By Cesar O.

This is a topic that, as a web designer, I don’t like a whole lot, because compatibility for IE6 in websites costs time, effort and money; but this is not the main problem, the main problem is that you can spend more time (and I have seen this several times) making your site work for IE6 than actually creating the whole website; so, How can you minimize this? How can you reduce the cost of compatibility with IE6? There are some simple steps you can take to try and ensure compatibility and/or reduce the time you spend making it work for IE6.

1-      From conception, from the first line of html you start typing, remember that this is supposed to work for IE6. What I mean by this, is, code clean. Try to use the most compliant markup possible, also, in regards to CSS, try to do it as clean as possible. This will allow for greater flexibility when making the site compatible. In regards to this, also

2-      Test constantly. This will help you identify if you have done something that you can do better, the better the code is, the less time you’re going to spend fixing IE6.

3-      DO NOT use frames. These things are hard to maintain, hard to work with, and they do not work with some browsers; using them is making your site inaccessible and ugly. Also, you don’t want other designers to make fun of you for using frames do you?

4-      Do not use fancy font. Fancy font can be cool and look really nice, but you if your site is going to be accessible, it has to look good with standard font also.

5-      When using images, take into account that IE6 does not support full transparency. To tackle this problem, you might want to consider where you are using the images in the site, the background you are going to use and if they are transparent or not.

6-      Even when you consider all this, might not have a fully compatible website. In that case, an IE6 only stylesheet should be used. This will contain all the IE6 styles that are different than other browsers. Conditional comments should be used to include this stylesheet.

These tips will help you achieve an almost perfect level of compatibility with IE6, but there might still be some stuff that will not work.  This part only covers the look and feel part, not the scripting part, which by itself it’s a whole other deal. I hope these tips are useful for the websites you build.