MacOS is still #3

Despite the halo effect from the iPod and the widespread use of Mac notebooks among speakers, MacOS still hasn’t managed to make much of a dent in the visitor logs:

1. Windows: 80.70%
2. Linux: 9.57%
3. MacOS: 9.44%

If MacOS can’t beat Linux on the desktop, I don’t know if it has a bright future.

Internet Explorer below 50%

Firefox is still #2 behind MSIE, but for this crowd, the gap is small:

1. MSIE: 49.61%
2. Firefox: 41.14%
3. Safari: 3.50%
4. Mozilla: 3.22%
5. Opera: 1.76%

If you’re designing or maintaining a web site with a tech audience, you’d better be testing on Firefox as well as MSIE.

Screen resolution and colour depth

I know that web designers like big layouts, but the sad fact remains that 1024×768 is still the most common resolution (and remember that the browser window may be much smaller than the screen):

1. 1024×768: 28.32%
2. 1280×1024: 25.84%
3. 1280×800: 10.61%

A long tail of resolutions follows, but it’s worth noting that the classic 800×600 has only 1.96%. Better news comes from colour depth, where almost everyone has 16bpp or better:

1. 32bpp: 80.29%
2. 24bpp: 11.89%
3. 16bpp: 7.37%

Traffic

Search engines, referrers, and direct access were all important traffic sources:

1. Search engines: 36.77%
2. Referring sites: 34.97%
3. Direct traffic: 28.22%

Blogs did show up among the referring sites, but the biggest traffic producers were traditional links from partner organizations (other conferences, IDEAlliance itself, etc.) — these were also the stickiest, since most people coming from these links went on to read more than one page.

As far as search engines go, I was surprised to find that nothing really matters but Google (assuming that Google Analytics isn’t biasing the numbers):

1. Google: 94.16%
2. Yahoo!: 3.46%
3. Live: 1.51%
4. MSN: 0.45%

I knew that Yahoo! and MSN were behind in search, but I had no idea just how bad it was (at least in the tech crowd). More than half of the people who found the site via a search engine went on to read more than one page.

The top search phrases were rather dull and predictable:

1. “xml 2007”: 28.50%
2. “xml conference”: 8.22%
3. “xml conference 2007”: 3.20%
4. “xml conferences” 3.04%

And so on through a very long tail. Individual speakers’ names start appearing soon, but none with more than 10 searches. I trolled through the low-frequency search phrases for something funny (and maybe risque), but all I came up with was the number “736”, which resulted in three visits. I gave up trying to find the site in the Google results for that number. Does anyone really search for a single three-digit integer, and if so, how many pages of results will that person scroll through?