I have a little side project that involves a website for a journal. I recently moved hosts, and installed the very cool Mint stats package to track use. Even though I only have a week worth of stats, I found a few interesting observations.
Because this isn't a tech site I think we can assume that the population visiting is going to be more representative of the population at large than, oh, say, sites like this here blog. This is reinforced in my mind because two-thirds of visitors to this site come via search. Oh, that's the first interesting stat. In fact, it looks like only about a quarter of visitors type the URL in directly. (The remainder follow links from other pages.) I think this speaks to the power of search in today's internet.
Next, looking at the browsers in use, we have IE with 63%, Firefox with 26%, and Safari with 9%. I'm very surprised that Firefox and Safari are as high as they are. So, chalk this one up as a win for non-IE browsers. But, let's stay on the topic of IE for a moment. I'd assume that there would be a decent spread of users from older versions, like 5.x. But, I saw only a handful of users with 5.x. Nearly fifty percent of total visitors are using IE6, and a surprising 14% had IE7.
Fourteen percent of visitors were on a Mac, a number higher than I would have guessed. And, as a victory for designers who want more space, only 7% of users were running their monitors at 800x600.
Now, given that Mint uses javascript code to track stats, it is possible that older machines and older browsers aren't counted here. But, I was still surprised at how many folks are running very modern equipment out there.
Posted by Karl
January 21, 2007 08:24 PM