David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

I was doing some research on how to do a non-www 301 redirect on a Windows IIS server and I found the usual response.status and response.addheader solution, which also required access to IIS for spliting up the www and non-www part of your domain. If you are on a shared server, this isn’t always possible. I wanted a pure code version of the redirect that I could drop into my pages so that if somebody visited a page on the site that had sub folders and/or querystrings without the www part, it would preserve these and redirect to the www version. I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for so I decided to write my own in ASP.

The script below should be inserted into the top of all the pages you want this to work. The best way to do this is using an include file or adding it to the top of one of your existing include files that runs before anything is written to the page. The pages also need to be ASP. This will not work on plain html pages. This isn’t a perfect solution as it will only work on actual pages but it will help a lot of people out there I think. On linux, this is much easier using the htaccess solution but as IIS doesn’t have this, this is a good alternative. If www exists in the URL, this script will not execute. You may want to do the same in reverse, as in redirect www to non-www URL’s. If there is a demand for this, I’ll modify the script to support it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, last Thursday saw the launch of our new website here at davidbehan.com. After a few changes and updates, it’s nearly there. There are still a few bits and bobs that need to be done but once complete, it’s down to marketing the website and really getting it noticed.

In honour of this, I’m going to track the campaign here in the blog. I don’t know how other web design companies are fairing out with traffic but I’m going to open up some of my stats on where davidbehan.com is, what promotion is being done and how it is effecting traffic. Ok, so to start, here is a brief account of where the site is at the moment. To gather this information, I’m using Google Stats, Google Webmaster Tools, Web CEO, PopURI.us, Feedburner and it is accurate as of launch of the new site last Thursday. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it was last November that my site was launched and I felt it was time for a new look to be designed and implemented. The new look site has just been launched and if you are reading this here (as opposed to an RSS reader), you obviously see it. I’ve still a bit to do to finish it off. I want to do up the blog layout a bit nicer and in more of the style from the rest of the site. Also, I have to tidy up some SEO bits and test for WAI but other than that, it’s road worthy.

I hope to get my teeth into the blog a bit more as well. I’ve been only slowly adding to it so over the coming months I hope to fill it with relevant posts and articles on a regular basis. Fingers crossed!

For now, what do you think of the new look? If you are reading the text on the different pages, what do you think of the language used (away from the whole corporate approach), etc. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to hearing from you. If you spot anything that my tired eyes have missed, then please do let me know. Thanks in advance!

It seems Google is doing a number of releases recently. I see they have released a beta version of their new interface for Google Analytics. My first impressions is that I like it. It’s easier to use and the map overlay report is much more useful this time. You can actually see the locations people are visiting you from as opposed to before when you saw one big blob over Dublin.

What I really liked is the export facility. On the dashboard, I exported the reports to PDF. It opened a lovely 6 page report covering all the main reports for my site. Everything right there, ready for filing!

The navigation is much easier now as well. Before, it was a pain to try and get to the keyword report (3 clicks I think and it was hidden under a stupid name). Now, you click traffic sources (and you see a summary of keywords here as well as top traffic sources) and then keywords and you’re into the report. Then, if there are any reports you would like to view regularly, you can add them to your dashboard. This will make viewing reports much quicker and less time consuming.

About 3 months ago, I installed Mint Statistics and I found it quite good. Different to Google Analytics but nonetheless, very good. I had actually started using Mint as my main program for checking stats on a daily basis but now I think I’ll move back to Google Analytics.

After my giving out last night about Google and their mapping system in Ireland, I’m glad to be praising them on their update of Google Analytics. Good job. I’m off to play with it now for the next few hours til I get bored!!!

I just came across these two great promotional videos for Ireland and Dublin. I really think they were produced very well and deserve a bit of a mention in terms of helping to promote our lovely country. I’m guessing they were both produced by Discover Ireland but the second video doesn’t have their name on it.

Discover Ireland on YouTube

It’s a Beautiful Day in Dublin

Anyway, great videos. Really shows Ireland in a great light. I hope it helps Discover Ireland get a bit of publicity.

Slán

I’ve just been doing some browsing and see that Google Maps have updated their coverage of Ireland. It’s not a great update by a long mile but it is an update nonetheless. They seem to have added in new major roads such as motorways (the Ashbourne bypass now appears, when it didn’t before) and they have a lot of towns with their names added too. The towns appear with a shaded area for built up areas and the town name beside it but they haven’t included a lot of minor roads within these towns. Still missing a lot of roads in my area.

Their coverage of the major cities still looks good but once again Google fails to deliver for Ireland. They’ve such a great mapping system but they just don’t care about little old Ireland!!! It’s quite annoying really. Their search facility (geocoding - that matches addresses to co-ordinates) still doesn’t work for Ireland either. I wonder if more and more people complain about it, someone might stand up and do something, especially when Yahoo Maps and Map24 have much better coverage.

However, I do like the new scroll bar zoom in/out feature on the Google Map.

Someone at Google please listen - Ireland (well me but I do know others out there want it too) wants 1) better coverage of maps including minor roads, 2) geocoding service that actually works on streets and not just towns/areas and while I’m at it, 3) the ability to be part of the business finder directory that’s available in the UK and US.

Thanks in advance! But I won’t hold my breath!