This is a great question and often when I’m sitting in a meeting with potential clients there is an open discussion about colours and graphics to be used on a website and maybe a brochure is put on the table asking can we replicate it on a website.

2 Different mediums.

After working in the print industry and migrating into the online publishing and website design industry it is interesting to see that many people are looking at a website like is was a printed brochure and often will have a totally different idea of what people want than ourselves.  Maybe its being responsible for running hundreds of websites and seeing how they do in search engines that gives us a unique point of view.

Website Stats

A website tells you everyday how it’s doing, it communicates to you and tells you who, where, when, what type of screen it was viewed on etc etc. A website doesnt cost extra for extra colours of the fonts that you use because we are limted to the number of fonts a user has installed on their PC. If we use a fancy font, it will only display correctly on computers that has it installed. The alternative is to create a graphic in photoshop that has the word or phrase written on it. We have to remember that a search engine can not read that text, only humans can, and if they can not read it they can not index what is says, so you can have a graphic designer create a lovely looking website that may be slow to download and hard to find in a search.

Don’t get me wrong, I like graphics, I love designing website, but I must always keep my target market in mind and if I was to design a website for the visual pleasure of the audience and neglect the websites main function.   To get found and give the person the content they are asking for.

Content is king.

A graphic design has a responsibility, a web designer does too, they must both create and make an impressions, the difference is the first is a matter of opinion by a user and the latter is a mixture of what the user likes and what a search engine will read. Indexing a website is a complex matter and depending on how you layout a website will depend on how the website is read. We have guidelines on the layout, font usage, font colour, so its not a case of beauty in the eye of the beholder.

Most of the websites that are in the top 3 searches in google will have little use of graphics and I would estimate are used very sparenly. We get asked every week to “fix” a website and in nearly every case it is due to a graphic heavy website that is not being indexed to its pull capabilities.

This doesnt mean that you have to remove the nice graphics on a website to get in indexed better, but just to note that it’s not the most important part of the site’s purpose. If you talk to a programmer they will be looking in a completely different direction too as they are looking at the database structure and how many sql queries each click makes and the impact on search engines and believe me they will take more of the graphic design away than I would.

My 3 rules for website design

Content

Content

Content

If you are interested in graphic design and website design and have any comments we would be pleased to hear them.

We noticed today that we recieved an email for the the ICS monitoring Team threatening to cut of internet access.

This is spam email delete it.

The email looks like this:

Warning: This message has had one or more attachments removed
Warning: (report.exe, report.zip).
Warning: Please read the “cadamedia-Attachment-Warning.txt” attachment(s) for more information.

Your internet access is going to get suspended

The Internet Service Provider Consorcium was made to protect the rights of software authors, artists.
We conduct regular wiretapping on our networks, to monitor criminal acts.

We are aware of your illegal activities on the internet wich were originating from

You can check the report of your activities in the past 6 month that we have attached. We strongly advise you to stop your activities regarding the illegal downloading of copyrighted material of your internet access will be suspended.

Sincerely
ICS Monitoring Team

When Neil of Safety Skills Training Ltd called into our office to inquiry about setting up a new business for Safety Training Courses in Ireland we originally told him it usually takes about 6 weeks to set up a website. Taken into consideration getting a logo designed, stationary printed, brochures created and web content created.

I would like to apologise to Neil as the website was 1 day late!

Not too bad when we have gone through the full process of registering the domain name, setting up his hosting package on our servers in Dublin to helping Neil set up his email on his BlackBerry. The courses provided by Safety Skills are located in various training centres around Ireland. The courses cover many aspects of safety from learning to lift boxes correctly to Forklift Driving.

The full list of courses we learnt he provides are :

• Reach Forklift Truck- beginners Course
• Reach Forklift Truck- Expperienced level
• Reach Forklift Truck – Refresher Course
• Pedriatric Occupational First Aid
• Patient Handling
• Food Safeety
• Water Safety
• SafePass
• MEWP Mobile Elevated Working Platform Training
• Defibrillator Training
• Health and Safety Training
• Manual handling
• Basic Fire Safety
• Fire Marshal Training
• Fire Warden Training
• Emergency First Aid
• Occupational Refresher First Aid
• Occupational First Aid

This company is new, but Neil is not new to the industry and after many years working in Dublin he has gone out on his own and set up this new company based in Dublin but working nationwide.

Our services included:

• Domain Name Registration
• Website Hosting
• Website Design
• Content Management
• Web Marketing
• Training

Best of Luck to Neil and his team with the business and we hope the website helps your business.

www.safetytraining.ie

We were recently approached by a Bed and Breakfast in Wicklow called Glendale BnB who also have selfcatering accommodation in the famous Glendalough in the garden of Ireland in Co. Wicklow.

This family run accommodation business is run by Christy and Valerie Merrigan, who take pride in their location and being in the middle of everything that is beautiful in Wicklow. Their setting is an ideal location for touring the east coast of Ireland and when we were going through the things to do and see we understood just how perfectly situated the Bed and Breakfast and 4 self catering cottages are.

It’s nice to meet a couple who enjoy their business and I guess we felt that they put their into their accommodation, Christie and Valerie know their area very well and thats how they were able to give us all the details they needed on the website. Their original site was over 7 years old and had searved them well. Their new site is fully content managed allowing them the ability to edit and update the website with images of wicklow, special offers and news and events in their locality.

Services provided:

• Domain name management
• Website hosting
• Website Design
• Web marketing

We would like to wish Christy and Valerie the best of look with the revamped website and hope 2010 is good to them.

Website: www.glendale-glendalough.com

I know I harp on about open source, but really are people listening ,

Denmark dumps Microsoft

Another government department is starting to use open source,

http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article890196.ece

Now County Council’s in Ireland, are you listening?

Anyone, anyone , Beauler, Beauler, Fry,  Fry . . .

Ok, now I know I said I wouldn’t rant anymore and try to keep this area for news and products launches etc, but I just have to mention “browser compatibility” and websites. Yesterday we had an existing customer ask why their new website we are creating looks weird in Internet Explorer 6.

When I checked the site in Version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer I did see differences, now as it turns out when I talked to our developer she told me the client was looking at a “draft version” she was actually working on as the call happened. So really it was like standing beside a builder working on a wall as he’s laying each block. It’s better to come back after lunch and see the final product!

Anyways, What I’m getting to is that fact that when we design a website we design a site to be compatible with a number of browsers, and in fact we do what we call in the business as “future proofing” the website. So her site will in fact be compatible with smart phones and iphones etc.

Microsoft no longer support older version of Internet Explorer including version 5 and we can go a step further by telling you that Google too are discontinuing support for version 6 later this year too. So really if you want to have a website that is compatible with all the major Internet browsers and all the versions and revisions, I would ask you to think about a few things.

Who are you aiming at, the people using older versions of browsers are people who don’t move with the times, who are happy with what they currently have and I could nearly guess might not trust the Internet enough to even shop on-line, where as people browsing using newer Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above will be the type of people you want and need.

Think about the future folks, . . . . . . .shhh . . . . don’t tell anyone but . . . . It’s coming !

Just a short note to our readers to say that due to the volume of work we have on at the moment we will be unable to continue writing as often as we would like and will be using the blog for news updates about our new products and services we are launching in February and March.

I’ll miss this old girl and her daily stats about life online in Ireland ! sniff sniff.

Definitely our biggest inquiry so far this month has been people asking to set up an online shop or payment gateway for their business using the net. We had a business from Kildare in with us today going over all the options available to them. We looked at VISA machines for their shop to maybe using an online virtual VISA machine going through a secure server on https://pay-here.bla

This would mean that as a shop they could take payments over the phone using any Internet connected pc or using their own website in the shape of an online shop. Today’s meeting is the 7th meeting of this type since we came back after the holidays. No other year has shown such a push for online sales. Maybe people are finally understanding that business and money is not all about bricks and motar and that just because a business using the Internet does not take away from what people preceive as the real world,

The Internet is the real world and that’s where your potential customers are looking for your services, now let us take you through the next stage and be able to take a payment off them for a product or service you supply.

Call Dave Jordan from Cada Media Ltd on 053 9430748 to start getting your business online.

Great news for Ireland that one of the worlds leading online transaction companies are expanding their staff from 1100 in Dublin by a further 100 new jobs, announced today. So listening to people talk about the recession and saying that no one is hiring is wrong.

Business has not stopped it has just moved online.

If your business is not online yet and taking advantage of being able to accept payments via gateways like paypal or realex or worldnet then we would suggest starting restructuring your business soon. For help using the net for online payments call us today.

We would like to let any of our clients who have accounts on Boards.ie to change their password on other sites if they use the same password.

boards.ie is one of Irelands most popular bulletin boards on the net in Ireland. There are thousands of members and today their central database was hacked into and the site administrators shut the site down to prevent any loss of date.

A holding page with the following was viewable

***********************

Fellow Boards Members,

Today, Thursday 21 Jan 2010 at 11:20 GMT the Boards.ie database was attacked by a source external to Ireland. This triggered our security response policy and as a result we are sending you this warning email.

In this attack, part of the database which includes our members usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords was accessed. While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords.

We also recommend that if you used the same username/email and password on other sites that you change your password there too as a precaution.

What happened:

• This morning our database server was accessed by an unauthorised source.
• We discovered this intrusion and took the site offline.
• As a precaution We contacted the Gardaí, the Data Protection Commissioner and an independent security consultancy.
• We have followed the advice we have received on how to proceed.
• Like all large sites we are regularly the target for disruption and take continual actions to proactively protect your data.  This particular attack was completely unprecedented despite our rigorous security measures and while we have no idea if this data will be used for any malicious reasons, we felt it vital to tell you this immediately.

What you need to know and do:

• If you use the same password on Boards as you do on other services, you should change it on those other services to be safe. Boards passwords are NOT stored in plain text, they are obscured with the standard vBulletin “Hash”. While this provides strong protection, we have altered all passwords on Boards as a precaution and suggest you take this time to allter other similar passwords.
• If you are a subscriber, please be assured, we do NOT store credit card details or any payment details on our servers. Nothing of that nature is held on our site and as a result such data was not compromised.
• We apologise for this inconvenience. We do not want to over stress the problem, however we felt the situation requires full disclosure.

Tom Murphy.

Things to check out:

• Boards.ie on Twitter

Great news from RTE about their website and it’s great player allowing you to catch a show up to 20 days after it was aired. The website is now available outside of Ireland so that should really crank up the hits and i’m sure their advertisers will be delighted with the news.

Well done RTE.

http://www.rte.ie/player/

On a side now, the BBC website that does not allow Irish viewers to view it’s shows online. They explain that it is due to legal issues regarding “rights” etc.

Just to let our spam filtering clients know that next week we are upgrading our servers again, (yes i know a pain in the ass but hey it’s for your benefit!) These new servers will mean new IP addresses and so we are informing you that you can update your firewall rules with the following IP addresses for our servers.

To do this you need to block all SMTP transactions from outside the following:

Filter 4: 77.95.34.194 to 254
Filter 5: 195.97.252.82 to 92
Filter 6: 86.54.206.48 to 55

Your network manager will know what to do with these, If is important that you take action on these firewall changes before Tuesday 26th January 2010.

Dave Jordan
Cada Media Ltd,
https://secure.spamfilters.ie

Its great to see new businesses starting up all the time and we often have to remind people the life has not stopped and this is apparent as we learnt of the investment in building and security that David O Sullivan has recently completed in his new massive buildings near Gorey in Co Wexford.

Storage Facilities in Wexford.

Storage facilities are often for self storage for small items like a barbaque or a few boxes from the attic, where as here at Self East Storage they store big stuff, Antique cars, motor bikes, Camper vans, Motor homes, dingy’s and even Yachts from the local Sailing clubs in Wicklow and Wexford.

Services included:

• Website Training
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Link Building
• Web Marketing

www.SouthEastStorage.ie

We would like to wish David & Aine the best of luck with the new website and hope they keep it freash and up to date with the Content Management System.

Before you get upset or to stop any confusion amongst the people to read this blog, it’s actually really simple we are looking for a “Flash Animator” to work with us on a number of new projects.

If you are experienced Flasher we are looking for you. Experience is a must, we get many Multi media students applying for jobs and they have created one or two flash elements in college, and that’s great, we need people with examples of their work please.

Call Dave Jordan 053 9430748 for details

I was browsing facebook and a friend of mine who works in a Media company in Sweden posted a link to a blog from a social media company in the UK. The post was about the percentage of tweets that contain brand names or organisation names. So what you may say,but like everything on the net you have to read between the lines to fully understand the benefit and reason for something.

We often get asked, why have a twitter account for business as most people just put some rubbish on it about what they are doing rather than actually using it for it s real purpose.

Conversation.

Twitter is a mini blog of types that give you the ability to ask questions, people will ask where a restaurant is, what shampoo do others use, what time is Metallica on stage, what ever the question is you must remember it is logged and search-able.

Twitter is a search engine that if we really think about it. It logs the real-time conversation that pople have online and you can search it to get the latest information.

http://search.twitter.com will show you what people are saying right now and don’t forget twitter is mobile so its not just nerds like me writting on their blog in the office on a dark evening, Its people standing outside supermarkets, sitting in restaurants, they are all around us telling us things using their mobiles.

19% of tweets mention brands