The IEDR today announced relaxation of the rules for registering personal dot-ie domain names for individuals. This means you can now register YourName.IE for approx 25 Euro per anum. Furthermore, most combinations of your first, middle and surname are acceptable.
An applicant named ‘John Paul Smith’ can register the following alternatives:
Johnsmith.ie [first name / surname]
Johnpaulsmith.ie [first name / middlename / surname]
John-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / surname]
John-paul-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middlename / hyphen / surname]
Johnpsmith.ie [first name / middle initial / surname]
John-p-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Jsmith.ie [first initial / surname]
Jpsmith.ie [first initial / middle initial / surname]
Jp-smith.ie [first initial / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
J-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / surname]
J-p-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Paulsmith.ie [middle name / surname]
Paul-smith.ie [middle name / hyphen / surname]
Psmith.ie [middle initial / surname]
P-smith.ie [middle initial / hyphen / surname]
You should contact your preferred hosting, web services company or the IEDR directly for further details.
Update (Sept 13th 2007): The IEDR press release is now onlineÂ
If there was one industry related to my profession that I’d love to plan, design and build a website for, it’d probably be a Hosting company. UK, Scottish, Taiwanese, Canadian or Irish, they just can’t seem to communicate successfully to their target audience(s) and consistently misunderstand what potential customers are looking for. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt for a second that most of these guys know their audience inside out but that knowledge rarely trickles onto their web presence. Perhaps it’s their technical nature that lets them down?
There is huge scope to dramatically increase hosting companies conversion rates and vistor numbers based on the evidence and feedback I’ve been listening to over my several years as a web designer. Sure, there are some companies out there that are doing it well but as both a customer and a family-member/friend/aquaintance to many, many people who have tried to source hosting services, I find that they are failing on key areas of their web sites and that this is losing them business.
UPDATE…(the above was drafted last week)
Just today I was wondering why hosting companies often have such terrible websites when I received a great little promotion in my email from hosting company, RackSpace. In an industry where most companies are in a race to the bottom and all about the lowest price, these guys are selling to me with clever campaigns, great design and benefit-driven messaging.
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.
“If you can’t read this email newsletter click here”.
You’ve probably seen that text on any well designed email newsletter that is catering for the now mind-boggling array of client-side email applications which designs are viewed in these days. Well, you’re about to see it a lot more. Microsoft has announced that it is replacing the Internet Explorer rendering engine in Outlook 2007 with the Microsoft Word engine. Among the many implications for web designers and their clients are lack off support for some rudimentary CSS functionality and a step backwards in terms of both web standards and newsletter design.
Visit Kevin Yank’s excellent article on Sitepoint.com for a full break down where he highlights Outlook’s major upgrade in 2007 now has…
- no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
- no support for forms
- no support for Flash, or other plugins
- no support for CSS floats
- no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
- no support for CSS positioning
- no support for animated GIFs
Now, we can live without the Flash and plugin support.
We can possibly live without support for forms in email newsletters. The loss of background images support and CSS positioning is a real let down for both designers and clients. Fingers crossed that Microsoft are listening to designers like they did with the Internet Explorer 7 development.
Here’s an animated eCard by EdenWeb that is currently being used by Dublin Financial Recruitment Firm, CFW.
Click the envelope below to lauch the Flash version of the eCard.
The original artwork was created in Adobe FireWorks and then animated in Flash to create the final piece. Most of the work was put into the intro animation with Mr.Claus gliding across the skies over to the big smoke.
Continue reading ‘Christmas eCard for Financial Recruitment Firm’
Deepmetrix have always had great customer support. Having been bought by Microsoft, the good work looks set to continue. It’s inevitable that there should be some downtime while they integrate the two systems (Live Stats and Microsoft PPC AdCenter). What wasn’t expected were some of the great emails we’ve had lately keeping us informed and rewarding us for staying on board during the tranistion. Cheers for the Microsoft AdCenter credit. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Dear Peter Knight,
As you know, Microsoft acquired DeepMetrix earlier this year. We’re excited to let you know that you will no longer be charged for current services and support as we work on the next generation of service-based analytics. Your last invoice is for the September billing period and you will continue to have access to current services and technical support at no charge.
Thank you for your patience through this transition. Watch for updates with more information and opportunities for you to provide feedback and be part of the new services we are building.
If you have any questions, or feedback, please contact our support team at: acahelp@microsoft.comSincerely,
Kevin Vaudry, Program Manager
Microsoft
DeepMetrix LiveStats Customers
Please accept our sincere apologies for the lengthy downtime of the LiveStats services. The outage lasted much longer than anticipated and we at Microsoft regret the error.
To thank you for your patience and understanding, next week we will send you an adCenter credit for $50 (USD) worth of search advertising and some more information about our continued dedication to you and all our DeepMetrix customers.
Again, please accept our apologies for the downtime of the LiveStats services. We will make every effort to prevent such an event from occurring again and we look forward to working with you.
Best regards,The Microsoft adCenter Team
The EdenWeb homepage has been updated with a new top banner and an updated value proposition. I’ve also added a new Company and Design Services page which I’ll be updating over time (some services are not yet listed). Interestingly enough, the ‘holding page’ we had for several months (even a year) hasn’t really had a huge effect on new work coming in. My biggest regret to scrapping the old site is the obvious effect that removing all that content has had on certain Search Engine rankings.
In hindsight, if I was to do this again, I’d probably take the following approach instead of just replacing all content with a holding page…
- Keep outdated content online
The long term vaue of your search engine visbility may be more important than the relevance of your content!If your site has good Search Engine visibility, is ’spidered’ successfully by Google and Co. and is bringing in decent volumes of tracffic then keep it live until you’re ready to do an intelligent modular update or a complete redesign. Furthermore, if you’ve got a good Page Rank then you’ll want a miminum disruption to the value of a good PR.Obviously, if that content in question is pricing or product information then you have to make your own call. In my case, the content ‘missing’ was more a lack of a current gallery, outdated date design services info and a new logo design and strapline that were all in the works.
- Add newer design work in the form of an updated gallery/portfolio
If you don’t have time to update descriptions of your design services, then at least update the actual design examples. In our case, our design services are obviously visual. People come to the site looking for visuals. Even if the design services page doesn’t have any information on Presentation , Icon and Diagram design, they’ll get the idea once they see the updated gallery.
- Start blogging
Instead of culling the News, add a blog to your site and keep people informed of company developments. It’s the easiest way to add relevant industry and company news to your site and a few montly updates can keep the site fresh while the main content is static.There’s a good PDF on the subject at Tom Raferty’s post on Business Benefits of Blogging
- Ask permission!
Add a newletter signup and start building your contact list. If you’re concerened that your site is out of date, can see passing traffic through your stats and want to at least catch some details, you will find that interested parties are only too happy to add themselves to your contact database.
This way, you can keep people informed of the new launch even inform them of your updates along the way.
- Rewire the site
Turn the navigation into PHP includes (is your hosting plan supports this). Keep the same navigation and the same links but do some rewiring here in anticiaption of all links and navigation items changing with the new design. PHP includes will allow you to rapidly update the site with newer navigation later on as multiple pages can be updated instantly. Introduce CSS into the pages (yes, my site was really that old!) so the overall changes to the look and feel are again easier (and quicker) to roll out.
- Start updating the content gradually and pushing it out live
Obvious enough. Even one page at a time can make a big difference. In our own case, I introduced some simple content changes that made a massive difference to the overall feedback we were getting and a jump in enquiries from the contact page.
- Rework the overall template and introduce a new homepage
Thats a whole different can of worms. Talk to a design expert :O)
So thats basically what I would do now instead of replacing everything with a holding page.
Apart from suffering a slip in visibility on search engines for key services, we didn’t do too badly. Each company is a different case and we had the benefit of most of our work being word of mouth/referrals. You may want to try the above approach or even try a blended approach (holding page and link to old site).
Whichever method you choose, I can recommend the blog, newsletter signup and newsletter/blog updates as the best way to keep your site current until you launch your new site.
I was pleasantly suprised to see some signage in Liffey Valley last week for the St Edmunds development that promoted a PodCast for the Apartments. It’s great to see some new marketing techniques being pioneered by the Irish estate agents.
Now if they’d just organise some decent Virtual Tours :O)
The Podcast is available over at stedmunds.ie. I wonder what the response has been to the Podcast. How many downloads etc.
*Added* Bernie has picked up the Podcast over at his IrishEyes Blog
One of our favourite web stats providers has been bought by Microsoft and are no longer taking new signups. It’s a real shame because we have several new clients who we were ready to sign up to DeepMetrix and their excellent visitor tracking service.
While researching alternatives, I notice that CrazyEgg has just done a softlaunch and has started to take signups. One of the more interesting features that a lot of Web Analytics developers are pushing out are the use of ‘Heat Maps’ which display the ‘hot’ areas on your page by recording mouse movements and clicks etc.
