David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

I just received an interesting press release and this is just a quick post to say congratulations to Aodhan Cullen, founder of StatCounter for winning the BusinessWeek Young European Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Most Irish web designers and developers would know of StatCounter and probably use the code on their sites but it is amazing to see them doing so well on the world stage. Well done Aodhan, it’s great to see a young Irish fellow doing so well! Below is the full press release I received.

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Really, what’s the point of them these days. I’ve been thinking about this for a long while. Years ago, we were charged extra for ringing outside the county and it made sense for a business that traded on a national level to have an 1890 or an 1850 number so it wouldn’t cost their customers extra to ring them if they were not in the same county, e.g. cork customer ringing dublin office.

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I’ve had reports from clients that funda.ie have sent out emails telling their clients that they are closing up shop. Funda.ie is the IAVI website for advertising properties for sale in Ireland and is part of the Funda Group, that own a number of web portals including funda.nl. Funda.ie entered the market last year when they acquired realestate.ie and re-launched the website as funda.ie in September 2006.

They did a number of advertising campaigns including a very good viral campaign about a man made shamrock island off the coast of Dublin. You can view it on YouTube here. Funda entered the market with good intentions but never seemed to be able to battle it out with the big boys - daft.ie and myhome.ie. After only 10 months in play, they have decided to close up shop. An idea of how funda.ie faired out traffic wise in comparison to the big boys, have a look at the report below generated at Alexa that Richard Hearne discussed a few months back.

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Ok, finally, there has been a decent update to the Google Maps coverage of Ireland. I first wrote about this last year and the coverage was terrible by Google. Yahoo and Map24 had much better coverage of Ireland. Still, the Google Map Interface is the best out there in my opinion and I’m so glad to see they have completed a decent update. I’ve checked around my area and some areas that I know were not covered in the past and all is looking good. How is your area covered now? Is it any better? Here’s a comparison of a Yahoo Map and a Google Map of Navan. Google is just slightly better, I think.

http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/maps.html#53.64865713071182,-6.687068939208984,5,0

If you compare that to the screenshot that I took last year, there is a significant increase in it’s coverage (especially the new housing estates in the bottom right hand corner of the screenshot). This is really going to help with a few web design projects I’m working on and saves having to deal with multiple GUI systems and API’s.

Kudos to you Google…. took your time but you finally come up trumps! Now, get off your backside and provide a nice Geocoding Application for us to use with it!!!