Dissecting the Connected Kingdom

January 4, 2011

This month a new report from The Connected Kingdom highlighted the progress the UK has made online. What does it mean?

Well for starters the Internet contributed approx £100 billion to the UK economy in 2009. This was found to be larger than the construction, transportation and utilities industries.

But one of the striking figures was that 60% of this is linked to e-commerce showing that users are now flocking to the Internet to purchase goods.

However, as suggested by Fadi Shuman in this months .net magazine, there seems to be somewhat of a North and South divide in the UK. The report shows that London and the South East have the highest levels of Internet usage whilst the North East performs worst in England (Wales, Scotland and NI prop them up in the table).

What does this mean? It seems that there are certain types of user that aren’t being catered for or who are not grasping the benefits of shopping online. Is it the Northern culture or is it merely to do with the types of goods that are bought online?

That makes it our job (along with other developers) to help boost the economy through the web further by creating better websites and attracting more traffic.