Pasta, Meatballs and Credit Card Theft

People are always asking me if it is safe to use your credit card on the Internet. Finally a stat that shows where the REAL security threat resides:
The most common place for credit card information to be stolen is at a restaurant, according to Visa.
The credit card company, which constantly monitors cardholder transactions and data […]

What To Test?

Any site designer knows that testing your web site across multiple browsers is key. But not only has the market become very fragmented regarding the number of browser, but there are also several popular VERSIONS of browsers running around as well — each with their own quirks. Here are some current browser stats:
According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp […]

25% of US Uses IE7

After Internet Explorer 7.0 was released in October it has quickly climbed to claim a 25% market share in the US (largely due to it’s rollout via Windows Update). This makes it the second-most used after IE 6.0 in the United States, according to Microsoft’s IE Blog. Microsoft claims more than 100 million users have […]

Halt to Hard Copy News Decline

A new Gallup study reveals a halt in the steady decline of those relying on newspapers for their news gathering.
Despite all of the publicity about people fleeing to the Web for their daily news diet, the Gallup survey found that twice as many still rely on newspapers: 44% daily vs. 22% daily for Internet use.
Read […]

Firefox & Safari Gain Ground

Internet Explorer continues to lose ground:
The downward trend took Internet Explorer to its lowest market share percentage for the year at 79.64 percent. Internet Explorer’s loss turned into gains for Safari and Firefox. Safari ended the year at 4.24 percent, and Firefox came in at 14 percent. Source
When Vista launches, look for IE’s market share […]

Four seconds till abandonment

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more
Is your page too ‘heavy’ and need help […]

Increasing Comments Traffic

Want to increase comments on your web site article? Try making the feedback option more prominent. Take a look at how ZDNet formats their comments button (on the left below):

Also note they add this to the top of the article page. See it in action at ZDNet.

Yahoo’s Market Share Drops

Yahoo will have an 18% share of U.S. ad revenues for 2006. In 2005, Yahoo had a 19.4% market share. Source

Only 11 Percent Of Searchers Use One Word Queries

11.4 percent of searchers use one-word queries, two-word queries 28.9% leads the bunch, followed by three-word queries at 27.85%, four-word queries with 17.1%, five-word with 8.25% and six-word queries with 3.7%. Source

Google Will Own 25% Of 2006 Online Ad Revenue

An eMarketer.com report estimates that Google will account for twenty-five percent of all online ad revenue, continuing Google’s 65% YoY growth. Source