From A List Apart…
Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.
Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?
The first ever Web Design survey is almost closed over at A List Apart. If you design, develop, architect, write, break or build websites, please head over and complete the Web Design survey 2007. Over 30,000 people already have.
I don’t white-label and resell any hosting plans or pretend I have my own data centre etc. Clients are better served by dealing directly with reliable hosting companies (I use both Blacknight and Hosting365) or commissioning us to source their hosting requirements for them. I imagine that a significant percentage of all hosting sold by a hosting company comes from Web Designers. Some clients might be resellers of their services or others (like EdenWeb) will simply point a client in the right direction. Hosting companies would also get a number of clients asking if they know a good web designer and so, it’s not hard to see why designers and hosts should work together and strive to improve a mutual industry and relationship both depend upon.
Or so you’d think!
Today I was running through some old copies of the Sunday Business papers and came across an advert I’d forgotten about.
Continue reading ‘Ouch – Irish hosting company slags off Web Designers’
Google have just announced that their free Analytics tool is due for an upgrade and users should see an updated user interface kick in over the coming weeks. This looks like a global upgrade as opposed to a phased, regional update and comes after user feedback and requests.
I’ve always found Google Analytics to be really unusable and the interface was overly complicated but these are probably legacy issues that Google inherited when they bought Urchin. I’m looking forward to this upgrade based on the following statement from Trevor over at Google’s Inside Adwords blog.
The new version of Google Analytics has a more intuitive look and feel, with greater clarity in the navigation between reports. In addition to the new interface, we’ve added many new features including a customizable reports dashboard, scheduled emailing of reports, improved geographic map view, and over-time graphs for at-a-glance analysis.
There’s an updated Interactive demo available too.
What could a site redesign do for your business? All numbers are going in the right direction for this client after their site was relaunched by EdenWeb in early December 2006.
We took this screenshot of their website statistics in the first week of May and expect May, June, July and August to be even busier.
A fuller post and case study are in the works.
Last week our local paper carried an article on Wicklow women in business. There were some interesting companies in there that I’d never come across before but it was limited to a two page feature. I started a search online for more details and happened upon a great business forum called Irish Business Women. If you’re a woman (or man) thats interested in sharing your thoughts, asking a few questions or learning something new about doing business in Ireland then drop over to www.irishbusinesswomen.com and introduce yourself.
