It's a great point and a touchy one!  I usually leave that decision to my
clients, although I do try to provide them with information such as a
guestimate of what percentage of their visitors will be of a mind similar to
your wife.

I also provide them with cost estimates for creating and maintaining
multiple templates versus using one template and having the site degrade as
gracefully as possible for NN4 (or other non-standard) users.

A really vague area is how many NN4 buyers would be lost because the site is
only usable in NN4 instead of identical with current browser displays.

The final decision, of course, is based on whether the client thinks that
the sales made to people like your wife will offset the increased costs of
supporting the disappearing platforms.  In most cases, for most small
businesses I have services, the answer has been no.  Some clients simply
don't want to spend the money, others simply can not grasp that people won't
see the site the way they do, others....well, you know the list of reasons
as well as I do!

Having a familiar, comfortable piece of software is a wonderful thing, but I
predict that (MHO - YMMV) more and more people will be upgrading as the
technology continues to roll onwards.  They will do so because the sites
will look better, because new computers or other platforms will already be
set up with the newer browsers (thus making it easer to just switch) and
because people will keep encouraging them to.

For us, it will be a Good Thing because coding for the newer standards is
more logical, more flexible and gives us more options for both presentation
and organization.

I love email - I can write a 2-hour monologue filled with self-importance
and nobody interrupts!

:)

D


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Jones" <dvjones(at)ksbe.edu>


If you want someone at my house to buy something
from your website, you better make it fully funtional for
a NS4 user. My wife is by far the main web shopper at
our house, and she won't give up her old familiar NS4
(running on Windows2000) for NOTHING! ;-)

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