What Does Your Website Look Like On My Computer?

Do you know what your website looks like on my computer? It’s not what you think, and I’m going to show you how to see what I see in just a moment.

In a perfect world, your website would look the same on every computer. Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Here are a few examples of what the IMAHawaii.com homepage looks like on other systems.

Click on the icon to make it bigger.

Whoa! Those look way different!

Notice how the IMAHawaii.com homepage looks different on different systems … and we know what we’re doing!

Most people have no idea what their website looks like on their visitors computer. You may discover that your site not only looks bad, but it doesn’t function properly.

Browser/operating system combinations that matter most.

We acquired these numbers from a sampling of 500,000 page views from our websites that we pulled from our Google Analytics account. This is the criteria we use to prioritize the testing for IMAHawaii.com and all of our other websites, consider using the same criteria when testing your website.

1. Internet Explorer / Windows: 44.91%
2. Firefox / Windows: 35.75%
3. Firefox / Macintosh: 7.84%
4. Safari / Macintosh: 3.94%
5. Chrome / Windows: 2.37%
6. Firefox / Linux: 1.45%
7. Opera / Windows: 1.36%
8. Mozilla / Linux: 0.54%
9. Safari / Windows: 0.38%
10. Mozilla / Windows: 0.22%

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Test Your Website Here

1. Go to Browsershots.org
2. Enter your website address and view what your site looks like in as many as 80 different browsers!  The screenshots above are from a test we ran at Browsershots.org
3. If your website doesn’t look the way you think it should, it might warrant a call to your web developer.

What Do I See

So, what does your website look like on my computer? Check the results for Firefox 3.1 on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) and you will see what I see.

Aloha, Josh Sommers
IMAHawaii.com President and Technical Advisor

P.S. Please comment below after running your test. I’m anxious to read what you discovered.

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Social Bookmarking

Recorded Social Bookmarking Java Gym from Pacific Villa Maui

StumbleUpon Installation Video (Part 1)

What is Social Bookmarking?

There is no substitute for a good example when it comes to understanding Social Bookmarking.  So, for the sake of example, let’s assume that you sell coffee and you want to become the most knowledgeable coffee seller on earth.

You head straight to your computer, fire up your browser and dedicate 15 minutes a day researching the Internet for everything you can learn about coffee, coffee shops, coffee growers, coffee roasters, coffee events, coffee everything!

My guess is that after viewing a few hundred of the 252 million web pages currently showing up on Google for the term “coffee,” you would have ten or twenty awesome resources bookmarked and saved to your favorites folder.

Think how valuable that information would be to you, not just with respect to learning about coffee, but being able to see how the most successful coffee companies on earth are marketing coffee on the Internet.

Now, let’s add the social bookmarking component to your research. Consider the fact that there are thousands of people (just like you) who enjoy reading about and writing about their favorite caffeinated beverage. Imagine how much quicker and more valuable your research time would be if you could see which coffee websites they found interesting?

Now imagine if you could quickly boil down the best of the best of the best of the 252 million coffee web pages on the Internet in one place. That’s the power of social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking allows people to research, organize, store, rate and share the best and most popular resources available for any given topic … even coffee.

How Can Social Bookmarking Help My Business?

1. Market Research – Imagine if you could see exactly what information your customers searched for, craved and saved!   This is exactly what you’ll find when you take advantage of social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us!
2. Website Research – Social bookmarketing takes the guess work out of creating web pages that your customers will want to visit. See what’s working and do more of the same on your website … only better.
3. Branding and exposure – Once you’ve created compelling content on your website, you can add it to social bookmarking world for review with the click of your mouse. If your content is valuable, you could easily see an unlimited stream of visitors coming to your website.

What Social Bookmarking Site Should I Use?

There are thousands of social bookmarking sites on the Internet.  Try some of the more popular sites and see which one does the best job of attracting your potential customers.  Each site is different and draws a different group of people.

Take time to review the more popular sites (and industry specific sites) before you jump in. You will get the best results if you dedicate all of your time to one or two social bookmarking site than to try to keep up with all of them.

Level of Difficulty

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Social Bookmarking Resources

• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Propeller
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Fark
• Slashdot
• Technorati
• Yahoo! Buzz

If you do happen to join StumbleUpon, be sure to add me as a friend!

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