For a long time most websites were essentially designed for Windows users running Internet Explorer. The simple argument was, ‘well, that’s what most of our customers run.’

That simple argument is not very effective anymore. With the strong growth of the Linux and Mac platform, more and more users are surfing the web using Firefox or Safari on a non-Windows platform. When the number of visitors using a non-Windows platform starts to climb up to 10% or even 25% of your visitors, it becomes hard to pretend they don’t exist.

People are inventive though and they come up with new arguments for making their pages Internet Explorer only. Maybe they’ll say their business is a Windows shop. Or that it’s too expensive to write for more than one browser, considering the returns.

Whenever you find yourself thinking along those paths, look no further for the counter arguments. Here are the top three reasons for why your website should be multi-platform.

Reason 1: You’re not Windows Compatible

Huh? Isn’t that exactly what you are if you’re running a Windows only website?

No! It turns out that if your website only works for the main Windows web browser – Internet Explorer – it does not work for many, or even most, Windows browsers! Many Windows users today use Firefox, Opera or other browsers. Some Windows users can’t even use Internet Explorer. If you have a disability you might go for an alternative browser which gives you more assistance than Internet Explorer does.

If you make your webpage multi-platform it will be much more likely to work in alternative Windows browsers as well.

Reason 2: You Might Hinder Decision Makers and Affluent Visitors

An example is Mac users. A couple of years ago Nielsen/Netratings released a study showing that Mac users on average have a higher income and better education than Windows-users. Even the popular publication Wired brought up this fact in an article. If you’re running a website to make money, reaching out to the people with the most money is kind of a no brainer. (Obviously, if you’re running a website to lose money this becomes a bit less relevant.)

Some websites might say, ‘Well we sell Windows software, so those visitors don’t help us any.’ Think again. A company manager might run a Mac but still be in charge of an office with a hundred Windows machines. A system administrator might be surfing from her Gentoo Linux machine, but she is the one in charge of installing thousands of machines at the end of the day.

Reason 3: You Look Better

It is very rare to find a professional web site which is not multi-platform today. Just check out sites like Last.fm, YouTube or even Yahoo!.

Small startups use multi-platform webpages to demonstrate their technological provess and willingness to work with all people. Big corporations know better than to turn away any customers since their competition will be more than glad to accept their customers in their place.

Even if your website is not for a technical startup or a big corporation, that kind of website is exactly the crowd you want your website to hang with. You want to be up there with the great and modern or with the successfull and stable. You don’t want to be the company with the fringe Internet-Explorer-only-with-blinking-text-and-repeating-backgrounds website.

Conclusion

At the end of the day it’s just way too easy to make a multi-platform webpage so you might as well. If you’re the one actually building the website, the easiest way is to follow standards. This blog points out why that’s a good idea: Web Standards and Why You Should Care.

If you’re not the designer, spend the extra time to find a webdesigner who’s actually worth his or her salt. Either way, ditch Interner Explorer and jump on the people friendly Web 2.0 train. It’s the train to the future.

Ok we admit it, we love Open Source. Both Alex and I have been using Open Source-products for almost decade. I first installed Linux about 10 years ago, and have been a user ever since.

In this manner, I bring you the software of the day: RoundCube WebMail Project.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a webmail that both looks good, is easy to set up, and have grown out of the alpha-status. RoundCube Webmail is the best looking and coolest webmail I’ve seen so far (check out these screenshots). RoundCube comes with Web 2.0 and AJAX support and the whole shebang. I particularly like the ability to drag you e-mails between different folders.

When I set up RoundCube for the first time, I was surprised how easy it was. You need a mySQL database as backend, and a webserver that supports PHP (I prefer Apache). If you have all of this running, the you just import the sql-file that comes with the package, and edit the config file, and you’re set. The entire installation takes less then 10 Minutes.

Even though the current release of RoundCube webmail is v0.1-beta2, it really runs fine. I’ve been using it for one of the companies I administrate now for about two months or so by now, and haven’t had any problem at all. I think this is the next big webmail, and I’m sure you will hear much about this project in the future.

I want to add a piece of advice to all of you guys before you run and install this software. Please use SSL for you webmail. If not, it’s really easy for other people to sniff your password and read your e-mail.

By the way, do I need to mention that RoundCube is our choice of WebMail for the company?

These last few days we have created a foundation for the work within our new company. Basically, we have configured and installed some internet related stuff. For now our ‘virtual base camp’ includes the following:

1. Eventum for project tracking. This lets us keep track of what needs to be done, when it has to been done, and who’s doing what. We’re going to apply this to software development and project development alike. It’s like our virtual whiteboard.
2. A Blogger account or two (or three) for this blog.
3. A Google Sitemap to make sure we can start staking out our claim in cyberspace.
4. Online document collaboration through Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This is pretty cool stuff, especially when working a lot online like we do.

Since we’re such a modern company we’ll probably be using many more online tools before we’re done.

It might be that a lot of ‘old school’ companies are still wondering how the heck these things work or why they’re even good. But I think some day people will be wondering how companies got by at all without this stuff.

Today Alex and I are signing the Article of Organization-paper that is a required form to start up a company here in California. We chose LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) as our form of incorporation, since it gives us many benefits. One benefit is that the required administrative paperwork is less than other corporation forms. Another reason is that LLC (as the name implies), protects us as individuals from economical liabilities in case of something goes wrong, and we get sued. If that happens, the worst thing that can happen is that the company goes bankrupt.

For further information about forming an LLC, I’d recommend you to visit the Secretary of State in California. There you’ll find all the forms and information that you need to form an LLC.

Take care,
Viktor

Hey guys.

This is the blog of a startup currently in stealth mode. Even that we aren’t giving you the company name here, you can at least see that we are insanely good at naming blogs.

Now this would be the place where I told you a little bit about the company and our grand plan. But like all startups our resources are ideas. Big companies might have many other resources, so they don’t have to keep their cards as close to the chest. But small companies, like this one, only have ideas. So we’re going to play it safe and tell you all about our vision later.

Most of our attention is going into design of our software right now. We’ve been at the drawing board for a couple of months and have some very fancy diagrams to show for it. There’s also the matter of paper work for setting up the company. We’re a bit behind with that, but that’s alright. Viktor made some contacts who happen to know all about it. We still have plenty of time to get all of that set up as well.