Target audience - Web safe

Target Audience:

Students,

Employers 

People interested in recycling, sustainability and enterprise.

Browsers:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

From this grid I can see what browsers people are using, so when making/testing the site I will primarily be testing on: Firefox and Chrome followed by Internet explorer, Safari and Opera, this way I will be reaching the most amount of users so that my site displays correctly for the maximum amount of users. 

Browser versions:

Firefox

The most used version of the firefox browser is:

2012 Feb : FF 10 16.8%

2012 Jan : FF  9 17.8%

2011 Dec : FF 8 22.8%

From this I can see that out of the 37.1% of people who use firefox, 16.8% of them are on the version of the browser that came before the new release.

This is helpful to know as I'm not just testing on the firefox browser but i am also testing on the a specific version, using this data I can see that I need to test multiple firefox versions ranging from version 9 to the current one.

I have also got this information on all the browsers I will be testing the site on.

As well as desktop browsers there are also mobile browsers and devices in which the web is shown through:

From this you can see that there is just 1.25% of sites that are visited on mobile devices, this would be helpful in knowing if you were designing a responsive web site or a site for a mobile device.


Screen resolution:
It is important that I design my site so that it suits the majority of screen size/resolution, below are the current statistics for January 2012, from it i can see that 1336x768 as the most popular screen resolution size followed by 1024x768 at 13%. Using this information I can see that i need to base my site around
1024x768 pixels.

Researching further I can see that a lot of popular sites including Facebook and Youtube all use a similar website size which is around 960 pixels wide, from this data as well as the above i can see now decide on the appropriate size for my website design:

960 pixels wide, for the length I will have on average about 600 pixels high still the user would have to scroll due to the fact you have browser tool bars, desktop toolbars, docks etc which all take up space on the screen.

So 960x600+ (600+ then scroll)

http://www.iteracy.com/resources/build-a-better-website/size-and-layout-of-a-web-page/

This is a list of the current statistics on which the websites are looked at, when testing my site i will need to test it on the most popular os and platform and then work my backwards to the less poplar ones shown, there are also tools online i have found which help with testing websites in multiple versions of different browsers.

Internet speed
6.8Mbps is supposedly the uk average broadband speed reported by ofcom
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/10/11/akamai-reveals-uk-average-internet-connection-speeds-hit-5mbps-in-q2-2011.html

I will be compressing my site so that the end file size is small, this will mean that images will load quicker and users will get the information faster.

For testing I will need to test how fast the site loads under different internet speeds, so that if it is taking too long I can look at further compression and/or removal of multimedia content.

All this information is useful as I am looking to grab the attention of the user and keep them on the page, if the site does not display correctly, content takes too long to load or the site doesn't come up under the correct search terms, the site will not be doing what it is supposed too.