Irish Statisitics
In a Sunday Times article of the 31st of May 2009 Paul McGurran, a director of e-commerce at Magico Web Design said that web sales in Ireland exceed €12m a day and are bucking the downturn in retailing by showing significant growth.
Latest available figures from the Central Statistics Office of Ireland indicate that in the first quarter of 2008 62% of households in Ireland were connected to the internet compared with 45% in 2005.
In 2005 only 7% of Irish households had a broad band connection. By 2007 this had increased to 31% and this increasing trend has seen the latest available figures for 2008 indicating that 43% of all households in Ireland now have a broadband connection.
96% of all Irish medium enterprises employing 10 or more people now have a broadband connection. This compared with 68% in 2007 and 61% in 2006.
Based on a sample of 8,000 enterprises in March 2008 - 65% of all enterprises reported that they have a website or homepage
International Comparisons
In 2008, 63% of Irish households had access to the internet at home compared with the European average of 60% for the same period.
Of those Irish households with internet access at home, 68% indicated that they had a broadband connection compared with the European average of 80%.
How Little Do Users Read ?
"On the average web page - users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely" Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 6, 2008
We've known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don't read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding.
In an eye tracking study performed on 232 users by the Nielsen Norman Group in 2006 it was found that there was a dominant reading pattern which somewhat looks like an F. This research was conducted across thousands of web pages and many sites in which these viewing habits appeared to be fairly consistent:
- Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
- Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
- Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.