Are You Designing for Firefox Too?

I have a friend in the industry that's always hounding on the idea that usability and accessibility are so intricately tied to search engine friendliness that they are almost the same issue. While many in the industry still don't believe him, I'm seeing proof time and time again that he's right. (Just don't tell him I said that.) A new case study released by MarketingSherpa this week supports his theories with news that Firefox usage is on the rise and that many sites are finding themselves inaccessible to Firefox users. How does all of this tie in to search engine marketing?

It's easy. Search marketing does you no good if your visitors abandon your site because they can't use it. Much like there's no sense in targeting phrases that drive traffic, but not buyers, there's no sense at all in putting time and money toward a search engine optimization and search engine advertising campaign if you aren't going to make sure that all of your visitors can properly use your site.

The MarketingSherpa study shows that in some industries, Firefox usage is as high as 35%. That's no surprise to me. I discovered during The Lactivist Project that more than 30% of my visitors were Firefox users. Thankfully, I'm a Firefox user myself, so I already knew that my site was fully functional on the browser. I'd also tested it on Opera and Internet Explorer as I do with any site I design. My concern is how many visitors might be coming in via Apple's Safari as I have no way to test my sites on that platform.

What's important to realize here is that browser compatibility goes beyond the simple issue of site design. Most users of non-mainstream browsers are used to having things be a pixel off here and there. What they are not used to, or happy about, is visiting a site that simply doesn't function at all the browser of their choice. This is where the real issue is with Firefox.

From the MarketingSherpa case study:

Here's the horrible truth your design team may not have told you: Shopping carts, calculator tools, survey and registration forms...lots of common interactive site functions can break in Firefox. Just one year after its official release, Mozilla's browsers have a global market share of more than 11.5 %, according to OneStat.

Turns out my friend might not be crazy after all... Which begs the question, are you driving visitors to your site only to turn them away when they've walked in the door?