Our Client Manager, Ronan Morris, was asked to speak at the DBASS / Bank of Ireland, Ready, Steady Go Seminar which was held recently in Ashbourne.

It was a short 10-minute presentation entitled “Marketing a Website” and highlights are available here.

Ronan spoke about:

• How to avoid the 7 most common mistakes that SMEs make with their websites
• Key sources of traffic for a website
• How a less than perfect website can damage all of your marketing and networking efforts
• The key components of a successful website project

Other speakers included Marc Coleman, the economist, journalist and broadcaster.

The audience was made up of local SME owners from Meath and surrounding counties. The event was organised by DBASS Chartered Accountants and was sponsored by Bank of Ireland.

One of our favourite websites is Made In Hollywood. The owner is Fran Hollywood and basically they can make anything from Styrofoam (Polystyrene). We’ve just launched a new portfolio update for Fran.  There are simply loads more photos of the latest work.

If you are builder or architect, you will be interested in the architecture portfolio. If you are in marketing or PR, you will find some very interesting product samples in the Marketing portfolio.

Visit Made In Hollywood

This is one of more interesting projects that we have worked on.

Medguard Healthcare is a progressive, Ashbourne-based medical supplies company that have developed an excellent reputation amongst doctors, dentists, nursing homes and many other businesses for the range and quality of their medical products.

A key business goal for Medguard for 2010 was to move their entire product range onto an online store. We were delighted to be involved with this project. While the underlying platform is the industry-leading Magento platform, there were a number of custom elements that made this project even more interesting.

Vist Medguard Healthcare

This is a project that we thought was worth highlighting. It’s another example showing how larger photo images are becoming much more popular on websites.

This client specialises in high-end commercial fit-outs for buildings such as schools, hospitals and office blocks.  ORJ can do key elements such as carpentry, plastering, suspended ceilings and partitioning.

The output of their work is highly visual and the photos (see ‘Portfolio’ page) allow the site user get a sense of the work that they do without having to read lots of text on screen.

This was one of the faster website projects we worked on with us finalising it over the Christmas period.  We also provide about 80% of the text content as an additional service to the clients.

Vist ORJ Construction Ltd.

If you have recently had a blog installed on your business website, you may find this helpful. The purpose of this article is to help you ensure that your Blog:

• Enhances the image and credibility of your business
• Drives additional traffic to your website
• Delivers a return on your investment

What are the benefits of having a Blog?

• It allows your business comment in an authoritative way about issues affecting your clients and your industry.
• It enhances the credibility of the business and of individual staff members within the business.
• It can be very helpful in driving additional traffic to your website.
• The articles written can also be used to set up a monthly newsletter.

Why your Blog needs to be actively managed

The simple reason is that, in our experience, it its not managed it won’t be regularly updated.  Not only do you stop getting the benefits from your Blog, you in fact can begin to damage your reputation as potential customers see that you have lost interest in keeping it up-to-date.  They might assume that your interest in them as customers may be similarly short lived.

To illustrate this, if at any point the Blog becomes too time consuming to keep up-to-date we normally recommend removing it from your site.

Benefiting from your Blog – Simple Tips

1. It is likely that you will be asking several staff members to make regular contributions to the Blog.  If you don’t clearly explain the short and long term benefits for them and the business they will see this as an additional burden they can do without.

   ACTION: Allow 15 minutes at your next team meeting to explain why a Blog is important and why it is on your website.




2. As the business owner, you need to make the Blog as ‘self-managing’ as possible.  Otherwise it will prove to be a burden for you.  The Blog should feature as an agenda item at regular management/team meetings. You also need to delegate the writing of articles to appropriate members of staff.

   ACTION: Include ‘Blog Articles’ as an agenda item at all management meetings ACTION: Decide who will write articles and brief them accordingly ACTION: Agree number of articles required per month and then define a schedule that everyone can sign up to.  (Ideally the Blog should have 1 new article per week but certainly no less than 2 per month).

3. Try to build up a small bank of articles so that you are never short of an article.  This really reduces the stress on everyone.

   ACTION: Ask for 2 articles per person to get things started.  Then hold the extra one back and release as required.  Obviously bearing in mind that some articles need to be more current than others.

4. Like all parts of business, you will need to apply a quality control measure.  You should ask to review all articles before they go live on the site.

   ACTION: Ask contributors to email their article to you before it goes live and to also give you a certain number of days to review it.




5. Why not use the articles you have written to make a monthly email newsletter?  And if you do, invest in a newsletter design and system that fits your overall online look and feel.

   ACTION: Assess whether an email newsletter would be suitable for your business.

We’ve just launched our first ever Classified Ads website for Fetch.ie

The client wanted something that would offer great functionality but also look visually attractive. The site user should find it very easy to drill down within categories to find specific ads. This is something that is hard to find elsewhere.

It costs €3 to place an ad on Fetch.

Let us know what you think of the site. For the first 10 people who send in a comment, we have a free promotional code that allows you to place ads for free for a period of time.

We thought this site was worth a mention on our blog as we think this signage company has the biggest online product catalogue for the sector they operate in. And, they are hoping to double the number of images on the site in the coming weeks!

There are all types of signs available such as, information signs, safety signs, warning signs and many more. ETAG Signs also do a range of branded clothing.

They have a great reputation for their speedy turnaround of orders as well as the value for money they offer. We have bought a few bits and pieces ourselves and the quality is always excellent.

They are based in Ashbourne, Co Meath and they deliver throughout Ireland.

Check out ETAG Signs at http://www.etagsigns.ie/

Have you heard the one about the online business that tried and tried and tried, for months and months and months, to get a mention in a national newspaper? And then when they finally did, it added hardly any extra visitors to their website? We have a few clients that experienced this recently and we thought it was quite interesting.

Have you or any of your clients experienced this unusual phenomenon? Please let us know. We might do a more in depth analysis at some future point.

In the meantime, in the absence of any reliable scientific (or otherwise) data, we will rely on our own intuition to spew out some easily challengeable observations and conclusions. Blog posts are great aren’t they? Imagine being able to write such opinion-based stuff when you were in college. Thank god these days are behind us :-)

Observations

(Remember, we are focusing here on businesses that generate most or all of their income from online product/service sales. But it also can apply to offline businesses who might think that a PR mention in a newspaper will drive extra traffic to their website.)

Anyway, back to the matter in hand and straight on to our ‘observations’.

• A ‘mention’ isn’t enough. If you happen to get a passing mention in an article and even if your website URL is stated, you will NOT need a new server to cope with the extra traffic.
• The ‘disconnect’ between the newspaper that is being read and the reader’s computer that could be switched off and/or be in a different place is a critical flaw. This is perhaps the most important observation. Your typical ‘data collector’ who reads newspapers, surfs the net, etc. has an attention span that barely surpasses that of a goldfish. The chances of that person retaining the information about your website, the reason why they want to visit it AND the URL would appear to be very low.
• If you haven’t got something unique you are in even more trouble. If the product or service you are promoting is a ‘me-too’ type offering, the value of your offline PR is likely to be pretty low.
• A memorable URL can help your efforts but it would appear to only reduce the effects of the above.
• Newspapers are mostly ‘scan-read’ and there is single layer of information. You begin reading and then you finish. End of experience. Compare that to online information gathering which is multi-layered, journey-like and almost open-ended. If you are an online business, aiming your public relations as directly as possible into that context has to be more beneficial than trying to move people from another context first (and hoping they remember you as they move across)

But… it’s not all bad news. Here are a few other thoughts:

• The rise in smart phone usage could gradually reduce the effect of the ‘disconnect’ issue above as more readers will have a browser easily at hand. But, remember your offer will need to better than just OK in order to get people to browse on a small screen.
• With more and more newspapers mentioning websites, more people are getting tuned in to keeping a ‘future browsing list’ but I for one wouldn’t be pinning my hopes on these ultra-organised types.
• We’re seeing more visual imagery in newspapers and this means that URLs are often appended to product photos and this can also help recall rates. The most successful examples of where offline PR does work for online e-commerce businesses is where brand new, otherwise unique, or heavily discounted products are promoted using photographs. The product pages on in the Irish Indo and Irish Times magazines on a Saturday are good examples.
• Even if you don’t get a website visit from the PR, you will still benefit from the increased awareness of your brand that the PR delivers. The value of this will vary depnding on the extent of the coverage and which business sector you operate in.

Conclusions

• If you have an e-commerce business, do not build your marketing strategy on an aggressive PR strategy aimed at national newspapers unless you have a truly compelling offering.
• Focus your efforts on online PR, particularly if you are paying for the service. Get your website URL into placements where not only is it mentioned, there is a hyperlink directly to your site. This will also benefit your link-building/SEO agenda.
• The observations above would also perhaps add weight to the argument in favour of a particular business pursuing a specific social media strategy.
• If you are going to use a PR agency, then choose wisely. Seek out ones that will suit your online agenda. Have they got specific experience or do they maybe specialise in online PR? Do they use Facebook and Twitter themselves? How credible looking is their own website?

A word on Radio and TV

While not specifically covered here, these media have similar difficulties in terms of the ‘disconnect’ issue and the ability of listeners/viewers to remember websites that have been mentioned.

In their favour however, is the fact that they are more engaging than press. Radio might also offer greater opportunities for someone to also be beside their computer while listening.

We were thrilled and honoured to be asked to speak at the September seminar for the Irish Women in Business last Tuesday night in the Osprey Hotel, Naas.

IWIB is a network that was set up by Tara Wilson-Black of Select Digital and it’s aimed particularly at start up businesses that are managed by women.  It holds regular networking events and seminar programmes for members. The atmosphere is always very relaxed and it makes for very interactive sessions as we found out first hand last night.   

Our topic was ‘Online Marketing’ and we covered areas such as Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click advertsing, email marketing and social media. We also gave some advice on what makes a good website.

About 30 people attended the event which was about 14 more than had signed up but there was plenty of room for everyone.

You can follow Irish Women in Business on Twitter and Facebook.

Of late, I’ve been doing a lot more designing and coding than I have in previous months and years. With this has come a lot of new skills and techniques but one thing that hasn’t changed and has become increasingly frustrating is getting our sites to look and work the same in Internet Explorer 6.

If you’re a web designer or developer reading this, you’ll have undoubtedly come across this headache and many of us have discussed it at different events as well as online. I quite regularly tweet my frustration and have read many similar tweets.

Many clients are unaware of the work that goes into making sites look the same across all browsers. The newer browsers (such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and even IE8) are more standard and are easier to get looking consistent. It’s legacy browsers that cause us designers and developers the most problems and take up the most time testing and fixing, which can also add costs to a project.

Well, I think it’s time that we take a stand and really make a push to kill IE6 for good. According to Statcounter Global Stats, IE6 currently equates to 17% of all browsers around the world (8% for Ireland), and it’s losing about 1% per month. With a final push, we could finally get IE6 out of our lives forever!

What can we do?

Update Now
Well, if you’re an end user and you’re viewing this site with Internet Explorer 6, it’s time for you to upgrade… seriously! Most likely users of old browsers don’t know they are using an old browser and we’re waiting for the cycle of new computer purchases to actually rid the world of IE6.

Inform IE6 Users
As a designer / developer, there is something you can do. I recently came across Update Your Browser that has a little javascript file that you can include on your websites and it will detect the users browser and if it’s an old browser, it will display a simple and unobtrusive message to the user. This links back to their website and gives the user information on why they should upgrade and how to do it. I like the way this loads and looks like the information bar in IE6 so these users should notice it. I’ve seen similar type campaigns but none as simple and elegant as this one.

Spread The Word
If you’ve got a blog or use twitter/facebook, spread the word. Write a blog post, tell your followers, get people over to updateyourbrowser.net.

I felt it was time to give it a plug and see if we could get more designers and developers involved. I think we’ll approach clients about this as well and increase the IE6 users we can put this script in front of. I remember the death of IE4, IE5 and IE5.5 and I’m truly looking forward to seeing the back of IE6 for good. I’m already anticipating the next browser kill campaign when we’re looking to get more support for HTML5 but I’ll leave that talk for another day.

I’ve also had a little bit of a chat on twitter about a retirement bash for IE6 - there could be lots of fun around the send off plus lots of sponsorship opportunities. More on that down the line.

So, what do you think? Are you sick of IE6 yet? Will you use this script on your sites? When will you stop supporting it - 4% or less?