Which languages are the most popular on the Web? Which languages are growing the fastest on the web. See: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
Archive for December, 2005
Web Languages and Relative Usage
Sunday, December 18th, 2005Designing for Firefox
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005Over 100 million users have now downloaded the Firefox browser. About 16% of our own November sessions on our web site were using the FireFox browser. That means if you are trying to reach a cutting edge demographic, your site better work in the Firefox browser. Unfortunately, many sites break when using Firefox. That can translate to lost customers. It is more than an issue of your site might look bad in Firefox. It may not work at all.
The breaking primarily occurs with interactive aspects of the site: JavaScript menus, shopping carts, polling scripts, registration forms - that kind of thing. Here is a site that breaks in Firefox (courtesy of Marketingsherpa.com):
http://www.digitallife.com
Try the menus. (Also, the referencing Marketingsherpa reference may disappear soon.)
The Digitallife site works find in IE. This type of breaking when examining a site with Firefox is not unusual.
The secret of capturing that 16% (or whatever) of those entering your site using Firefox is to be sure your site works with the web standards as defined by the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.
Here are our suggestions for doing this:
- First, check your statistics on your site to see what percentage of users coming into your site are using Firefox, or Mozilla. (Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox).
- Be sure you have a DOCTYPE tag on each of your web pages that defines the standard you are using. You can see an example by looking at the source code for our home page and looking at the DOCTYPE tag for the first line in the code. Start your code the same way.
- You can get a free program to check a web page for its compliant with standards at:
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
Use it to verify your coding. Also, Some editors, such as Dreamweaver, do some level of validating your code. -
Download the Firefox browser (which is free) and check your web pages using it. You can download it from:
The advantages of using a Firefox/standard site:
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You will capture those users who fomerly found your site broken.
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You will get better search engine optimization. Some engines don’t index sites with broken code too well. They want sites designed for the standards, and use the DOCTYPE metatag to define what standard they should check your site against.
These two are definite. MarketSherpa also reports you will gain decreased development and maintenance costs, lower bandwidth costs, faster download times, and mobile device viewing
If you are looking at our site - we have had one blog comment on our site needing more Firefox compatibility. There are over 800 pages in it. Checking all of these and editing as necessary is a time consuming task. We will try to work top-down, but don’t expect us to check even the top levels quickly. We do want, however, to keep our users happy.
Search Engine Optimization News from OPM this Week
Saturday, December 3rd, 2005Here are several notes on our search engine optimization insights this week:
- We successfully got a client to a #2 position in Yahoo out of 53,000 indexed pages on a popular keyword phrase. Her Google position is coming up but is slower as the links build. Our search engine optimization book tells how we did this.
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Our web traffic has doubled since adding the AI-driven
Darcy to our website. We are training her to close sales. This Darcy page and the page about our Vonage problem, are the two hotest pages (most hits and visitors) on our web site after the index page. -
If you have tried to sign up for Googles new Google Analytics to track your web statistics, you’ve probably discovered that they are overloaded with signups. We use a commercial program of the Urchin they purchased, but may switch to Google Analytics if they can every get it going.
Using AI to Get Web Traffic
Thursday, December 1st, 2005If you ask Darcy (http://www.netadventures.biz/darcy.htm) if she likes coffee, she has no way of knowing if coffee is a person, a city in Europe, something you eat, or something you drink. You may get a weird answer. Ask if she drinks coffee, however, and you will find drinks, coffee is defined as a concept and she can give you an appropriate reply.
A search engine such as Google is also an AI machine, and can determine the concept from looking at a large number of replies to previous queries on coffee. In fact, Google is working hard to enable their engine to track the history of your searches (and other tasks you do on the web) to enable it to better understand the queries you submit. Even with this, however, at the present time Google is severely limited on understanding your questions because it has to work from such a broad base of knowledge and there isn’t enough computer power to resolve this at the present time. Adding more Linux servers on Google is not the answer. Amazon does some of this by tracking the history of your purchases and recommending books based on this.
There is a solution, however, if you design the AI engine to address a small knowledge base, and this is exactly what IBM is doing with their Web Fountain project. In fact, IBM won’t even tell you much about who their customer base is for these engines. John Battelle in his book The Search tells us you can put a platform like WebFountain on a site with a friendly interface on top and a small company or individual can get in on the party and beat Google at their own game.
Isn’t this where Darcy is going? Follow the logic here. The companies that succeed the best on the Internet are those that address a niche market. For example, trying to start a web site to sell books puts you in competition with Amazon and a dozen plus other companies doing the same thing. But a web site selling books related to ancient Egyptian history is targeting a niche market and could well succeed. You could also add a very targeted AI engine to this niched site that would pull in its weight in gold.
Same thing with a breeder selling Abyssinian cats. Suppose the database stores the concept and reply as:
| Concept |
Question | Darcy’s reply |
| about cats | What can you tell me about cats? | The question is too vague. Can you be more specific? |
| about Abyssinian cats | What can you tell me about Abyssinian cats? | What do you want to know about Abyssinian cats? |
| history of the Abyssinian cat | What is the history of the Abyssinian cat? |
In all probability, the history of the Abyssinian cat began in England. - not in Egypt as the story often goes…….. |
You ask the question,
and this drives the reply from the concept.
Our web traffic quickly doubled when she hit our home page. Why not contact us and get Darcy or one of her variations on your site?
http://www.netadventures.biz