E-commerce increased by 37% over a year, from the 3rd trimester 2008 to the 3rd trimester 2009 in France.
€4,4 billion were spent online on the 3rd trimester 2009.
The average online basket reaches €93, the same level than last year’s.
Source: Journal du Net
Just installed the Wordpress Breadcrumbs plugin.
As I’m getting more content and sub-pages, the breadcrumbs menu will help visitors finding their way on my website.
I appreciate that I can decide where to have the breadcrumbs menu; it does not appear on the blog entries but appears on top of every static pages and sub-pages.
I was told the other day “How come this dull website ranks better than my site? … Has it been optimised?”
Follow the 3 steps below. If you get 3 yes, then the website integrates SEO techniques.
1. Look at the top left corner of your browser. If you see keywords or relevant sentences-> SEO here
(E.g. Website | Buy shoes online)
2. Look at the navigation bar. If you see keywords-> SEO here
(E.g. website.com/shoes/sandals)
3. Put your mouse on an image, if a little rectangle with keywords appears-> SEO here
(E.g. Summer sandals – come in white and red)
Of course the full SEO list is way longer, but these 3 steps are a good start 
I recently installed Wordtwit, a WordPress plugin which publishes all your blog entries to your twitter account.
I indirectly update my twitter account when I blog … and now the visitors coming from Twitter represent 15% of my entire visitors!
In brief, I just had to create a twitter account, connect it to Wordtwit … and got a few followers and a nice share of new visitors.
Though I was quite reluctant to only use 140 characters and limited web design facilities, I appreciate to know who follows me.
My twitter account: http://twitter.com/webgiraffe
Linkedin just reached 1 million users in France, 10 months after the French version was released (Facebook did the same and is now the 1st networking platform in France. Facebook has 6m members in France – dec 2008).
Created in 2004, Viadeo is a French professional networking plaform which has 2.5 m users in France (january 2009) and 8.5m worldwide. The platform is available in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.
Want to:
Facebook increased its market share over 400% in a year (Dec 2007 – Dec 2008). At the beginning of 2008, Facebook relased an interface translated in French and was accessed by 12 243 000 unique visitors in January 2009.
Therefore, Facebook is now the most popular networking platform in France. It is followed by Copains d’Avant (“Friends from before“) and Trombi (short form for trombinoscope) which share the same concept: you fill a form and indicate which primary/secondary schools, university, business schools you attended. You can also mention which company/institution you worked for.
People are classified by their education and work path. Copains d’avant (Main heading=”Find your highschool, school, company“) and Trombi (Main heading=”Where did you go to school?“) digg in the past while Facebook offers more way to classify and connect people in everyday’s life.
Want to visit the platforms?
Sources: ComScore, Feb 2009. Social Networking Has Banner Year in France, Growing 45 Percent
Médiamétrie, March 2009. Les réseaux sociaux en France et dans le monde
Wouldn’t it be great if all your web visitors used the same version of a browser?
It definitely would, but things are different, especially when you manage a multilingual website which is accessed by people whose Internet connections, browsers and screen resolutions drastically change from one continent to another. So if you don’t have enough resources to tweak your WordPress template so that it looks nice with Internet Explorer 6 too, here’s a way to deal with the IE6 visitors.
Shockingly Big IE6 Warning is a WordPress plugin which displays Warning messages when the site is accessed by IE6 or lower and invites them to upgrade their browsers. If “Warning message” seems a bit excessive (Is IE6 dangerous indeed? 
), you can customise the message content: title, text area and web browser download pages.
The plugin works great, and I’d love to see a multilingual version someday (so that the Chinese message is displayed for visitors in China, the Portuguese message in Portugal and Brazil, …).
According to Ipsos Media CT, European web surfers are (way) less likely to illegally download music or video, compared to Chinese and Russian web surfers. 15% of the French visit a non-official website to download or listen to music/video.
Here’s a quick way to find online business information on the major industries in France.
The French gouvernment decided in 2005 to create competitivy clusters (“Pôles de compétitivité“). They gather companies, research centres, universities which work for the same industry, in a defined local area (town, department, region).
Among the 71 clusters, there are 7 global competitiveness clusters:
According to SRI and Capgemini, the sponsored search market in France increased by 35% from 2007 to 2008 and reached €800,000,000.
If you want to target the French online market by using PPC campaigns (Adwords, AdCenter, ..), here are a few tips:
English 