Design Blog

Here are a few facts about the World Wide Web to get you thinking:

• The Web turned 15 years young in April 2008.
• In 2007, over 61 billion web searches were conducted every month worldwide.
• The Asia-Pacific region had the most searchers – 258 million unique searchers conducted 20.3 billion searches monthly.
• Netcraft claims the total number of websites worldwide now exceeds 182 million, which has doubled in the last two years.
• 2008 e-commerce revenue is expected to total $230 billion in the US and $166 billion in Europe.
• 2008 Australia/New Zealand e-commerce revenue is expected to reach $56 billion.
• E-commerce revenue are expected to continue rising by at least 25% annually over the next 5 years worldwide.
• Australians are the third largest online shoppers in the world behind only the US and UK.
• Australians spent 38% more buying products and services over the internet than a year ago.

Depending upon what you do and don’t include, some of these figures could be disputed, but the online market is clearly huge and growing rapidly. What experts do not disagree about is:

• Most commerce will be e-commerce someday very soon – i.e. the majority of transactions will be technology-based, so companies without a strong web presence will fall further behind.
• Businesses without websites are already missing out on customers. More people every day routinely search websites for phone numbers, company and product information before contacting anyone. If you aren’t there, they will find your competitors!
• Having a bad website is even worse that having no website at all! If your website looks bad, is confusing, or isn’t what your users want, they just won’t want to deal with you.

So how can you justify not investing a big part of your marketing budget on your website?

© Article by Fiona Morsink-Ryan, Communications Director, Art Attack Web & Graphic Design, Sydney, Australia (www.artattack.com.au).