It’s true Ireland is currently feeling a “downturn” . . . . . .  Offline that is, as opposed to online sales that are  actually on the increase in the country, Ireland is achieving online sales of over €12 million euro per day.

This is a major fact when many companies are looking at cutting costs and actually deleting their website and dropping the work they have carried out of the past few years to promote their business.

As Irish shop battle for your custom, many people are looking online for shops and businesses. So IF you online you now have an even better chance of getting new inquiries in via your website.

Upgrade your current website and ecommerce it, don’t drop. Its total madness but as far as we can see from talking to many business owners and registration businesses, many companies are actually just letting go of their domains.

So the smart people will not use this time to grab available domains and put up an online shop!

Move fast, others will

This is something that we have been telling people since these social networking sites started to appear, that much of the information on the site is actually available to be viewed by the general public as well as your boss, so when you called in sick and you boss looked up your name in google and found that you were actually at “Electric Picnic” on that Friday that you called in sick, it can come back to bite you in the ass.

It has recently been reported that employees have even been let go because of the lies they have been telling in the work place that the proof was actually on a video on their own website!

I even came across a bebo page of a young website designer in wexford who had a statement on his bebo page claiming he was going to rip off as many people as possible and earn as much as he could from his clients and didnt care if they actually got what they needed. I hope he hasn’t con’d many people into buying his services.

Social networking site are very important into the way the internet is progressing as they are bring many site forward with their use of Web 2.0 technologies, thats whereby the useers can update the site themselves etc.

They are also very search engine friendly and the written in such a way as to allow the robots to index every word in the listing.

But always be away that this content IF negative can be used by your potential employer etc to look you up before an interview, If we see you in every picture in a put 4 nights a week, we will be thinking of course about if you will be able to make it in each morning and then once your in what exactly you are able to do hung over!

Be warned.

Many websites are missing one major important page, The About Us page. Your potential clients want to know who you are, what type of business you have, how long are you in business, will you support your products, will you be there tomorrow for them, are you working from a mobile number and be contactable when needed.

The internet is used for research as well as selling and marketing your business.

Give them what they want and tell them a little about yourself, when you were established, if not it can look like you’ve got something to hide!

We have noticed that a number a small business are starting to feel the the pinch as the recession in Ireland hits home to smaller businesses. We are actually seeing smaller business close and some are just closing their website down.

Why?

The trend is that sites that are not doing well are the ones that have very little content and therefore were not doing well in search engines and not doing well as a marketing tool to draw in potential clients.

As this recession kicks in further you will see the smaller players in every business finding it harder and harder.

Another trend that we have noticed is that bigger business who have been in business for say 20 plus years are starting to get online, believe it or not many still only use eircom email accounts in thier offices.

Moral of my rant, get a website for your business in the good times so you wont be last on the list in the bad times.

If you had purchased €1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth €4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your €1000 would have been worth €16.50, €1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than €5, but if you bought €1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get €214.

So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.

Website Redesign

Diving and Walking Holiday Expert – Shane Gray Holidays have updated their website with a fully content managed website. Features now available on the site are

• Content Managed Gallery
• Content Managed Pages
• Media Manager
• Page Search
• Google Site Map
• Update from any Pc with Internet Access
• Domain Management
• Hosting
• Training

We would like to wish Shane and team the very best of luck with the new site and hope that their business continues to grow with their new website.

www.Shane-Gray.com

Dave Jordan

Cada Media Ltd

A 404 error page can be a static or a dynamic page depending on the type of website you have, It is the page that shows the “page not found” error message if a page has been deleted or removed.

It is recommended that you provide the search engines, robots etc with a 404 page to help them index the site completely. If you have a content managed site then this facility should be taken care of automatically.

Hint: Why not put a sitemap on your 404 page to help indexing!

We are happy to be working with Jamie McCalmont a bloodstock consultant in London. Services include consultancy, domain management, email forwarding.

http://www.JamieMcCalmont.co.uk

We are delighted to announce the launch of the new redesigned website for Deirdre of Spell Check Editorial Services, a web content and brochure content specialist here in the south east. Spell check has got a complete overhaul of their website we complete manu years ago.

They have moved upwards in this digital age and opted for a Content Management System allowing them to manage their online presense from any internet connected computer. Gone are the days of emailing the web developers or hacking your way through the lines of HTML. With a slick internface theya re able to now login and edit and amend their content.

Best of luck with your new site.

http://www.spellcheckeditorial.com/

We have had a number of people mention to us that they wish to register a .ie domain name as they want to be found in Google under the “pages from Ireland” button. They think that that is the difference between and .com and a .ie domain names.

This is not the case. It is believed that in fact it displays pages that are actually physically in Ireland. Many companies opt for cheap hosting in the USA for example and this is believed to then not show their website as Google knows their IP address (the hosting server) is in Texas and so will not show up their website for a particular searches “pages from Ireland”

Call me for more details: 053-9430748

We had a response to our write up about the letter so many businesses are getting and the suggestion is to send back the envelope EMPTY so to cause them a further expense. It is a SCAM.
Thanks to Ewan Duffy from http://www.industrialheritageireland.info

Has anyone gor more information about the increase that AIB are setting for online transactions with ecommerce shops. I believe that they are upping their charges to a min of €30 per month, this will make it harder for smaller ecommerce shops who have a small volumne of transactions to make a profit.

Add in the average €35 per month from Realex this might make it tougher for the seasonal online shopping.

If you have any more info olease let us know.

Moving your business forward can often mean moving with the times and the technology that comes with that. We are happy to announce that Gorey Yoga Studio have decided to use Cada Media Ltd for the redesign and implementation of a new content managment system for their website.

www.YogaGorey.com has come from a basic brochure website allowing the owners to show their directions, their yoga time of classes. Their new site has fully content management allowing the owners to now add in images, you tube videos, text, banner adverts and new pages etc.

This ability to change the content will put the power of the internet back in their hands.

Best of luck with the new site to Liam and Anthony.

Congratulations to Nicola Kearns and staff with launch of their new website to help promote their services in Business Support. Nicola needed a website that had content management without being too technical or having a long learning curve.

Our Solution gives her a easy and fast tool to update her website aswell as needing vertually no training as it is very WYSIWYG “What You See Is What You Get” in its layout andstruction.

Best of luck with your new site www.2Busy4.com

Duplicate Content is getting it’s serious tie on these days as many websites are falling down in respect to “Duplicate Content Copyright Infringement”. We supply web sites that our users can update, upload text and images themselves, but where are they getting the content ? Where are they getting the images from?

We have been advising our clients for a number of years now to make sure they write good web content for their sites to attract visitors. If they use content from other sites/books then they will attract visitors such as solicitors and american lawyers!

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Sample letter received

Pursuant to US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Ireland Copyright Act

To Whom It May Concern:

I represent X Company (client), the exclusive publisher of the XXX book, which is a secure test instrument restricted to purchase by qualified individuals. The book is an original work of authorship registered with the United States Copyright Office.

It has recently come to the clients attention that you have a web site that contains an unauthorized reproduction of the Book. The reproduction, display, and distribution of the material at the online location infringes our clients copyright in the book because the test items are reproduced and displayed on the online location without our clients’s permission. As such, the web page you are hosting clearly infringes both U.S. Copyright law. See 17 U.S.C. 512(d) and New Zealand Copyright
law .

LOCATION OF INFRINGEMENT

The location of the infringement is:
http://www.yoursite-name-here-.ie

NOTICE OF TAKE DOWN

The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients’s rights and to seek your agreement to (1) remove and destroy the copyrighted material; and (2) disable or remove any hyperlink(s). Please note that the disabling or removing of Pearson’s copyrighted material from this site should include destroying the usefulness of any textual directory or pointer information contained therein.

Please confirm in writing that you have complied with the above request.

RESERVATION OF RIGHTS

Clients name reserves its position insofar as costs and damages caused by the unauthorized reproduction and/or display of the book and any information locating tools with respect to online locations engaged in infringing activity. Pearson also reserves its right to seek injunctive relief to prevent further unauthorized activity, particularly any information locating tools, pending your response to this letter. We suggest you contact your legal advisors to obtain legal advice as to
your position.

VERIFICATION

The information contained in this notification is accurate as of the time of compilation and, under penalty of perjury, I certify that I am authorized to act on behalf of our clients, xxx client name has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

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