Quote:
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Originally Posted by robot180
Someone said that almost everyone uses IE. That is certainly not true. Here are some statistics from my team's site. It is true that a majority of people use IE, but a large percentage of people use other browsers.
MS Internet Explorer
No 10980 55.2%
Firefox
No 5860 29.4%
Unknown
?2667 13.4%
Netscape
No 169 0.8%
Opera
No 96 0.4%
and more
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But is it a representative sample?
It should be pretty clear that the target audience for a good FIRST-related site (as in, website award material) is the general public, seeing as section 9.7 definitively articulates the need for features that serve to promote FIRST and the team to outsiders. So I ask, if you're catering to outsiders, why are you primarily concerned with the recent traffic on your site? That reflects the people who have already been reached, not the people to whom you are reaching.
Additionally, I have a few questions about your methodology. Are you counting page loads, unique hits, or something else? Of these, are a large proportion due to the developers themselves—such as when you reload a page to test a code change? Do you use Firefox in this manner? I hope that you can appreciate how this sort of thing can easily bias your data.
In general, FIRST teams must design their sites to support recent versions of IE, because among the general public, that is still the most popular choice. Supporting Firefox, Safari, etc. are of course good ideas as well, but any site which is not fully operable under IE is not worthy of recognition by FIRST, because its inoperability negates any merits that it might have under the various categories of assessment. The team's site isn't the place to be making a political statement regarding your opinion of Microsoft, or of the Mozilla Foundation, or any other entity—at least not if you value winning a website award.
And with regard to the linked image from robot180, that certificate error (whatever the reason—maybe your certificate provider isn't on Microsoft's most up-to-date list, maybe you issued it yourself, maybe there's something wrong with my browser) surely isn't a good omen. These are the little things that annoy users, and judges; fix them!