Diversity and Web Design

By June 2010, the world Internet user population reached 1.9 billion (All about market research), and commentators are agreed on the speedy growth of the World Wide Web, with annual growth estimated in 2004 at 20 per cent (Van Iwaarden et al., 2004) and recently, by Dr Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota, as 50 to 60 per cent per year (Economist, Technology Quarterly). This speedy growth brings immense advantages for business since the Internet is thought to offer many advantages compared to conventional channels. For example, ‘it is estimated to produce ten times as many units [sold] with one tenth of the advertising budget’ (Potter, 1994), to facilitate a flexible response, is an advantage with shrinking product life cycles (IITA, 1994), and to ease customer retention (Van Iwaarden et al., 2004). Together, these factors are said to have ‘transform[ed] the way business is conducted’ (Grover and Saeed, 2004). In terms of web usage, critical independent variables are those of location, gender and age. Where the first of these is concerned, the percentage of the population using the Internet varies enormously from continent to continent, as can be seen in Table 1.