Categories
internet

Browser Wars – More Analysis

Browser Wars 2 - Small Business, Marketing and Web Design Blog As I was looking a the chart in my previous post (Are You Tired Of Browser Wars?) I realized that even this skim on data can provide enough for cheap marketing analysis. Since we’re not presenting a case study here let’s look at possibilities that small business can extract from data they already have at their possession.

The chart on the left presents the browser shares for this blog. The picture is very different. Internet Explorer has got only 56% of visits with 41% belonging to IE 7 (dark teal piece). Only 15% of you, readers of this blog, hadn’t update your Internet Explorer to the latest version, keeping your version 6 (green piece on a diagram). You are exposing yourself to much more vectors of attack then those who have IE 7. Total share of all Firefox visitors is a whopping 40% (dark orange piece of pie). Of course the picture is a bit skewed by my own visits, since I write posts via WordPress admin. But 40% looks too damn impressive. The little salmon-colored piece is a representation of Safari users – 2%. Opera – less then 1%.

What looks interesting to me is that while this blog is all about small business, most people who read it are much more computer-savvy then visitors to our client’s web site from last post. If you a starting entrepreneur just by looking at your stats you can learn a lot more about your audience. If your audience is computer savvy – you can talk more technical to them, use more sophisticated online selling tools and techniques. If your audience looks like the picture from previous post’s diagram – then you should resort to simple and proven methods, like simple contact form, phone contact, direct mailing and so on.

On the other hand – this may be your chance to find out that despite your efforts the audience that looks at your web site is just the wrong crowd.

Categories
business

Offline-Online Promotion For Small Businesses – Part 4

Mini CD Find Me If You Can - iStudioWeb BlogThis wouldn’t be a guide to promote your small business offline, but rather a rant of small business owner who tries to do something good – and not quite succeeded.

Yesterday I spend a good hour and a half searching for small CDs at local stores – both computer oriented and those selling office supplies. While regular small CDs were sporadically available at certain merchants, the business card CDs were nowhere to be found. At a single store only I was able to find a mini-CD in quantities over 8 pieces for 8 dollars.

The story with CD labels was even worse. If you are looking for regular-sized CD labels – you are all set pretty much anywhere you go. But if you thought you could find labels for any other CD size – think again!

Overall I visited around 8 stores, 5 of them were Staples and Office Depots, three others were BestBuy, DataVision and CompUSA (that was a sorry view). While trying to order labels online at Neato I almost got hit with a charge of $50.01 for shipping on 200 pages of two sorts of labels. The amount itself was about 40% higher then the price of labels.

Categories
business

Daily Reading

Reading Trends from my Google Reader - Small Business and Web Design Blog

This is the reading trends of my Google Reader. As you can see I haven’t been reading much lately. But January is usually a very bad month for web traffic. Sales are low. Additionally, everyone is worrying about the upcoming recession, feds acting on it and so on and so forth. So people post a lot less, too.

This, however, brings up one important aspect. With pessimistic outlook on economy and less and less disposable money – will Americans start more businesses or less? Would they sit on the money waiting to spend – or take a risk of investing inĀ  hot areas while others wait and loose? Hard to say at this point as panic is still upon us and stock market.