Did You Know

Items we come across that we find interesting.  These are moderately fact-checked, but don’t bet the farm on them.

The average grade level reading age in the United States is 8th grade.
(Source: The Informatics Review, 1994)

So should you write your website content at an eighth grade level? It depends, is your target audience statistically average in reading?

Firefox has 19% of the browser market share; Mac Safari – 6%.
(source: Net Applications, as of June 2008)
Should you care – probably. Why alienate 25% of your target audience by only developing for one browser. The good news - if a web development firm is used to building for and testing on multiple browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.), they usually know the “gotcha’s” that are likely to cause cross browser variances and will avoid them.

Google had revenues of over $16 billion in 2007.  They sell ads.
(Source: Yahoo Finance)
While not all Google’s revenue comes from Pay Per Click ads, the vast majority does. When people tell us that they never click on these ads, it reminds us of all the people that claim they never lose money in Las Vegas.

Only 7% of people still browse the web at 800x600 resolution.
(Source: TheCounter.com, for July 2008)
If your site is built for an 800 pixel x 600 pixel world, it’s looking pretty tiny right now on all of the higher resolution monitors out there.

92% of the North American online population has made a purchase over the Internet.
(Source: Nielsen.com, November 2007)
So does that mean you should have an eCommerce element to your site – maybe. This same study also emphasized that buyers' first choice is to purchase from a company they’ve already done business with. Capturing an online customer for the first time becomes extremely important.

“google” is a transitive verb in the OnLine version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
(source: www.Merriam-Webster.com)
It’s true – we googled it. However, google still is shown as a misspelling in Microsoft Word - imagine that. Note also that “bastion” is found not only in Merriam Webster, but in the Oxford dictionary as well.