How I easily increased my website visitors by 30%

From the articles we read we suppose that users are equipped with latest browsers, and are using more and more Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Let's see whether this is true.



Problem description:
I decided to test my website layout in different browsers so I've loaded it up in browsershots.org.

Result: Everywhere except on Internet Explorer 5.5 & 6 the site rendered correctly. On the mentioned versions a JavaScript error alert popped up followed by blank page. It appeared that Internet Explore 5.5 & 6 both fail to render a page when its DOM structure is changed by Javascript/AJAX methods residing in a element under the body tag. In that case Internet Explorer gives error: 'The Page cannot be Displayed' or 'Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://... Operation aborted'

Here is the official statement on this issue from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917

Statistics:
When I looked at Google Analytics I've understood that around 70% from all users preferred Internet Explorer 35% of which using IE6. Because I wanted to help my IE6 users I ran the following solutions then tested again with browsershots.org:

Solutions:(chose what suits you)

- move the script at the end of your body tag or place it up in the head tag.

- load up your JavaScript code from a function called by window.onload

- do not load JavaScript code if your Internet Explorer version is < 7

- add the attribute defer="defer" after your script

Results: The stats showed over 30% increase in my website traffic. And that was a real success!

....
P.S. Sometimes same JavaScript code runs flawlessly under Firefox, but produces errors within Internet Explorer. So here are some common errors and ways of fixing them:

Expected identifier, string or number
array: var img= {width:100, height:100,}
Firefox runs without errors, IE - gives error.

Solution(remove the comma at the end, otherwise it actually instructs the interpreter to expect next element.):
var img= {width:100, height:100}

object Expected when working with previousSibling and nextSibling
var prev=el.nextSibling;
again Firefox goest without errors, in difference with Internet Explorer

Solution: always check whether the element exists or not:
if (el.nextSibling) {
//use the element
var prev=el.nextSibling;
}
...
Initial element check:
var el = document.getElementById("el_id");
if(el) {
//use the element
}

You can also try the free online JavaScript checker JSLint. by Nevyan Neykov

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