Easy Way to Add an Extra 54 Million People Worth Of Traffic

I recently saw an interesting article at site-ference.com, How to Get 54 Million People to Visit Your Site. – (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Website-Development/How-to-Get-54-Million-People-to-Visit-Your-Site.html.)

The article explains how most websites online are not accessible to 18% of the US population. Let me say that again, 18% of the US population is being completely ignored, that is 54 Million people.

If an estimated 10% of the world population were sampled, it would come out to 670 million people that are potentially being ignored once they gain Internet access. That’s a huge audience.

According to the article, 73% of people with disabilities are heads of households, and $13.6 billion is spent on 31.7 million trips made by people with disabilities.

The online traffic that is being missed by most web sites is astounding, but it helps me to remain focused on making sure that all of my websites are w3 validated, css validated, and accessible for people with disabilities.

Google even has a lab search engine for those who are visually impaired – (http://labs.google.com/accessible/.)

Now imagine my surprise when I searched for a keyword term for one of my clients in the accessible search and found 9 out of 10 of the search results are my pages! It’s separated between several sites, but the fact that I took the time to w3 validate my site, and take the extra step to make sure that it is accessible to the visually impaired means that Google has rewarded me.

Once I realized the importance of my coding, I took the extra steps, went back to all my sites, and revalidated them to make sure I’m one of the few web designers targeting an untapped audience.

Adelard Gasana

October 21, 2008