Customising IE8 to Drive Users to Your Website

nparker — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:05:00 GMT

I have been running IE8 as my default browser since Beta 2 was released a few months ago and I have been enjoying the experience.

As many of you know already IE8 ships with a brand new standards based rendering engine that is nothing like IE7 or IE6. It is great to see some large NZ websites (airnz, TVNZ) ready to go with the IE8 release already. If you want to learn more about what you need to do for your sites to get ready please read about IE8 compatibility on Mike’s blog or from the IE Team.

Previous I have also discussed now prevalent IE6 is in the NZ market and our plans to get rid of it. A couple of weeks ago Kris from our web team implemented a page gate strategy on the popular Your Digital Life consumer site and I am happy to report a 14% conversion rate amongst IE6 users visiting the site in the first two weeks!

If you are interest in using the script (no warranties included) grab it

and follow the 3 easy steps below.

1. Upload the files to a ‘detectie6’ folder on the website

2. Include the following line just before the closing </body> tag (eg in a footer include)


3. File and replace any path references in the include (as highlighted above), and in the detectie6.aspx, detectie6.js, detectie6.css files.

I learnt a lot during the IE8NZ road trip in September when we had Matt Heller out from the IE team (check out the video of the session) and have recently had a chance to play around with some of the new customisation opportunities that IE8 provides web developers.

I think there is a real opportunity to innovate on top of IE8 and provide your innovations packaged up to your customers next year when IE8 is launched.

Please now sit back and join me for the next 45 minutes while I go end-to-end on customising IE8!

Download the video (188MB)

What I showed:

IE8 Visual Search

IE Team - Get started
Note my demo’s are hosted on a “demo” server in the US. A service like this can easily be used by millions of users which means that it needs to be very robust and stable. Alexander Strauss does a great job of describing a more robust architecture for building visual search with WCF.
My Demos:
- Try NZ Herald Open Search xml
- Try Stuff Open Search xml
- Try Flickr Visual Search xml

Try Channel 9 Visual Search xml

IE8 Accelerators
- IE8 Developer Center Documentation
- My Demos:
  - Try Channel9 Accelerator xml
IE8 Web Slices

Video template from Expression Encoder 2 SP1
My Demos:
- Try TVNZ Web Slice (hover over Recent TVNZ News to add)
- Try Black Caps Live Scoring Slice (hover over CANTERBURY WIZARDS vs AUCKLAND ACES)
IEAK8 Beta
- Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images
- TechNet Screen cast

Vista 64 bit outputs from my IEAK8 test

XP 32 bit outputs from my IEAK8 test

There are still some bugs to iron out with the IEAK8 that I found in my travels but hopefully I have wet your appetite here to get building and try some of these things for yourself.

Tags: IE8, IEAK8

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Nigel Parker's Outside Line : IEAK8

Customising IE8 to Drive Users to Your Website