Market Analysis [statistics] Complete analysis of your target market is essential for deciding a web strategy. Even in isolated environments, such as intranets, a web strategy is crucial to lowering development costs, reducing wastage of resources such as over-engineering. Reduce over-engineering: a common mistake on web strategy is making your website accessible to the widest possible audience. Note: it is the resources required to make your site compatible with the last 5% of your target audience that provide 25-35% of your overall project and development costs. We believe unless budget is not a factor, target audience minorities that fall under 5% should be excluded. The exception to this would be where the minority 5% contribute (directly or indirectly) to over 30% of your projected revenue. Examples of target audience below a 5% cut could be non-javascript support, old browser, rare platform, small screen resolution or low bit-depth, or even geographical location. Examples where the benefits outweigh the implications could be that a minority browser may have a higher proportion of users in your target market (e.g. lower spec PC use in the civil service, if thats your target market, mac users amongst the influential journalist community etc) Cutting your losses: maintaining multi-environment compatibility is an ongoing cost. Without analysing up-to-date data, you could end up tying up valuable budget and resources on functionality that is no longer relevant to your target audience. Early-mover advantage: entering a saturated market means that you are chasing minimal profits. By correct analysis of current environment and predicting trends, you are better placed to develop brand awareness, and therefore a higher market share. To do this, you need accurate and reliable statistics. Provision of stats: Globalspot.net has been in the internet industry since 1995, and has statistical data that accurately reflects the changing environment. Our current analysis tool monitors all our consenting client sites (over 3/4 of a million unique vistors per month), and compiles accurate data which reflects market behaviour in a number of targetted and specialised areas. [ Sample browser stats: 1st Quarter 2002 ]
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