SE's and Source-Ordered Content

How much extra traffic is likely?

[MatthewHSE]

Take a page with the following characteristics:

Relevant title, heading, text, and image alt attributes
Clean markup
High text to HTML ratio
Several incoming links
Header, header navigation, left-side navigation bar

Now, taking the same content and layout, assume one version of that page is designed using tables, and another version is designed using a source-ordered CSS layout.

I believe it's pretty well universally agreed that the source-ordered CSS layout, having the actual page content at the top of the code, will perform better in the SE's.

However, that same page will potentially lose 5% of its traffic due to cross-browser compatibility issues. So, the bottom line comes to whether or not the better SE rankings due to a CSS layout will send enough extra traffic - about 5% - to make up for the number of visitors lost through compatibility problems.

I know it's possible to create a CSS layout that degrades nicely with older browsers, but my personal belief is that NN4 users would rather go through a "pretty" site than a lightly-styled version of a CSS layout. So for the purposes of this question, I'm assuming that a CSS layout will simply lose all 5% of it's NN4 users.

Does anyone have any experience or advice in this area?

Thanks,

Matthew

[pageoneresults]

But my personal belief is that NN4 users would rather go through a "pretty" site than a lightly-styled version of a CSS layout.

I doubt very seriously that NN4 users get to see many pretty sites these days. I've been tracking the statistics of NN4 users across a variety of industries that I market in. At this stage of the game, the statistics clearly show that NN4 is dead, at least with the industries I watch. The percentages are now down to less than 1.0% and even below 0.5% on most sites.

CSS sites will outperform table based sites 9 out of 10 times.

Disclaimer: The above statement is based on my personal opinion and is not representative of the community here at WebmasterWorld. I've done enough testing with both to effectively determine that CSS based sites do and will outperform table based sites with all other factors being equal.

[topr8]

echoing what pageoneresults says, the main question is where do you get your 5% from?

with my stats, that are obviously only relevant to me, the number of nn4 users is actually less than the lower figure that pageoneresults gave.

again it depends on the sector but the actual buyers on my site are almost without exception using recent releases of aol, IE 5.5 + and a few nn7 ... i get all kinds of other visitors including linx, firefox and opera but these people do not buy (from me) - to be honest they are probably researchers or other webmasters coming by to check me out or steal my content!

[MatthewHSE]

I figure that 5% is about the highest percentage of users, that any average website can expect to get, who will be using browsers that won't do at least a decent job on advanced CSS. That would count NN4, IE 4, previous versions of NN and IE, and all the various other browsers that may pop up from time to time where the site will appear broken or unstyled. I estimate that less than 1% of my visitors get my unstyled pages, but I've seen other statistics that give older browsers a higher market share. 5% was a very high estimate, simply because I thought there was no chance that an average site, drawing an average cross-section of the Internet, would get any higher percentage of non-CSS visitors.

But you guys have pretty much confirmed what I hoped was the case. I just wasn't sure if the added SE traffic (the reward for source-ordered CSS layout) would outweigh the potentially lost traffic (the penalty for not using tables) from incompatibility problems. Looks like CSS wins the day!

Still, every time I fire up NN4 for a little surfing, I'm surprised at how many sites look nearly the same in it as they do in anything else. In fact, when using NN4, I've found that the Internet looks almost as "pretty" in it as in modern browsers. (Except for the dog-ugly interface!)