When it comes to cross-browser compatibility, no browser causes more pain and suffering than Internet Explorer—no version is as standards-compliant as Firefox, Opera, or Safari, and every version has its own unique bugs and issues. The majority of CSS hacks, testing, and workarounds are for Internet Explorer. Testing has been a major pain, requiring a different computer or meddling with the registry for each version of IE.

Finally, Test IE7, IE6, IE5, IE4, and IE3 in Parallel

Yousif Al Saif built upon some others’ work to create an installation for each of the major versions of Internet Explorer since IE3. Read about it here, and download the multiple IE installer here.

Power Testing

The truth is, almost no one still uses IE 3 and IE 4, and very few people use IE 5. Most of your testing will involve IE 6 and IE 7, with an occasional nod to IE 5.5.

I installed IE 5.5, IE 6, and IE 7 on my machine. Everything is working fine, without any crashes, hanging, or strange behavior.

Testing is powerful and easy—I can open all the versions I want to test at the same time. I make a change and then hit Alt-Tab to switch through all the browsers on my machine—Firefox, Opera, and IE 5-7, thus covering about 95% of all the browser users out there and catching nearly all known (and still important) cross-browser issues.

I just need a Mac so I can test small changes on Safari (For final testing on a Mac (not incremental), see my post about testing on Safari).

I wrote a few months ago introducing Tag A Cloud as a possible method for generating free traffic to a site. At this point, I think the results are mixed.

Starting Off

I signed up with Tag A Cloud back in January. I put a link on my site in a blog post I wrote about Tag A Cloud, and then I simply clicked on my own link each time I visited my site. I usually browsed a few of the other links that were there, too, doing my part to help drive a little traffic. The day I put the link up, my site visitors started to click through as well.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many links, and many of them weren’t upgraded, so if you could make your link on the Tag A Cloud pages larger, you stood to gain a decent amount of traffic. I know I clicked on the larger links, especially to see why they were larger—was there something about the site that was driving clicks or traffic?

Leveling

Like role playing games, leveling up is addicting. My visitors and I drove about 190 clicks to Tag A Cloud, and my tag is now level 9, which means it’s now a larger version of the standard black text. No bolding, underlining, or colors yet. I wonder how far you have to go to get more than font-size upgrades.

Google Juice

In my last post about Tag A Cloud, I wondered what Tag A Cloud would do with the Google page rank it would surely get. Their rank is up to a 6. That question is still to be answered. They may not need to think about it, though, if enough people keep paying to have their tags upgraded.

Noise. Lots of Noise.

Tag A Cloud recently introduced their “Point Shop” which allows tag owners to pay to upgrade their tags in an effort to make their tag more visible and drive more traffic. Most of the sites that joined early on have had their tags upgraded through natural clicks to and from Tag A Cloud, too. Between all the upgraded tags and the paid highlighting that many have been doing, Tag A Cloud is starting to look rather noisy. It’s harder to make sense of the big pile of tags. Since they’re displayed randomly, it’s a little tricky to find a tag you know was there before from earlier. They need a save-a-tag feature that lets you save tags to your own personal tag page.

Free Traffic

Despite the noise, Tag A Cloud has delivered 27 clicks to my site. This may not seem like many, but it’s nearly as many as I have ever received from any other directory-type listing, and certainly in a shorter period of time. If you don’t need to pay attention to it, then your interested visitors will do the work of clicking through to Tag A Cloud and increasing the prominence of your tag. If you have to babysit your tag, however, the invested effort compared to the traffic you will get is an ROI that doesn’t make much sense. I think I may make one last push to get my tag to be more visible and drive traffic, and then I am probably going to let it go dormant and let the link on my site and the tag on Tag A Cloud do all the work.

DiamondLime is two years old today. Happy Birthday!

I haven’t posted as much in the last year as I did the year before, but I have managed to make (in my opinion) quality posts. I also managed to keep posting through some busy stretches at work and the birth of my second child, Lucy. I know, there are plenty of people who write higher-quality posts more frequently through a lot more adversity than I have had, but who’s comparing blogs? I’m glad mine has survived.

As for the coming year, I don’t think I will make any promises, but I can say that I will keep writing and that I have some fun ideas for where this site can go.

Thanks to all of you (both of you?) who read my blog. Stick around for another fun year!

We’ve released a new version of SeboMarketing.com!

Old Site

The old version of SeboMarketing.com had a number of problems with it. Many of these problems fell into “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” category—as Internet marketers, we know better than to make some of the mistakes that were being made, but we’ve been so focused on our clients’ sites that we neglected our own.

Table-based Layout, Invalid HTML

Our site was put together with a dated version of DreamWeaver, and so the layout was based on a series of nested tables and the HTML was awful. The use of CSS was limited, and the code was bloated and full of presentational elements and markup.

Too Little, Stagnant Content

The overall size of the site was less than 30 pages. The content hadn’t been updated to show some of our new clients, any news from Sebo Marketing, or even new copyright dates.

Insufficient Navigation

Perhaps the greatest sin for a site that is meant to have a clear conversion path and to present Sebo Marketing in a good light is the fact that its navigation was confusing and inadequate. It was difficult to find the client bios or case studies that had been placed on the site, and it was nearly impossible to know what part of the site you were on.

New Site

The new version of SeboMarketing.com is much improved over its predecessor. Besides a visual update, we have made the following improvements:

Valid HTML, CSS Layout

Because it’s a new site, there are probably some few mistakes left lurking in the HTML of the site, but overall SeboMarketing.com is now 98% valid. The layout and presentation have been effectively separated with the use of stylesheets. Maintenance and the next visual update to the site should be a breeze.

Updated Content

We updated and added a lot of content. We have all of our clients whose sites we’ve completed listed, and we have case studies to show the success we’ve had since we last updated our site. We’ve also posted some informational articles about different aspects of Internet marketing.

Clear Navigation

The navigation on the site is leaps and bounds better. A more complete list of options is presented, and a highlighting scheme for showing the visitor where they are on the site has been put in place.

Additional Credibility

Finally, since we last updated our site, Sebo Marketing has been recognized as an Adwords Qualified Company by Google. Pay Per Click advertising is an important facet of our service offerings, and being an Adwords Qualified Company strengthens the trust that our clients, both current and potential, can have in us.

In conclusion, we’re happy with our new site, and we’d love to have you come take a look sometime.