tried looking at it in Firefox and it doesn't seem to work.

If he paid for something then as a good supplier you should point out if they need to do something.

Could charge him for the advice I suppose.

[aldi]

Isn't firefox on about 12% market share now? Maybe you could approach it from the marketing angle, i.e. if they want to spend £££ to get more people looking at the site, are they aware that an easy 12% might be to fix it for firefox kind of thing?

Edit: It's 11.5% worldwide, 14% in the USA. How does the site look on Macs?

>> Edited by aldi on Wednesday 7th December 11:45

[zaktoo]

Liszt said:

Just advise him that you tried looking at it in Firefox and it doesn't seem to work. If he paid for something then as a good supplier you should point out if they need to do something. Could charge him for the advice I suppose.

I don't mind telling him, and absolutely won't charge for that, but problem is if I tell him he's not got what he paid for, it could be taken as an insult to his judgement - both for the site he'd paid for & the staffer he hired to continue work on the site. I'd rather not get on the wrong side this early in a business relationship - or ever.

Thanks

Ciao

Zak

[sp60]

Have you actually seen it in IE on your machine. The problem may not be due to browser incompatibilities, but an access problem. When you saw it at his place, he may have been looking at a local copy, or for whatever reason, when viewing at his place he has access to the site, but the outside world does not (could be loads of reasons for this).
Either way if it has been developed in house and they aren't a software/web development house, they may be happy to have this problem pointed out to them as it may still be cheaper for their inhouse guys to learn/resolve about the problem than simply ditch it and start again. Depending on how complex the site is, it shouldn't be too hard to find and resolve the problem if it does turn out to be a browser problem.

[robbieduncan]

aldi said:

Edit: It's 11.5% worldwide, 14% in the USA. How does the site look on Macs?

If it doesn't work in FireFox it probably won't work in Safari either. If the OP posts a link I can check it when I'm at home...

[zaktoo]

sp60 said:

Have you actually seen it in IE on your machine. The problem may not be due to browser incompatibilities, but an access problem. When you saw it at his place, he may have been looking at a local copy, or for whatever reason, when viewing at his place he has access to the site, but the outside world does not (could be loads of reasons for this).

I don't have the ability to run IE here, but I know he was looking at the live site because I saw him type the url in. But good call in any event.

sp60 said:

Either way if it has been developed in house and they aren't a software/web development house, they may be happy to have this problem pointed out to them as it may still be cheaper for their inhouse guys to learn/resolve about the problem than simply ditch it and start again. Depending on how complex the site is, it shouldn't be too hard to find and resolve the problem if it does turn out to be a browser problem.

I just really don't want to upset the guy, but I do want to resolve the issue... damn, I wish I had a tact pill somewhere ;-)


Ciao

Zak

[Don]

Sure - you are doing the guy a favour by mentioning it doesn't appear as it should on Firefox. He may be delighted to find out or he may not give a stuff - it will depend on his view of how important it is.

For example: our web applications only run on IE - we don't care because we sell only to corporates who have control over their "desktop" and roll out IE. No-one has ever asked us to make it work with Netscape/Firefox/Opera/a Macintosh and so on so its just not worth it to us to bother.

For a marketing web-site that the world sees I would (probably) take a different view though...again it would depend. If my product sells only to corporations who cares - they'll be using IE. If I was trying to sell product to the general public I'd be pretty foolish to inconvenience 12% of my potential market...

[zaktoo]

Don said:

Sure - you are doing the guy a favour by mentioning it doesn't appear as it should on Firefox. He may be delighted to find out or he may not give a stuff - it will depend on his view of how important it is. For example: our web applications only run on IE - we don't care because we sell only to corporates who have control over their "desktop" and roll out IE. No-one has ever asked us to make it work with Netscape/Firefox/Opera/a Macintosh and so on so its just not worth it to us to bother. For a marketing web-site that the world sees I would (probably) take a different view though...again it would depend. If my product sells only to corporations who cares - they'll be using IE. If I was trying to sell product to the general public I'd be pretty foolish to inconvenience 12% of my potential market...

That view is obviously fine for you - but what we're trying to do in this case is raise his visibility online. That means, amongst other things, getting listed by Google, both in the index and via sponsored (AdWords) links. If it is only working in IE, Google doesn't have much of a chance when it comes to indexing it. If you're willing to throw away 90+% of potential new business that's fine, but in this specific case is about the exact opposite.

Ciao

Zak

[sp60]

zaktoo said:

I don't have the ability to run IE here, but I know he was looking at the live site because I saw him type the url in. But good call in any event.

Ok. Do you know if it is hosted at your clients site or offsite? Either way there is a possibility that they can only get access from their site due to routing/security setup. It is unlikely, but until I'd seen it accessed from elsewhere, I wouldn't rule it out. I have a 'public' website that is hosted at our office that to all intents and purposes seems to be running on the web, but in fact is not available outside our office. Its easy to set up deliberately and reasonabley easy to set up this way accidentaly....but you really need to confirm outside access via IE before your meeting. This shouldn't be hard to do, would be happy to if you send me the address.

zaktoo said:

I just really don't want to upset the guy, but I do want to resolve the issue... damn, I wish I had a tact pill somewhere ;-)

I can't see how you will upset him if you tell him his website doesn't work. He's running a business and a website to any modern business is crucial (more so some than others obviously). Put yourself in his position. I would want to know if it didn't work even if I had spent a load of money/time on it and done it myself! I don't think you need much tact, just give him a demonstration.

[zaktoo]

Thanks sp60, you have mail

Ciao

Zak

[sp60]

Works just fine in IE6

[zaktoo]

Thanks sp60 - that's what I thought would be the case.

Ciao

Zak

[HiRich]

zaktoo,
email me the link, and I will check it on a range of new and old Mac systems.

You are absolutely right to flag up the issue, and I can't see how any would complain if you just opened with "we seem to have a bigger problem to deal with. I've accessed the site from a range of browsers and platforms - here are the results..."

Another factoid that may be helpful. It is estimated that Macintosh represents 20-25% of the domestic UK market (not provable, as no-one can separate domestic from corporate, which is of course almost exclusively PC). If your client is B2C, and you lob in the Firefox market they are ignoring, they could increase accessibility by 30% or more, just by "doing what they should already be doing", which is probably more than you could offer them in the same timeframe.

[dieselnut]

Hi Zaktoo,
Happy to test it out in Firefox if you like... I've just spent ages getting our corporate website working in Firefox/Mozilla/IE ... might be able to offer some pointers.

I tried to mail you through PH's email, but ti says you don't accept emails

Matthew

[JonRB]

As an aside, I know many people say "so what if it doesn't work on firefox?" to which I point out that it is rapidly gaining market share, but more importantly, is fully standards compliant whilst Internet Explorer is not. So if it doesn't work with firefox then it probably won't work with Mozilla, Safari, or any other non-IE browser.

There's really no excuse for a web page only working with IE. There never was in the past and even less excuse now.

(This excludes thin-client applications like Don's)

If you point it out tactfully, mentioning that IE has a falling market share and also that search engine spiders like google will be less effective on non-compliant code, then I can't see you putting noses out of joint too badly.

Edit: Ok, sorry, a lot of that has been covered already.

>> Edited by JonRB on Wednesday 7th December 13:46

[robbieduncan]

JonRB said:

As an aside, I know many people say "so what if it doesn't work on firefox?" to which I point out that it is rapidly gaining market share, but more importantly, is fully standards compliant...

Not quite. FF is much more compliant than IE but it is not fully compliant with CSS2.1 (or 3). I have open bugs in their database for some bugs in their compliance. Safari has problems too. Now browser is perfect, IE is worse than most though...

[JonRB]

robbieduncan said:

Not quite. FF is much more compliant than IE but it is not fully compliant with CSS2.1 (or 3).

Fair point. But it's far more compliant than most (any?) other browsers so the point still stands.

[Don]

JonRB said:

search engine spiders like google will be less effective on non-compliant code

THREAD HIJACK APOLOGY:

So how does that work then? I have never heard of Google having a problem with "IE only" pages...

I'd love a code example if anyone had one...

[JonRB]

Don said:

JonRB said: search engine spiders like google will be less effective on non-compliant code So how does that work then? I have never heard of Google having a problem with "IE only" pages...

I'm probably talking out of my arse, to be honest. However, it occurs to me that unless the google spider code has been specifically written to cope with IE-only pages (which, I grant, it may - but with 100% success?) then it is more likely to incorrectly index it than multi-browser code.