The internet is no longer for the young or nerdy, more and more people aged 50 or over are surfing the information super-highway!

According to Internet Research over a a quarter of internet users in the UK are aged 50+, a figure that has shocked Juno and made us re-think our target markets for certain clients. The amount of surfers over fifty has surprisingly bulged up an extra one million people.

Juno believe that the rise in 'older generation' web surfers is due to the ever-improving search engines such as Google and the fact that shopping online has become a lot safer and easier with payment methods such as PayPal.  Web design and development has also helped made online purchases easier and clearer, we've seen again and again that a clear, well structured ecommerce website out-performs a complex one every time; simplicity is the key.  The last probable factor of older regular web users is browser technology improvements; making the font size larger or quickly finding information out (with the mini search toolbar) has become a lot simpler for users.  The old browsers used to increase the font size within the actual code of the website which often broke a website's layout; new browsers such as FireFox 3 zoom the whole webpage which makes everything bigger and still in the same position.

We cannot see any reason for people to not use the internet in the future, as generations pass by more and more people will be using the internet and they'll be increasing competition online especially in ecommerce.  If you run or own a business then act now or be very far behind in the race online, certain markets are nigh impossible to enter with the amount of competition currently there like "insurance" for example.

'Website Accessibility' has always been a key issue with Google, they encourage webmasters to create alternative text for each image for blind people and a clear navigation bar.  With a wider range of internet users Juno predicts that accessibility will play a larger role in which websites Google rank highly in their search engine results.