Daniel Purchas
Nearly half of Australian Graduates will have a bad experience on a graduate website.
It came as a bit of a shock to us, but some Australian Graduate Program Websites we have seen over the past year don’t seem to work well in many of today’s popular website browsers. These websites can either look bad, or simply not work in Firefox, Safari and others (which make up nearly half of Australian graduate traffic).
What is website browser optimisation?
To start off lets cover what browse optimisation means. In a nutshell, web browser optimisation involves making sure that your graduate recruitment web page is displayed correctly in the different web browsers used by graduates today. I thought that this topic is worth a blog post because these days an organisations website is fast becoming the most valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of generating graduate job applications. Once you’ve done the hard yards to attract graduates to your site through careers fairs and on campus presentations you don’t want to scare them off because they think your website is broken.
So how do you check your graduate website works?
To test whether or not your site is being displayed properly to your graduate job hunters you can cover most of your bases by simply visiting your site in the web browsers and checking them out for yourself:
Microsoft Internet Explorer
This browser comes by default with windows operating systems and most corporates and many universities will provide this as their standard web browser. There are a wide variety of versions for this browser the most common being versions 6.0 and 7.0. Version 8.0 has just been released and more users will slowly move to this newer version.
Mozilla Firefox
This is a popular browser that many users are migrating to on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can download a copy here.
Safari
This browser comes standard with an Apple computer. With the large amount of Apple fans out there this is becoming quite a popular browser and it is used when browsing the web from and iPhone as well. You can download a copy here
You may need to try some of these browsers at home as you may not have the security permissions you need in the office.
Why is it important to run these tests?
Most websites are optimised for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser as it comes by default with the windows operating system. This is due to Internet Explorer having the majority of internet users historically.
Over the past two months we’ve had around 30,000 graduates come to our website to view potential graduate employers and we’ve found that there has been a substantial shift away from Internet Explorer as the standard web browser used by graduates; you can see the breakdown of our traffic in the table below:
Browser % of Graduate users Microsoft Internet Explorer 52% Mozilla Firefox 37% Safari 6% Other 5%
We’ve seen a wide variety of different employers graduate websites that have had issues when viewed in different browsers and you can see that close to 50% of graduate job hunters are using a different browser than the ‘standard’ Internet Explorer.
This in contrast of total market share, where Microsoft Internet Explorer enjoys a market share of 66% (hitslink.com).
Optimise your graduate website for all major web browsers!
From the statistics we have generated, it is clear that nearly half of all Australian Graduates use a web browser other than Internet Explorer. This is well above the internet industry standard for browser use probably due to the fact that Australian Graduates are extremely technology Savy in comparison with general internet users. We strongly recommend that you check your website, especially if it is older, to see how it performs under other browsers. We have heard of several websites that have become a major barrier-to-entry for graduates looking for jobs.
All website designers now create websites that adhere to industry standards, so if you decide your website needs re-development, you could get the majority of this covered for around $5000. We can happily point you in the direction of a few great website designers if required.
Let me know if you have any more questions about this topic, hopefully it helps you catch any issues on your grad site in the future.
Great tips Dan, keep them coming!
The other important thing to remember is that there are two common versions of Internet Explorer in use – our web statistics at Constrex show about 25% of visitors still use Internet Explorer version 6 – despite it being a horrible, outdated (it was released in 2001), and insecure browser.
Testing in IE7 isn’t enough – the huge differences in the rendering engines between IE6 and IE7 (which is a polite way of mentioning the smorgasbord of bugs in IE6) means you have to specifically develop for both versions. Particularly if your graduate website uses any amount of Javascript.
This is a particular problem in engineering & construction, where some computers languish at sites and often don’t get updated. I imagine it might be a problem at universities too – I remember some pretty crusty software in some corners of the uni I went to, and it’s likely still there, and still being used by graduates seeking work.
Come to think of it, that is a very good point Jason, there are a number of graduate websites in Australia that may not be optimised for IE 7 either. Thanks for pointing this out.
The good news on universities is that (anecdotally) they have invested a lot into their computer infrastructure in the last few years. We have been at serveral Sydney Universities over the past couple of weeks including Sydney University this morning, and the labs are in far better shape than a few years ago. That being said, the labratories we were in were mainly in the commerce and economics schools, not the engineering and science departments.
IE7 is not backwards compatible, meaning that graduate sites built in the early 2000’s are often broken in newer browsers. So if you have an old graduate recruitment website, it would be a good idea to examine it in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 / 8.
Mike
Well that is one school of thought.
An alternative view and one many webmasters subscribe to is that the onus is upon the browser providers to produce a browser that is compliant with the web as it exists today. If you are using a minority use browser and you find that many websites do not display properly that should tell you something i.e. your browser is not working to well and maybe you should switch to one that works properly.
Producing a browser and saying that websites need to change to provide a nice experience on your 'new' platform is a akin to saying all books should be written so they can be read in every language (within the one book).
People will always experiment with new browsers and young people will often be the first but if the browser does not provide the viewing experience that you want then change to one that does, browser producers will get the message……eventually.