In a chat today someone was complaining about supporting IE6, and I see this all the time. But the problem remains: How do I convince my clients that IE6 on their parent’s PC doesn’t matter? It comes down to dollars.

So I wrote out an equation for deciding if you should support IE6. It’s bulletproof and simple to calculate. Have fun kissing IE6 goodbye.

The equation is…

average sales per visitor * IE6 visits – (designer cost per hour * hours required to fix IE6)

Note that this is to be calculated on monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Example

• Website earns an average of $.10 (10 cents) a visitor
• 100 monthly visits are using IE6
• Designer gets paid $20/hour
• Designer spends about 4 hours fixing IE6 every month

Here’s how that would work out:

1 * 10 – (20 * 4) = 10 – 80 = -70

In other words, you’re losing $70 by supporting IE6. And this is a very small example and it doesn’t even take into account the lost opportunity of providing a richer experience to >IE6 users

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Brian Cray is a Columbus, Ohio-based web entrepreneur & consultant. View some of Brian’s work in his portfolio and learn how to make kick ass websites by reading his blog.

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