Designing for both Mac and PC

I participate in an online community of web designers in the Baltimore/Washington area. A recent post discussed how one employee of a local company couldn’t access her employer’s new web site from her Mac (the same Mac the employer provided for work purposes). When she approached the site’s designer, she was essentially told “good luck with your problem.” This is wrong on so many levels, and I thought it was worth a mention here.

The “web designer” in this case (I use that term lightly, given his clear refusal to follow basic standards-based design) obviously is not very experienced. If he were, he would know that in this day and age it is not difficult to create a site that works on both Mac and Windows platforms (Mac IE aside). If this were 5 years ago, I might cut him some slack and say maybe he needed to take advantage of some Windows IE-only technologies for the bulk of his site’s audience. But in 2007, I am of the opinion that those old Windows IE-only technologies have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of platform-independent/browser-independent (standards-based) technologies. In other words, it’s not that hard to make a site work on both platforms! Geesh!

For all those PC users, I will concede that the percentage of Mac users is 10% of the market at best. However, that does not let this designer (or any others) off the hook from creating cross-platform functional web sites, unless you are sure your audience contains no Mac users (i.e., you’re creating a private site for a group of PC only users)… otherwise it’s pretty lazy to ignore this typically very vocal and very loyal (albeit small) portion of the audience.