Cyber Monday boosts gloomy online retail sales

December 4, 2008, 6:06 am

NEW YORK (AFP) - Online retail spending fell an unprecedented two percent in November, but rose 15 percent on the online shopping day known as Cyber Monday, Internet researcher comScore reported on Wednesday.
The Reston, Virginia-based comScore said Americans spent 846 million dollars online on Cyber Monday, the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, up from 733 million dollars last year and the second-highest total on record.
"Consumers are clearly responding positively to retailers' aggressive online discounts," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
"With Cyber Monday promotions beginning in earnest over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers have finally begun to open their wallets," said Fulgoni.
"This is an extremely encouraging development for retailers and we can but hope that their aggressive discounting has still left room for profits," he said.
ComScore said online retail spending for the first 31 days of the holiday season starting November 1 fell two percent from a year ago to 12.02 billion dollars, the first such drop for the period.
According to another online research firm, Hitwise, the top visited retail website on Cyber Monday was Amazon.com, followed by Walmart .com, Target.com, BestBuy.com and Sears.com.
Hitwise said Amazon.com's traffic was up 21 percent on Cyber Monday 2008 compared with Cyber Monday 2007.
While the Cyber Monday sales figures were encouraging, comScore has forecast flat online retail sales for the November-December holiday period of 29.2 billion dollars, the same as last year.

(Source: Yahoo News)

Web Site Desigh

A web site is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a web site is defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a web site. A web page consists of information for which the web site is developed. A web site might be compared to a book, where each page of the book is a web page.

There are many aspects (design concerns) in this process, and due to the rapid development of the Internet, new aspects may emerge. For non-commercial web sites, the goals may vary depending on the desired exposure and response. For typical commercial web sites, the basic aspects of design are:

• The content: the substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.
• The usability: the site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.
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A web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a web site is known as the Home page or Index. Some web sites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language or region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial web sites are concerned.

Once a web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the web site receives. This may include submitting the web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other web sites, creating affiliations with similar web sites, etc.

(Source: Wikipedia.org)