Eden Web - Design & Marketing Blog » Marketing

YourName.ie

peter — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:20:37 +0000

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 â€˜John Paul Smithâ€™ 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

The host with the most?

peter — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:48:47 +0000

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.

Ouch – Irish hosting company slags off Web Designers

peter — Sun, 13 May 2007 17:30:05 +0000

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.

I won’t credit the hosting company with a link to their site (it’s not Blacknight or H365) but they’re basically crediting half their development and programming upon patchy work by people calling themselves ‘web designers’ who don’t know what they’re doing.

I still can’t believe these guys are slagging off and alienating web designers like this with a print run over several weeks.

PS…The ironic thing is that their own site (which has a Reseller scheme aimed at Web Designers) looks like a cheap template, has almost zero Search Engine Optimisation and is almost invisible in the major search engines. I’d spend less time slagging off designers and more time working with them.

Goolge analytics update

peter — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:01:35 +0000

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.

Outlook 2007 Vs CSS-based newsletter design

peter — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:26:54 +0000

“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.

Christmas eCard for Financial Recruitment Firm

peter — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:01:44 +0000

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.

I spent a lot longer that anticipated getting that effect just right (about 8 hours!) but it was worth it to ensure the effect was believable. The stars, mountains and moon had to scroll by on a seperate, slower layer than the trees and snow as they were distant objects and had their own timeline etc. I had visions of that Fr.Ted scene with Fr.Ted explaining to Dougal ‘These cows are SMALL, those cows are f…a…r a…w..a..yyyyy” :O)
I’d like to go into more detail on the marketing, distribution and conversion rates but they are still evolving as we tweak the cards and probably best kept just between my client and I :O)

Deepmetrix and Microsoft

peter — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:20:30 +0000

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

EdenWeb updated

peter — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 08:39:50 +0000

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
- Word Press – http://wordpress.org/
- Blogger – http://www.blogger.com/start
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.
- Campaign Monitor – http://www.campaignmonitor.com/
- Vertical Response (now with a Salesforce plugin) – http://www.verticalresponse.com/
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.
- Blacknight Hosting – http://www.blacknight.ie/
- Hosting 365 – http://www.hosting365.com/
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.

Podcasting for Housing Development

peter — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 13:38:02 +0000

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

Web Analytics

peter — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:35:34 +0000

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.

Salesforce for Google AdWords

peter — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:57:12 +0000

Salesforce have aquired the San Fran start-up whose product allows users to manage aspects of their Google AdWord campaigns via their AppExchange platform.
Kieden’s product seems to be very highly regarded by most SalesForce users but I’ve yet to be convinced that there are any huge benefits of this mash up.

I’m a big fan (and regular user) of both Salesforce and Google AdWords so if I’m missing something, please shout!

Some interesting comments on ZDNet – http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/wp-trackback.php?p=3528

Corporate branding – be consistent

peter — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:17:27 +0000

Have you ever taken 10 minutes to fill out your own web site forms, seen how long it took to get a response, checked if the automated response had the correct sales details and telephone number?

Let me explain.

I was put on hold today and subjected to some really loud chart music that was about 5 times the volume of the person I was dealing with. A pleasant experience with a professional outift was quickly soured by a trashy blast that clearly didn’t fit with their corporate image. It physically hurt my ears. I wasn’t certain if this was the same company. I definitely wanted to hang up.
For a moment I wondered ‘How can they let this happen? It’s AWFUL’.

And then I realised that they probably don’t even know it is happening. It’s probably not very often the Marketing Dept dial their own main desk from outside. It’s absolute that they would change things if they were aware.

So when is the last time you called your own company, stood on the other side of the counter, filled in your own web site forms or asked the Sales dept for a quote?

Probably never. But you would be amazed at what the view is like from over here.

Search Engine Strategies 2006

peter — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:22:18 +0000

SES 2006 is currently kicking off in San Jose, California.

Billed as ‘The Premier Event for Search Engine Marketing & Optimization’, attendees will learn

how search engines list Web sites for free and through paid placements
how to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors
how to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results.
how to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buyâ€”and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t!
how to build links that generate traffic to your Web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines
what’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search, and how you can profit from those changes

Challenger Brands: Understanding The Technology Customer

peter — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:54:09 +0000

As the technology industry matures, marketers need to get closer to their customers. Marketing is becoming a key differentiator for startups and multinationals alike. Connect, learn and update your marketing toolbox.

RedHerring 2006
http://herringevents.com/CMO/index.html

SEO – 1st place guaranteed

peter — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:18:35 +0000

Some Search Engine Marketing firm has been spamming us with ‘compelling’ offers such as

First place guaranteed in Google
Get listed in under a week on page one of all the major search engines

etc etc

If this caught your attention and seems like an attractive, quick and easy way to remedy low search engine positions, then you need to be aware of something very simple. Nobody can guarantee you a no. 1 ranking in Google, Yahoo or any of the other Search Engines for anything. Read the spam again and you’ll find the offer is vague and scant on the specifics on what they will get you to no.1 for..
What they probably can get you high (even 1st place) listings for is your company name.

Thats fair enough. I know quite a few companies that would love to be more visible on search engines for their company name and it wouldn’t be a huge challenge to get them there either. You see, chances are your company name is quite unique and there are not a huge amount of other firms competing to be at no. 1 position for that name. However, Keywords that people use to find your business are another matter entirely and it’s here that you really want to be visible.

Example: Imagine your family business makes hand-made Greenhouses and your company name is Adamsons. Yes, you want to be found for people searching for ‘Adamsons’ but you definitely want to be found for the relevant real-world keywords and phrases that people are using to find your services.

Hand made greenhouses
Greenhouse europe
Red cedar greenhouse
etc etc

Getting to number 1 in any search engine for those particualr phrases could be extremley difficult depending on the amount of competitors you have who are jostling for the same space. Without knowing specifics and doing a genuine levels of detailed research on your industry, customers and competitors there is no way any Marketing company could presume to guarantee you a 1st place listing anywhere except probably your mail’s spam-folder!

Google launches Video Ads for Adwords

peter — Tue, 23 May 2006 13:18:20 +0000

Google have announced the launch of click-to-play video ads for Adwords across their US, Canadian and Japanese networks.

See the blog at http://adwords.blogspot.com/ for further details.

EdenWeb Newsletter – Free Design and Marketing Tips

peter — Tue, 09 May 2006 15:01:49 +0000

We’re kicking off the EdenWeb Design and Marketing newsletter this summer.

Written exclusively for Marketing Executives, Entrepreneurs and Business Managers, our newsletter will give you FREE leading-edge Design and Marketing tips that will help you grow your business successfully Design for Digital Marketing.

There’s nothing like being in the Design and Marketing engine room of a large hi-tech company. These guys have serious ambition, knowledge and experience in the global Marketing arena. We’ve been privileged to work alongside several of the finest UK and Irish companies over the past 6 years and are now bringing this ambition, knowledge and experience to you!

If you have a business or look after the marketing of a company web site, then you’re about to receive some truly great FREE Design and Marketing tips that will significantly increase the value of your web site.
Anyone can sign up. Look for the form at the bottom of edenweb.ie

Checking it out or checking out?

peter — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:18:00 +0000

Internet marketing needs to learn lessons from already extablished bricks and mortar industries so they can draw upon decades of experience and not have to make unnecessary mistakes.

This email newsletter caught me eye this morning. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and it’s great to see something come in that is pitched perfectly at their audience and has a creative theme applied to this message. I love the what they’ve done with the main banner (above). It’s creative, well executed, appeals to their audience and is refreshingly humorous.
But there’s one big problem…

I click on the email and it brings me to the rackspace web site (good!)
I have a look around their very infomative hosting services site (very informative)
Overall I get a good impression from them (becoming more interested)
I decide to look at SLAs and benefits of using Racksapce (very good!)
I decide I’m interested and look for pricing and order information. There’s none!

Or at least there appears to be none. Please have a look – am i missing something? I can’t see an ‘Order now’ button or any way of buying their products and services other than emailing them. Directly. Now this only takes two seconds but this is unecessary.

On a related note and to use a bricks and mortar example…

I took a trip to the supermarket last week to grab some ingredients. I was trying out a new Ainsley Harriott recipie ( i love that guy!) and since everyone had exceeded their yearly quota of his fish cakes or spaghetti bolognaise recipie it was time to do something different. While I was in the shops I saw at least three couples eye up the checkout ques, ditch their baskets and walk away with brass in pocket. I have to confess I did the same after i’d left everything back. I just didn’t have the patience. It was busy, everyone was rushing to do the Lottery and nobody was smiling. But at least next time I go down to the shops I know where the checkouts are are will probably actually hand over my money.

Now we all know how to buy groceries. We all know that the checkouts are usually at the end of the shop and they’ll even have big helpful arrows hanging from the cieling instructing us to ‘PAY HERE’. The groceries industry is an established one and these guys know their stuff. They know why we shop, when we shop, how we shop, what we want while they shop, how to get us to shop with them more often and how to get us to the checkout so they can make a sale.

If everyone in that shop were to fill their baskets, take out their wallets and then leave because they could not find the checkouts, I’d say the groceries industry would be in big trouble.

Fortunately for us the groceries industry solved this problem years ago. Just to emphasis the point, they now have even bigger arrows hanging from the celing and even more checkouts for bigger baskets. In fact even if i wanted to I don’t think I could leave their store without paying (and I do frequently want to!).

So my point is that your web site must make it easy for customers to purchase your products. Sounds simple? It is thankfully. Internet marketing is a very new discipline but fundamentals still apply. Think about how people use your web site, why they use it, what they are looking for while they use it and how to get them to come back more often. But unlimately, let them know HOW to buy something.

Brightening up a newsletter campaign

peter — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:47:22 +0000

Designing an email newsletter for a client at the moment. The campaign is essentially an invite to come meet the client at a US conference and exhibition in Las Vegas. Readers click on the email and are brought to a registration page which collects their data into their CRM app.

I really wanted to brighten up the campaign and introduce a lot of colour as the messaging is quite technical. Originally we planned on having a Flash animated sequence which would fade through several network message clouds but since most email clients won’t support Flash we knew the majority of recipients would have recieved text-only news.

The concept of Network Clouds were combined with each message and the reader will scroll down through several of these clouds until they eventually reach an illustration of an exhibition booth.

Will post full version when it’s completed.

Small Business Marketing: Make a big splash with a small budget

peter — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:04:32 +0000

…it is about thinking and creativity, and even the smallest business can do that – Graham Green

Great article by Rachel Bridge on Marketing for the small business at the Sunday Times web site

The tipping point of septic tank blogs!

peter — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:47:37 +0000

A psychic once told me that if I wasn’t doing what I was doing right now (professionally that is I.E. Not drinking beer, eating microwave popcorn and updating my blog at 11pm), that I’d “be a gardener”.

I didn’t ask her to tell me this, she just did.
As a courtesy, I didn’t ask her to tell me what I was actually “doing now”. But to be fair, she may have been onto something. The name EdenWeb has more than a little to do with gardening and more than a little to do with an underdeveloped interest in sustainable living.

Having bought our first home in May 2005 it was time to push out the sustainable living vibe. It was going to be Solar-Power Central (it’s free energy, man! (Apart from the couple of grand it costs to install and maintain!)). My bookmarks are full of Domestic Wind Turbine web addresses and I have felt an urgent interest to make our new home greener and less taxing on melting icecaps that is guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over instead.

Or at least I did until we were informed about a planning complication relating to our new Wicklow home and the local Rathdrum sewage treatment facility which has to be upgraded before we can move in.

Its been a year now and well, thats another story to make your eyes glaze. But bear with me while I make a giant leap and establish a tenuous connection from my web business to The Septic Tank Blog!

So tonight I was thinking, ‘well, I won’t update my blog’ and will just surf around looking at geothermal heaters, Biotanks and sewage systems instead (how glamorous is that?) when I came across an informative little site from a UK company that specialises in domestic waste solutions.

And would you believe that they have a blog? Its called the Biotank Septic Tank Blog. It’s a good read on waste treatment systems and it’s a good example of how blogs are reaching mass-appeal and being endorsed as info & promo tools for all types of industries with a web presense.

And while I steadfastly refuse to use the most overused jaded buzz word this side of Web2.0 (‘tipping point‘) I do think it demonstrates beautifully the increase in adoptation of blogging as a essential marketing tool when a business that might otherwise be considered ‘below the tech-radar’ has an informative, up to date (and interesting) blog.

On a side-note….
Trevor Saergent (The Irish Green Party) was interviewed by Podge and Rodge recently. When asked what three things he would do to make the Ireland better, his third suggestion was for every home built in Ireland to have a solar-panel on the roof.

As the man said, Solar energy is free energy and is energy we can all take advantage of to reduce the cost and reliance on oil. Simple. Brilliant. Common sense.
See – told you i’d make your eyes glaze over :O)
Time to irradiate more popcorn…