We have several sites we’ve been developing for a range of conferences we are running (Safeguarding and Q, G & E being two) and to help reduce the development time, our designer used a few PNGs so that we could use a standard layout template and then alter a CSS sheet to create a new site. This plan was working well until I finally found some time to do a bit of housekeeping and checked Google Analytics.
I was quite shocked to find that almost half of our users are still visiting us with the rediculous IE6, complete with it’s security flaws, lack of compatibility and other problems. The main problem in this instance is the lack of proper support for PNGs and in particular, alpha transparency. This was causing our nice design with the rounded corners to be displayed as big blocks of light grey all over the place.
Apart from the slight anoyance that the only reason these people are still on IE6 is because they are ignoring or not using Windows Update, and are therefore probably part of a Botnet, it means that IE’s awful legacy is still with us and is likely to be so for some years to come until these PCs finally die. We therefore STILL need to code all our new sites for IE with all the hacks and tweaks we’ve been using in the past.
In this case I found an off the shelf solution that worked quite well for us in the excellent SuperSleight that for us, allowed us to keep most our PNGs with the transparency enabled and just change a few of the core images. I never did look two hard at why all the PNGs weren’t fixed (we replaced the logo with a JPEG) but maybe your site will be fixed without a hitch.
I'm a web developer based in the East Midlands, UK and if I keep up the current rate, I might have developed 3 million sites by the time I retire