100 million websites
According to a recent Netcraft web survey, in November 2006, there were 101,435,253 websites online. Not all of them are “alive”: some are domains that are “reserved”, while others are abandoned weblogs that have not been updated over the years. But even if only half of the websites are regularly updated, there are still more than one hundred million websites that someone continues to pay to continue.
100 million is an impressive milestone, demonstrating the huge growth of the Web since its inception 15 years ago.
The graph shows the increase in the number of sites in the period from 1991 to 2006. Pay attention to the logarithmic scale on the Y axis - this is the only way to show in the form of a graph the rapid growth of the Web in the early years of its development.
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As you can see in the graph, the Web experienced three stages of growth:
Of course, we can call a 25% increase "mature" only when we are talking about the growth of the Web. Any other areas of human activity would be glad to grow by half of this speed. If the Web maintains its current growth rate, by 2010 the number of websites will reach 200 million.
On the one hand, it would be realistic to expect some reduction in the existing growth rates, as the Web becomes more and more mature every year. On the other hand, 200 million sites are still not the limit - there are far more than 200 million different organizations in the world (both commercial and non-commercial and state-owned) - in the end, all of them will have their own sites (which is also true for everyone separately). Thus, I expect that the number of websites will reach 200 million very soon, while 2012 seems to me a more realistic date than 2010.
What does all this mean for web designers
I remember 1994 - the period of the most rapid growth of the Web in its entire history. That year, the Web grew from 700 to 12,000 sites, which accounted for 1600% of the annual increase. Our working group dealing with websites gathered then every week and every time discovered something new and unknown on the Web a week ago.
Given the pace of change, in 1994 did not have to talk about the "experience of interacting with websites." Whenever users logged on to the Web, they would discover something new. Despite this, already at the end of 1994 in my publications the first models of user interaction with sites (Web usability patterns) were outlined. As you can see in my new book , I corrected some of the recommendations that I first made in the early 90s, but many of them have not changed.
The rapid growth of the Web ended in 2001, and all those usability rules that we managed to give since then have been repeatedly tested for correctness. Despite the fact that web usability is not yet fully formed discipline, the latest work is aimed more at finding additional knowledge than at revising the “old” finds made before 2001.
Thus, the mature Web is associated with the already well-studied user experience with it (user experience), and users have established stereotypes about how the website should behave. For example, all users have one specific mental model of how the search works , and our research of eye movements confirms that different users view the page in the same way with the search results - even if the sites differ from the standard model.
The above does not mean that the search can no longer be improved. On the contrary - the search collects almost the lowest number of points when evaluating usability, and therefore there is still room to go in improving the search. We are talking only about the fact that the main stereotypes of user behavior have now been formed, and you should develop websites based on them, unless you have something substantially better. Minor improvements will not work here if it requires the user to change their established habits.
Despite the fact that in the future the total number of sites will steadily increase, for our research it is important that the growth rate has already stabilized. From a technical explosion to a public facility in just 15 years: this in itself speaks of the rapid nature of the modern world to us. Books have gone this way for hundreds of years: until the moment when it became important what was written in the book, and not how it was made and framed.
Creating a website, consider user expectations. In a mature system, your site can no longer stand out from a number of its tribesmen with a cool heaped interface. Such "interfaces" only frighten users from the site. The web is no longer considered to be a testing ground for experiments, it is a tool for everyday work, and you can stand out by providing the user with both good content and the means to solve his problems.
Jacob Nielsen.
100 million is an impressive milestone, demonstrating the huge growth of the Web since its inception 15 years ago.
The graph shows the increase in the number of sites in the period from 1991 to 2006. Pay attention to the logarithmic scale on the Y axis - this is the only way to show in the form of a graph the rapid growth of the Web in the early years of its development.
')
As you can see in the graph, the Web experienced three stages of growth:
- 1991-1997: Explosive growth (an increase of 850% per year).
- 1998-2001: Rapid growth (150% per year).
- 2002-2006: Mature growth (25% per year).
Of course, we can call a 25% increase "mature" only when we are talking about the growth of the Web. Any other areas of human activity would be glad to grow by half of this speed. If the Web maintains its current growth rate, by 2010 the number of websites will reach 200 million.
On the one hand, it would be realistic to expect some reduction in the existing growth rates, as the Web becomes more and more mature every year. On the other hand, 200 million sites are still not the limit - there are far more than 200 million different organizations in the world (both commercial and non-commercial and state-owned) - in the end, all of them will have their own sites (which is also true for everyone separately). Thus, I expect that the number of websites will reach 200 million very soon, while 2012 seems to me a more realistic date than 2010.
What does all this mean for web designers
I remember 1994 - the period of the most rapid growth of the Web in its entire history. That year, the Web grew from 700 to 12,000 sites, which accounted for 1600% of the annual increase. Our working group dealing with websites gathered then every week and every time discovered something new and unknown on the Web a week ago.
Given the pace of change, in 1994 did not have to talk about the "experience of interacting with websites." Whenever users logged on to the Web, they would discover something new. Despite this, already at the end of 1994 in my publications the first models of user interaction with sites (Web usability patterns) were outlined. As you can see in my new book , I corrected some of the recommendations that I first made in the early 90s, but many of them have not changed.
The rapid growth of the Web ended in 2001, and all those usability rules that we managed to give since then have been repeatedly tested for correctness. Despite the fact that web usability is not yet fully formed discipline, the latest work is aimed more at finding additional knowledge than at revising the “old” finds made before 2001.
Thus, the mature Web is associated with the already well-studied user experience with it (user experience), and users have established stereotypes about how the website should behave. For example, all users have one specific mental model of how the search works , and our research of eye movements confirms that different users view the page in the same way with the search results - even if the sites differ from the standard model.
The above does not mean that the search can no longer be improved. On the contrary - the search collects almost the lowest number of points when evaluating usability, and therefore there is still room to go in improving the search. We are talking only about the fact that the main stereotypes of user behavior have now been formed, and you should develop websites based on them, unless you have something substantially better. Minor improvements will not work here if it requires the user to change their established habits.
Despite the fact that in the future the total number of sites will steadily increase, for our research it is important that the growth rate has already stabilized. From a technical explosion to a public facility in just 15 years: this in itself speaks of the rapid nature of the modern world to us. Books have gone this way for hundreds of years: until the moment when it became important what was written in the book, and not how it was made and framed.
Creating a website, consider user expectations. In a mature system, your site can no longer stand out from a number of its tribesmen with a cool heaped interface. Such "interfaces" only frighten users from the site. The web is no longer considered to be a testing ground for experiments, it is a tool for everyday work, and you can stand out by providing the user with both good content and the means to solve his problems.
Jacob Nielsen.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/30907/
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