David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

It’s no secret that we’re now in a recession and most industries across the country and the world are feeling the effects. In talking to a number of other web professionals and from my own experiences, I believe that the Interent is good for consumers and businesses alike, thus being good for our industry. Let me explain a bit more and maybe make more sense.

The Internet for Consumers in the Recession

With everyone needing to become a lot more conscious of their spending habits and how much they are spending, more and more people with be researching and even making their purchases online, looking for better deals. Hence, I believe that although we are in a recession, there may be a shift of spending from traditional sales channels over to the online sales channel. During the boom times in Ireland, we didn’t really care what we were spending on items because there was always more cash coming our way (I’m generalising here but not always the case). I’m constantly reminded that I don’t know what it is like to live in Ireland during a recession and it’s a different mind set. The last recession in Ireland was in the 80’s and I was too young then to notice. With the Internet available to all in this ecomonic cycle, I wonder how much it will influence people in their buying habits. Spending figures may go down but I think the percentage of spending online will go up.

The Internet for Businesses in the Recession

So, it’s no longer the spending frenzy that as it has been in years gone by and I’ve found that a lot of businesses that previously didn’t need to do much marketing for the business to sustain their size and also grow, are now looking at new ways of bringing in the business. A recession pushes businesses to get back to basics and focus on sales and marketing to keep their businesses alive. This is where the Internet comes in to play. Utilising a business website to help market your business and generate sales leads or indeed direct sales can be a cost effective approach compared to traditional sales and marketing methods. Take a one day full page ad in one of the national papers that can easily cost upwards of €10,000 but it only lasts a day. By putting €10,000 towards your website, you’re looking at a sales and marketing tool that can last at least 2 years. Any subsequent traditional advertising can be directed to your website to pick up where they leave off, and generate those must needed sales leads. If you haven’t embraced a website for your business or your current site is looking a bit dated, now is definitely the time to look at how a strong web presence can benefit your business in these difficult times.

The Effect on the Industry

Both of the above lead to one thing for our industry, we are definitely getting busier. I’ve talked to a number of other professionals in the industry and nobody seems to be feeling the effects of the recession just yet. Everyone is saying the same thing - they are busier than ever. Will this last? I’m not sure but if businesses all come to realise the strengths a good website can have for their business during a recession, our industry will continue to grow. We’re working with lots of new clients on their new approach to online business as well as upgrading existing clients with new techniques to improve their presence. We would definitely recommend companies that need a new sales and marketing strategy in this unsure time to look into this further and contact one of the many companies out there that can provide a good service. Finding the right company can be difficult though so in addition to ourselves, I’d like to recommend a few web companies and individuals off the top of my head, that I know in the industry and believe they can do a great job:

• Ken Stanley - Standards guru with a good team around him for some exceptional work
• Contrast - They mainly build web apps but also design some very unique websites
• Sabrina Dent - Designs some great looking websites that have also achieved some great success
• Spoilt Child - Probably one of the best design companies in the country with an excellent portfolio
• Click Stream - Have a wide array of clients and producing some very good work
• Red Fly Marketing - For when you need to market your website in the online world

Do you need some advice?

We love talking to businesses and offering any advice we possibly can. Feel free to call me directly on 046 - 9072998 for a chat or email me at info [at] davidbehan.com.

I’m happy to report today that one of our clients, Blue Sky Mortgages, has done very well out of Google’s recent SERP shuffle. They’ve reached no. 2 for the search term “mortgages” on google.ie.

When we took over the site late last year, one of our objectives was to increase search engine traffic. By employing standard SEO techniques during the development process (such as compliant code, css based design, naming conventions, search engine friendly urls, etc.) and some help from 2bscene with a targeted link building campaign and optimisation of the site, we are really happy with the results this week. Being no. 2, pushes Blue Sky Mortgages above the likes of GMC Mortgages, Permanent TSB, Irish Mortgage, Mortgage Store, Ulster Bank and Simply Mortgages - to name but a few.

Blue Sky Mortgages also rank very well for other terms such as “mortgage”, “mortgages ireland”, “mortgage broker”, etc. We’re looking forward to analysing the statistical information and improving on the current results. This actually coincides with a new service we will be offering our clients that makes use of PPC campaigns to achieve exceptional results. We’ll have more on that soon.

Ok, I know it’s not even Halloween yet but hear me out for a second. I’m actually doing a little test to drive a bit of traffic to the site. Not necessarily quality traffic but traffic nonetheless. Last year, I uploaded this post wishing everyone a “Merry Chrismas”. I hit publish and as soon as I did, I realised my spelling mistake in the title and immediately corrected it. However, the bots had already picked up my feed and the blog aggregators and search engines where pointing to the site with “Merry Chrismas” and not with the updated “Merry Christmas” as we all know it should be. The result was that anyone that mistyped “Merry Christmas”, was getting to me… I think I was top 3! I’d never be up there for the actual proper spelling but it was fun to get a lot of traffic from a mistyped popular phrase!

I also had another post about how crap the booking system were for the major ice skating rinks up in Dublin - Smithfield on Ice and 7up Christmas on Ice. I haven’t gone over to see if they have improved yet so there might be another rant about them later on! This also generated a lot of traffic to the site as these companies where spending a lot on traditional marketing, which had people searching for their names and related keywords in the search engines! Guess who was coming up?

So, where am I going with all this stuff? Well, it’s coming up to that time of year and as these keywords are seasonal, I thought I’d throw up this post as a bit of a test to see what traffic I can nab from people searching on terms like “ice skating dublin”, “smithfield on ice”, “7up on ice”, and of course “merry chrismas”. I’ll let you know how I get on but I’ll put it to some of my readers to try something similar in whatever area you like and see what traffic it generates. If you’ve got any suggestions or good stories, I’d love to hear them!

And just for the record… Happy Christmas!

#UPDATE - Related sites:

7up Christmas on Ice
Booterstown Ice Skating
Dundalk Ice Dome

Well, it’s been 4 weeks since the launch of the new website and I’ve done a fair bit of marketing on the website. Still have lots to do but the past month has seen some good results. I outlined my targets in the first post and gave an update in the second post. This post is to round up a full summary of how the site is fairing out now, after the changes took place. So here’s the final results of the last 4 weeks, compared to the previous 4 weeks. To gather this information, I’m using Google Stats, Google Webmaster Tools, Web CEO, PopURI.us, Feedburner

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Following up on my recent post about documenting the marketing of davidbehan.com, it’s one week on and good news so far. I’ve managed to achieve some of the targets I’ve set out and I’m on route to hitting the others. This is going to be an ongoing process with the ultimate aim of taking the top spot for "web design ireland" in Google. I don’t expect to do that over night or even in the next few weeks but with these efforts and bit of energy, I don’t think it is an impossible task. I’ve often joked with Dave Davis online, who’s currently holding number 1, that I want that place so if you’re reading Dave, now you know… I’m coming for ya! Any tips you want to share?

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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.

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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 »