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Would you like to receive regular email updates of my ecommerce and marketing research, plus news of additions to the site? Subscribe today for free via the form in the right hand column of this page! 17 February 2004 Internet Explorer 7 on its wayBill Gates has announced at the annual RSA Conference that a new version of Internet Explorer, 7.0 will be beta released later this year. The focus on the next release appears to be on security issues relating to phishing and malware. I guess the threat of FireFox in terms of market share has urged this along, so thanks to the FireFox team for awakening the creators of my favorite browser :) - yes, I remain primarily an IE user :) - see below. 15 February 2004 Women - 80%+ of buying decisions in all homesAs mentioned in a couple of articles I've written over the last 3 years about marketing to women on the web (2004 version), this is one slice of the online demographic that no merchant can afford to ignore - regardless of the products and services you are selling (with the exception of a few). Even a guy's purchase of a monkey wrench can be influenced by a female in the household. How can this be so? Read my first article on marketing to women (2002). Please, no email about some women wanting monkey wrenches, it's just an example to illustrate a point :). This recent article on Business Week provides very interesting statistics and further insight into why recognition of female influence should be foremost in the minds of ecommerce site owners when developing their product/service promotions.
14 February 2005 Browser wars, the W3C and ulcersPlease forgive my lack of unbridled enthusiasm for FireFox's stunning success. While I'm very pleased to see a competitor for IE, it's reminding me of the browser war days in the late 90's to 2001 where developers ended up with ulcers trying to create cross browser compatible sites. A few people have noticed my grumblings and said that if people just developed to W3C standards (they actually mean something that looks good in FireFox), there wouldn't be any problems - this isn't quite true. I work with a number of guys who are FireFox fans. They preview pages they develop with it and on a number of occasions, stuff they've created looks fine in FF and terrible in IE. So, here we go again - cross browser ulcers. I used to get in stand up arguments with my students about the W3C standards, and as far as I'm concerned, my point remains valid - the market dictates, not the W3C. In fact, if you run the sites listed in the W3C's members directory, you'll find, just as I pointed out 4 years ago, that most of those sites are not totally compliant; some of them non-compliant in a big way. In FireFox's case, their success has little to do with "standards". Standards are for technophiles and purists. Joe Surfer doesn't give a damn. The FireFox team listened to the market - people were getting sick of IE's continued vulnerabilities. It will be interesting to see how issues relating to security develop as more people start using FireFox - whether hackers start paying more attention to it. In any case, kudos to the FireFox team; they are onto a winner - but will it hold? According to this article on Clickz.com, Firefox has just under a 4.5 percent market share. Netscape and AOL have a combined browser market share of just over 5 percent, and that percentage is declining. It's interesting to note that certain slices of the demographic, particularly bloggers, have a huge leaning towards FireFox. The point is made towards the end of the article (quoted from a study by Gartner) that if Microsoft decides to throw resources at the threat posed by FireFox, MS could easily regain market share. The question is - will they bother? 13 February 2005 Having trouble getting listed in search engines?I've received many questions over the years from site owners having trouble getting listed in the bigger search engines, so I thought it was time to write an article on the issue. I hope you find it to be of value, and I'd like to hear from you if you have other points that should be mentioned in the article as I'm sure I've missed a few :). 12 February 2005 Online publishers upbeat on advertising revenueAdvertising.com has released results from its recent survey of online publishers in relation to expectations during 2005 of their advertising businesses. Amongst the key findings:
Emarketer states that over 85% of US online publishing sites allow advertisers to run banners, over 60% of sites support popups and popunders and 51.3% support contextual advertising.
17.7 million new online shoppersA report released by Jupitermedia has stated that the 22% increase in online purchases during the November/December 2004 holiday shopping season was largely driven by 17.7 million first time online shoppers. According to their research 75% of online shoppers made purchases from sites they previously had not bought from before. JupiterResearch estimates that online retail sales in 2005 will exceed $79 billion, a $13 billion increase on 2004. Gmail moving out of beta soon?Google's Gmail, the free email service offering 1 gigabyte of storage space, appears to be gearing up to move out of beta according to some industry commentators. Current Gmail users have recently been granted an extra 46 invitations each to give out to other people so that they can try the service. Yahoo releases FireFox toolbarYahoo has launched a beta version of their toolbar for the Firefox browser. The Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox can be downloaded here. Read more about site
usability and teenagers.
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In Loving Memory - Mignon Ann Bloch
copyright (c) 1999-2007 Taming the Beast Adelaide - South Australia
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