Azure Health & Beauty Salon are based on the Clonattin Road in Gorey, Co, Wexford. They are a family run business with a great personality. Working with Helen Byrne was a pleasure and helping them revamp their website and give them a better footing on the Internet has been a pleasure. Their old website was fine, a basic HTML “old school” style of site that was a brochure to their Health Salon here in Gorey.

Redesign the Website.

Our brief was to update the site to a content management system that is easy to use and will allow them to update the site with special offers and change products and prices as needs be. We have given them a wordpress based site that allow just this. We have also designed for them a handful of extra headers that will be easily changed as they change the site to suit each season.

We would like to thank Helen & Tom the team at Azure Beauty for their help with the sites content and we wish them the best with the new site. I’ll be checking in from time to time to make sure its up to date guys to login and keep your customers informed of new products and services you have to offer:

Services Provided:

• Web Strategy
• Web Design:
• Web Marketing
• Training

www.AzureBeauty.com

There are many different types of content management software including paid software off the shelf, licenced software you pay for on a monthly basis or annual basis. We use one called open source, where the application is free to use and we use these for many reasons, but mostly to reduce the costs for the customer.

We use WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, OS Commerce, ZenCart to name a few. These can be found easily online and our many years in business have meant that we can demonstrate how they work and how to get the most out of them.

We have created a demo site to demonstrate how a business can edit their content and publish online information easily, in-fact even from your iphone if you are on the move.

For more information about using a content management system based on open source applications call Dave Jordan of Cada Media to set up an online demo for you to login and use.

Tel: 053 9430748

Investing in your business takes many forms and for Groveside Farm Bed and Breakfast in Wexford, they decided this year to upgrade their website to a more modern looking and more efficient website that allows them to edit and update the content of the site as they wish.

The old site was a standard html style of website that has worked well for them for a few years but now the owner Mary Cousins decided it was time to upgrade the site and show the customers what her Bed and Breakfast in Wexford and the surrounding area of Kilmore have to offer.

We discussed her requirements and working with Mary in gather content for the upgrading of her new site. Explaining that “Content is King” when it comes to online marketing and so embarked on deploying a photographer to help work on gaining the correct images for the site and also working ourselves on the written content.

Once we gathered the data, we then went about producing a website that now allows Mary to update easily and keep her customers informed about her great bed and breakfast and also the locality in Wexford where their farm is located.

We would like to wish Mary and family the very best with their new website.

Services supplied

• Website Redesign
• Content Management Software
• Web Marketing

www.grovesidefarm.com

We are please to announce the launch of a new website for the “Small Job” around the house that everyone has and are looking for tradesmen online to come and work on. The type of jobs that wouldn’t be looked at a year or two ago are now the main bread and butter for many in Trades such as carpenters and plumbers etc.

We have worked with our client Paul on creating a directory style website that he can manage himself in terms of content and ECommerce payment facilities the site incorporates. The site allows tradesmen from all over Ireland insert a small advert for their services in a County or town they wish to apply for. It will also allow for miltiple listings if required.

Tradesmen nagigate to the area they wish to be listed in, they click on “Add Listing” and fill in the form and follow the steps. The site then links them to a payment option and they can get listed virtually immediately. The owner of the site “Paul” then checks their listing for approval.

The site has the following features:

• Search Engine Friendly Directory
• Printer Friendly
• Downloads Fast
• ECommerce facility
• Content Management Software
• Online Advertising Management

Services carried out were

• Domain Management
• Consultancy
• Web Development
• Training
• Web Marketing

This is a common issues with websites, trying to keep them fresh, you can look at the following

1. Read your website and each page to see if it makes sense to you as , a newbie or as an experienced user looking for information. Do you cater for both
2. Make sure you have good meta tags on every page, the description and keywords match each page.
3. Look at your competitors sites and see if they have something you may have overlooked.
4. Check other search engines to see how you rank try www.google.co.uk and search for your products and services there for example if you cater for the UK market.
5. Are you linked from enough sites, are their suppliers who should have a link to you? Link building is very important, get all of them to link to you.
6. Start a Social Media Networking campaign, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for your business
7. Get involved in posting articles on forums say on Boards.ie etc

This is just a sample of how you can keep your site and information online about your business fresh for more call Dave Jordan on 053 9430748

Bates Restaurant Goes On-Line.

Bates Restaurant Rathdrum

This is an opportunity that shows itself once a year in our industry, where we get an inquiry from a simple email into our offices requesting a meeting to discuss setting up a website for a business. And it’s not just any business. it’s “Bates Restaurant” in Rathdrum in Co. Wicklow.

Ok, I’m being a nerd, but their reputation definitely preceded them, so we knew they were looking for quality  website design and had high standards. We met the two owners of the business, one running front of house and the other bring the head chef. It was obious from the off that they had a passion for their industry and it was a breath of fresh air to see people so excited by their product, so much now-a-days is doom and gloom!

These guys inspired us as much as we inspired them and together we designed a website that we hope is going to be a great part of their business as they grown and their reputation spreads.

Services included:

• Domain Registraion
• Web Design
• Web Marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Training

Best of luck with the new website.

www.BatesRestaurants.ie

Baltinglass Outdoor Education Centre

Baltinglass OEC

We are delighted to launch the all new revamped website for Baltinglass Outdoor Education Centre. The new site is fully content managed and with the website training they have received they now have the capabilities and opportunities to bring their products and services using the best marketing tool available these days.

Paul Scott contacted us after seeing the work we have done for similar businesses in Ireland and asked us to meet and discuss their existing website. It was a little dated and did have some content management, allowing them to edit a news page. We talked about what they wanted a website to give them and then we set about on the re design of their new site to suit their target market and of course their budget.

We created a website that has produced the identity they shrived for and will meet their marketing needs. We used a variety of Social Networking websites to help them reach out and place their services in the areas where their audience are.

Services provided:

• Web Design
• Web Hosting
• Web Training
• Consultancy
• Social Networking

We would like to thank Paul and his staff for their custom and we wish them the very best for the website.

www.baltinglassoec.com

What are Content Management Systems?

A Content Management System is a program/software installed on your website that allows you to access and update your site through your Internet browser. You can add content from anywhere in the world. There is no need of any prior content management experience and you do not need to understand <HTML> code.

Content Management can be used to manage simple business brochure style website, portal or directory and also an ecommerce online shop website.

To Sumarise if you get a content management system, your site is ready for expansion in the future as it is built on a powerful base.

We have a number of requests to get a content managed system (C.M.S). This is a website whereby the client is able to log in and update and write content, new pages on their own website. Thus keeping it up to date and fresh. This is now becoming the standard style of website that businesses today.

CMS websites are great idea, but a few things must be taken into consideration when you are looking into getting a website of this style as opposed to a “static brochure website” whereby the pages are created in a format that can only be edited by either a web designer of a kid with good web knowledge.

Content management is about being able to edit content, but its a lot more that that it actually allows you to edit the whole site, the menu system, the layout, the colours, the design, everything!

Now here’s the But. . . this is all great but a few factors we would suggest would be required in getting involved in this.

• Time
• Creativity
• Experience in Desk Top Publishing or Graphic Design and Layout.
• E.C.D.L

Time: Being able to change a websites content is wonderful and really puts power in the owners hands. That’s of course if the user assigns time to the project and we have found that the more time the users give to their website management the more they will benefit from this tool. And that’s all this is, a tool to editing the site, so depending on how you use it will depend on the results.

Creativity: Say you edit the text and insert only a few words about a topic. The search engines will see that this is all you know about the topic. Don’t keep this knowledge in your head, put it on the site. Write about your chosen topic and remember you are not writing a book, Think of it as a magazine, you need to understand you reader and the time they have to scan down through you content.

Layout and Design: Ok so now you have the time, you’ve inserted the content. How does it look? Does it look like a long back and white page or have you used indents, bullet points, italic, bold, remember you online users scan down through the content so grab their attention and highlight words for them.

ECDL: These types of courses are great to give the user an understanding of the methods that can be involved. But do note that content management is not MS Word, Its a thousand time more. We think of it like comparing MS Word and MS Excel to Content Management and An Accounting System.

If you post an invoice on an accounting system you can not just click “back” and start again, you have to insert a credit note to minus the invoice. Its a little more structured but there is method and reason for this.

Content management systems are similar to this as you can’t just click back, they are online applications that need to be closed properly otherwise you lock a document. And once the document or page is locked it may not be accessible to edit by another editor. A Desktop application like Word etc can close and you can open it again it may have tried to so an auto-save.

So to sum up, think about your design skills, your time and your typesetting skills.