é WEB 2.0 WebMonkey Developer Tool Link

é Scroll further down for 2009 survey data & web development information/blogs & tools:


TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com

Edited by Michael Arrington, this blog is THE leading Web 2.0 news resource that profiles innovative and important Internet companies and products.

Mashable

http://www.mashable.com

A social networking news blog, edited by Pete Cashmore.  The site includes sections deveoted to MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Facebook and Xanga.
ReadWriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com
Edited by Richard MacManus, this blog provides webtechnology news, rev iews and analysis.
GigaOM
http://www.gigaom.com
Technology News and analysis Blog, edited by Om Malik -- founder of GigaOmniMedia and a former writer for Business 2.0, Red Herring and Forbes.com
Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog
http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com
Web 2.0 news and analysis blog by Dion Hinchcliff, Editor-in-Chief of Social Computing Magazine.
Matt Cutt's Blog
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog
Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, globs about gadgets, Google, and SEO.

O'Reilley Radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/
O'Reilly Media's blog about Web 2.0 open source, emerging technology and more.
SearchEngineLand
http://www.searchengineland.com
Search engine news blog, edited by Danny Sullivan -- a leading search engine expert.
Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com
News and analysis of the search engine industry.  Includes blogs, tutorials, forums and more.

 


 

8 EASY WAYS TO IMPROVE STICKINESS

1. Don’t keep your audience waiting

The initial interaction with your website is critical to determining whether the users will stay or go. In other words, one should avoid using extensive loaders, intros, movies, music, or any other aspect which will delay the loadtime of the site and keep the user waiting. Remember, you have about 3 to 5 seconds to grab the users’ attention.

2. Don’t leave your audience stranded

The home page is the gateway to the rest of your website.
The most common mistake is to assume that your web audience understands your business offering completely and secondly, is familiar with how to navigate your site. It’s important to guide throughout your site and provide the user with a home page that gives them direction as where to go next to find their ideal solution offering.

3. Avoid clutter

Remember, less is more. A busy home page can overwhelm the user and leave them looking for a quick way out. It’s important to have no more than one animated item on your home page. Furthermore, the choice of buttons, menu systems, and overall page layout will ultimately decide the fate for your potential customer.

4. Provide your audience with the right content

In an attempt to achieve search engine optimization, many individuals are placing pages and pages of boring content on their home page. In many cases, the content can be overwhelming for a new user and a large turn-off. In today’s fast paced world, web users don’t want to read your entire company’s life history. It’s important to highlight key points through the use of bullet point or graphics and to write concise, well thought-out text.

5. Use technology to captivate your audience

In today’s world of Apple I-phones and instant data gratification, web users are looking for more than just basic graphics and text. Through the use of technology such as streaming video, flash animation, and online demonstration, you can sweep your web user off their feet and turn them into a potential customer.

6. Introduce a blog to your website

Besides the fact that blogs do wonders for your search engine optimization, a website blog is a great way for potential customers to interact with existing customers or even the company itself. Blogs also keep your users coming back to the site over and over again increasing the chance of turning a potential customer into your number one client.

7. Make it easy for your audience to contact you

In many cases, web users are in a rush and may not have time to go beyond your home page. Perhaps when they have time a later point, they may no longer be able to locate your site or remember the exact website address. Through the use of live chat, click to call, and online forms, you can ensure your users can quickly and easily reach out to your sales group. It’s important to have the right tools to ensure that you high conversion ratio of hits to leads.

8. Keep it fresh

One of the most important aspects of creating stickiness on your website is to constantly 
re-invent yourself. This could be as minor as changing the main graphic on your
home page or integrating a new icon discussing a new service offering. It’s 
important to keep your audience excited about what you do and how you do it.



March 2009 Web Server Survey (via http://news.netcraft.com)

In the March 2009 survey, the Netcraft monthly  received responses from 224,749,695 sites. This has brought the total up by more than 9 million sites, with QQ and Microsoft making the most significant contributions. Apache remains in the lead with a total of 104 million sites, while Microsoft-IIS's gain of 3.3 million sites (mostly consisting of new Windows Live blogs) brings its total up to 66 million.

 

After storming into the survey last month, this month sees QQ gain a further 8.9 million sites. QQ now hosts nearly 29 million Qzone sites under the qzone.qq.com domain, all of which are served by its own QZHTTP server. Little is known about this server, although people have noticed a similarity that suggests QZHTTP may be a customised version of thttpd.

 

Although it is generally uncommon for websites to use fake Server headers, there are some cases that stand out more than others. One relatively prevalent example is ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC), which is used by a Russian company to serve 0.02% of the world's websites. The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal home computer released in 1982, but it was discontinued two years before the World Wide Web even existed.

Which servers do the busiest sites use?

With almost a quarter of a billion websites found by this months survey, it is timely to show which web servers run the busiest sites on the web.

Using traffic data compiled by aggregating visits from the Netcraft Toolbar community, we have determined the web servers used by the million busiest websiteson the Internet. Examining a fixed number of high traffic sites produces a less volatile view which is uninfluenced by parked domains or the majority of personal sites, shared hosting accounts and blogs.

The clear leader amongst web servers used by the million busiest websites is Apache with a 66% share. It has a 47% lead over its closest competitor, Microsoft-IIS, much greater than on the web as a whole.

Server Share amongst the Million Busiest Sites, March 2009

top1m.png

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - March 2009

Total Sites Across All Domains, August 1995 - March 2009

Graph of market share for top servers across all domains, August 1995 - March 2009

Top Developers
Developer February 2009 Percent March 2009 Percent Change
Apache 104,796,820 48.59% 104,178,852 46.35% -2.24
Microsoft 62,935,449 29.18% 66,229,250 29.47% 0.29
qq.com 20,021,763 9.28% 28,905,129 12.86% 3.58
Google 8,157,546 3.78% 5,403,930 2.40% -1.38
nginx 3,447,596 1.60% 3,838,784 1.71% 0.11

 

 

 


 

Rank Company site OS Outage
hh:mm:ss
Failed
Req%
DNS Connect First
byte
Total
1 New York Internet FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.005  0.011 0.057 0.117 0.255
2 www.uk2.net Linux  0:00:00  0.011  0.054 0.037 0.080 0.157
3 Server Intellect Windows Server 2003  0:00:00  0.011  0.008 0.068 0.140 0.396
4 WebFusion Linux  0:00:00  0.011  0.005 0.071 0.153 0.373
5 Pair Networks FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.011  0.009 0.074 0.151 0.373
6 Swishmail FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.016  0.010 0.050 0.102 0.220
7 ReliableServers.com unknown  0:00:00  0.016  0.009 0.060 0.120 0.172
8 INetU unknown  0:00:00  0.016  0.010 0.074 0.157 0.295
9 Softlayer Technologies Inc unknown  0:00:00  0.016  0.023 0.079 0.162 0.492
10 www.dinahosting.com Linux  0:00:00  0.016  0.081 0.082 0.287 0.591

See full table

New York Internet was the most reliable hosting company site during February 2009, failing to respond to only one of the requests made by Netcraft's performance collectors throughout the month.

New York Internet was closely followed by UK2, Server Intellect, WebFusion and Pair Networks; each of which failed to respond to two requests in February.

This month's victory marks a hat trick for New York Internet, which also came joint first in the previous two months: January and December.

Established in 1996, New York Internet is located in the heart of the Wall Street area and owns and maintains its own data centers. The company's core services include dedicated servers, colocation and virtual web hosting. The company's main website is served by Apache running on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is used by three of February's most reliable hosting company sites, with another three using Linux and one using Windows Server 2003.