From the US Hostile Workplace Survey, 2000.

About mobbing, bullying and harassment, Jim Landgraf, president of Education Testing Service said: “We don’t see $8 billion worth of antidepressants in this country for nothing. The corporate culture is so accepting of these kinds of aggressive actions, it’s not going to go away.”

They’re on the web in great numbers, they are your users, and American English is not their first language. They may be across the world or across the street. Who are they? They are global readers, and if you’re doing business on the web, you can’t afford to dismiss them. Global Reach at http://www.glreach.com/globstats/ estimates that 510 million non-native English speakers will be online by 2003. That’s more than half the online population! How can you welcome these global users and make your site easy for them to use? Here are our five writing tips for making your web site universal.

When I check my site statistics – I get a WEALTH of information – you need to check your stats out, too – you can reclaim lost traffic, find out the sites people go to most, and better your traffic.

For instance, when I look at the “errors” information, I see sites people “tried” to go to but found there to be no site, or perhaps tried to send an email to a wrong address – you can now make a copy of a real page and save it as the error page, or rename it on FTP and then upload the real page back.

Do you always know what’s going on at your website ? How many unique visitors you had and which pages they looked at ? If not , you should consult your best friend, your best colleague and your relative for everything that is related to your online business : Your website statistics !

When designing a web site, you are never sure how it appears to all people. This is because people use different browsers, resolutions, computers and connection speeds to the Internet. Your site may look good with your browser, but absolutely horrendous in other browsers. This is why you should test the usability of your site, before you expose it to the world.

In the early days of the Internet it was common to visit a web site and see a counter informing you that “you are the 118,456th visitor to this site”, and various webmasters would proudly talk of how many “hits” their sites were getting. Now, things have changed and you will mostly find counters on amateur sites, and wiser webmasters now know that the term “hits” doesn’t really mean much.

The term hit refers to a request for a file on your web site. When someone visits your web page, they request your URL, but in order to see the page, they also have to get all the graphic files that are located on your page. So, one visitor to your page may be requesting 25 different files, and thus you have 25 hits.

As some of you probably now know, WebTrends Live no longer offer the free Personal Edition of their statistics tracker.

Stats tell us a myriad of things, some even useful and we’re accustomed to using them in our marketing and selling processes. Frequently abused and made to say what WE want, but here I am merely considering them in ways that influence site design … and, I believe, letting the numbers speak for themselves.