Some time ago, I signed up to Google Analytics, the other night I checked my site’s statistics, and here is what I found:

General Statistics

Browsers

Thats always the most interesting thing, which browsers do your visitors use? here are the stats for this site: So, the majority of this site’s visitors (50.33%) have chosen FireFox, next is Internet Explorer, with only 33.89%. Good, but not good enough. guys, Stop using Internet Explorer! No. 3 is the favorite browser of the mac users, Safari, with 12.13%. Under 2% are Opera, Mozilla, Camino and Konqueror.

Operating Systems

Sadly, windows is still leading this one with 79.07%, Mac is second with 17.11% and weirdly enough, Linux only has 3.82%.

Connection Speed

80.4% have some sort of broadband connection (cable or DSL) 10.47% have dialup (Much more that I thought) and the rest have corporate or ‘unknown’ connections.

Screen Resolutions

The leading resolution, with 40.2% of visitors, is 1024×768. no. 2 is 1280×1024 with 22.76% followed by 1680×1050 (8.47%) and 1280×800 (5.98%). under the 5% mark are 1440×900 (3.49%), 1152×864 (3.16%), 1600×1200 (2.49%), 1280×768 (2.33%), 800×600 (1.99%) and 1280×854 (1.83%).

Outdated Stuff

Another thing that interested me was if there’s still a point in designing for IE 5, using web-safe colors and limiting the designs to 800px.

Screen Resolutions

Less then 2% of this sites visitors have a 800×600 resolution, so while I think that those visitors need to be kept in mind, less important stuff, like a right sidebar, can be put outside the traditional 800 pixel limit.

Older Browsers

Internet Explorer 5 got 0.49% of the Internet Explorer Visitors to this site which are only 36.29% of total visits to this site. Netscape didn’t even register once! so no hassle with outdated browsers and their quirks for me.

Screen Colors

Is using web-safe colors still important? well, not for my site. 90.2% use 32-bit monitors, 5.32% have a 16-bit monitor, and 4.32% use a 24-bit monitor. not even one 8-bit registered. web-safe colors are officially dead.

All the above stats can be found in any old stats tool, the real good stuff in Google Analytics is stuff like what links were clicked and the bounce rates, but I’ll save that stuff for another post.