Internet Explorer has dominated the share of the browser market for years but has seen major decline in it’s market share since hitting the dizzying heights of 70.44% share in November 2008. Since being launched in August 2008, Chrome has seen a dramatic rise in popularity and usage and has finally overtaken IE to take the crown in the browser wars.

Global Browser Share

Global Browser Share: Last 2 Weeks

This are the global browser share statistics which are useful to know, but if you run an online business and rely predominantly on UK traffic then it may be more useful to know the browser market share in the UK.

UK Browser Share

UK Browser Share: Last 2 Weeks

We hope this information was useful for you to know. Whether you’re a developer, a site owner or simply an internet user, it’s always important to where your current browser ranks in the global browser share.

The American Heart Association urges us to take 30 minutes of walking to reduce the risk of heart disease; 100 steps per minute is considered a reasonable pace.

The infographic below also shows 8 excercises you can perform while sat at your desk, from thigh stretches to shoulder shrugs, from leg squats to chair dips.

Exercising at your desk is a great way to stay active, but we are warned not to strain ourselves while working out or overexerting ourselves around the office. Ergonomic office furniture is a good way to prevent workplace injuries so make sure your chair is up to the task.

Let’s have a look at the visuals they’ve released so far:

Dashboard Overview

New Layouts

New Navigation

Thoughts

At first glance we’re very impressed. It’s how every user interface should be like, simple, intuitive, easy to navigate and a pleasure to use. They have stripped the back the treatment of each page and have really focused on removing any unnecessary information yet kept it accessible.

The current online software is very usable at present but this is certainly a step forward. Each page looks well scoped and real definition has been applied to each page template.

We’re looking forward to reviewing the software in more depth once these updates have been rolled out.

We already recommend FreeAgent online accounting software to small businesses and freelancers from all around Yorkshire and nationwide, but now we’d even endorse it!

Thanking for reading!

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Basic Features

So AWR seems reasonably priced, but what do you get for your money? Well, the Standard Licence (the cheapest one) lets you rank check as many sites as you like and you get access to all the data you’d expect like ranking changes over time. The next level up (Professional) lets you create nice reports to print and email – great if you have clients or people to share the data with.

The Enterprise and Server levels give you access to keyword research tools (Wordtracker, Google Keyword tool and and there’s an API for others like SEMRuch and Google Webmaster Tools) – to be honest I use separate tools anyway so that isn’t why AWR is important for me. What I like is being able to rank check sites from any search engine – the Server licence which is the most expensive, actually gives you a proxy so you get accurate results from other countries.

Setting Up A Project

The AWR Project Manager is a tool that lets you set up and manage your rank-checking project. This could be something like “My Website Rankings” or “New Keyword Set”. You start by choosing which search engines you’d like to use – Google UK and US for example – and then you add your keywords. This is as simple as typing them in, although you can export from a file or URL. You then add as many websites as you like to be checked and choose what crawl depth you’d like AWR to go to.

Realistically, it doesn’t really matter where your site is after the first few pages, but setting a crawl depth of a few hundred results let you see if you’re popping in for any of your target terms.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the bigger the crawl, the longer it takes. AWR actually rests in between querying the search engines so that it reduces the risk of being blocked.

Once you click OK that’s it – the project starts running! You can manually pause or delete it at any time, and re-checking is as simple as forcing a new crawl or scheduling one. You can even set it to email you the results.

Top Sites

One neat little feature is the “Top Sites” tab which is part of your main project dashboard. This shows you up to 200 sites that rank above you for the selected keyword. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the competition and even find sites that are worth partnering with.

One Downside

The only annoying thing about AWR is that you have to purchase a Maintenance Plan after the first 12 months in order to keep getting updates and support. This costs from $29 to $119 and as we mentioned above, it’s not totally clear at first that you have to pay this (AWR talks about a “One-Time Fee”). I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you didn’t bother to buy a maintenance licence after 12 months – presumably it would continue to work!

Overview

AWR is an easy to use, solid rank-checking program. It’s got all the features you could want to check your own site, your client sites or your competitor sites, and the reporting is great for a quick overview. You can customise the reports and dig a lot deeper into various data, but from my point of view it’s the data at a glance that’s the most useful. AWR is the best rank checking tool out there at the moment so it’s well worth using for your clients or just for your own sites.

#####

Reply from AWR on 26th August 2011.

The application license does have a one time fee. Upon purchase, AWR comes with a 1 year maintenance plan, which provides free application version and search engines definitions updates. When the initial maintenance plan expires, you can continue to use the application at the version level we released before the maintenance plan has expired. Purchasing a new maintenance plan, which will bring new version and search engines definitions updates, is optional, as each user may consider is best for himself.

- AD, Advanced Web Ranking Support Team

According to Techcrunch…

The company hopes by the end of 2013 to have 1 billion users (more than Facebook) in addition to $1.5 billion in revenue and an over 5,000 person staff. Just typing out that sort of ambition is sort of painful when the service still shows me that I’m following people who I’m not and is all over the place with regards to a steady revenue stream.

Follow @thefloatingfrog

What did I do before starting The Floating Frog?

Well in summary I’ve been lucky enough to serve the last 10 years in 2 great digital agencies after training for 4 years in Graphic Design. My first role was in a start-up web design company called Save9 who was founded by two fine gentlemen. I was originally offered a temporary summer work placement that would take me up to the start of my top-up degree but with the ever growing success of the business and the opportunity I saw developing for me I decided to stay. Save9 branched out into 9 core product and service offers and more role became extremely diverse and exciting. Some of these offerings included VoIP systems, Bluetooth marketing, cinema touch-screen systems, data mining, eCommerce websites, mobile solutions and more. We were invited to the grand opening of Apollo Cinemas flagship cinema outlet which opened in London’s Piccadilly Circus and attended by a hat full of celebrities and the Countess of Wessex. Apollo Cinemas were the first privately owned cinema chain to go full non poster based advertising in their outlets and we were responsible to installing all the technical hardware plus delivering the rich media. We also traveled to the Cine Expo in Amsterdam to sell the concept to companies like Kodak and Coca Cola.

After nearly 5 years at Save9, I moved to Harrogate and became Senior Web Designer at 9xb, a full service digital agency. This role enabled me to specialise in online solutions and consolidate me UI/UX design skills while delivering bespoke solutions to clients that maximised their ROI and helped them engage with their customers better. I worked directly with some big brands yet gained more pleasure when I had the chance to work on new start-up projects as I could help turn a clients new vision into reality, rather than simply completing a to-do list for a worker bee at a larger company.

I have now gone full time freelance and work closely with a group of highly trained and experienced freelancers. In the 3 monthly since, we have already created an impact and are gaining a great reputation with the clients with have served. We have also worked with a few other agencies who outsource a lot of their work to us so I’m glad we can deliver such a service.

Plans for The Floating Frog

Primarily The Floating Frog will act like a shop window for our services, our work and our blog. We’ll use it to advertise our services straight to the end client and slowly cut down on the agency work as we get more established. One of our core strengths is our WordPress expertise. We seem to be getting a lot of job offers from agencies who have won a WordPress job but don’t have the skills to do it. I’d say 70% of our work at the moment is connected in some way to WordPress so there is obviously a real demand for it. It’s also important to educate both clients and agencies about the pro’s and con’s of WordPress and to help eliminate the dated persona that WordPress isn’t a via CMS and is just an insecure, low featured blogging platform.

We don’t just work with WordPress, but if a project is geared up to use it then I’d recommend it every time. For eCommerce sites and larger projects that require for of a bespoke solution then we work with the client and scope out the entire project and advise from there.

FrogsThemes.com

We have also started a premium WordPress themes company called FrogsThemes.com. This is where we develop off the shelf WordPress themes that are priced at the entry level market. So far it’s been a great success and we’ll soon be hitting the 1,000 premium WordPress themes download mark which is fantastic news. We also offer a lite version of the themes to give users the change to try before they buy. These lite versions are the same as the premium versions but without a few advanced features and support. These are very popular and we’ve already exceeded 20,000 downloads of those themes, amazing to think.

Core service offerings

These are still to be decided but in essence we all agree that we want to offer the full service to our clients so we can maximise their potential impact and growth after launch while gaining a good return on their investment. We already know the market is saturated with companies claiming to offer a full service but it’s important for us not to follow but more to specialise and be innovators in what we do best.

New Logo

This is potentially just an initial idea of the logo but we all agree it works pretty well for us. The pixelated frog (digital) in the center of the speech bubble (discussion and consultancy) with the name and tagline “Handcrafted websites”. Principally we’ll be focusing on websites, user interfaces, with great semantic and cosmetic builds that are positioned with SEO in mind. We’ll be cutting out the middleman and the bullshit most clients have to deal with when hiring an agency and focusing our efforts on delivering an end product that full filling the clients objectives, meeting timescales and budgets and ultimately is a pleasure to work on, for both the team and the client.

What do you think of the logo? It has potential to adopt colour and animation on hover and in other mediums but as a basis it’s good to see it stripped right back.

So hold tight, and come back soon. We are aiming to have the new site designed, built and setup in the next month or so. If you have any suggestions, comments, advice or spare staplers we’d love to hear from you….. oh L00k, we have comments enabled below

P.S. I haven’t checked for grammar or spelling mistakes in this blog post so please pull me up on any you see, I know you’re dying too!

Well, prepare to be open mouthed at this nine square mile creation!

As with many artistic installations it is the final product that gets shown off, but because of how fragile nature can be, this is all about documenting the process followed by a fleeting moment of the final artefact as the wind and snows sets it.

Eight people and a broom led onward into Siberia by Jim Denevan created this somewhat temporary masterpiece on Lake Baikal, the world’s largest lake.  How apt.  Even more appropriate is leader Jim Denevan (who created the previous world’s largest artwork in the Sahara), is known for creating expansive and repeating patterns over endless scale.

Given the ferocious Siberian winds it’s a marvel the artwork survived in the tundra for as long as it did, making the photography and documentation of this work even more important than usual.

Living in a yurt in the centre of the lake the team survived by creating a daily fire (as the flames would periodically freeze), eventually giving up when ever so slightly warmer temperatures arrived and the circles melted away.

The complete experience has been documented in its entirety on The Anthropologist so do check it out.

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