David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

One of our own projects that we launched earlier this year, OurMemoryOf.com, is up for an Irish Web Award. In case you didn’t know, OurMemoryOf allows users to create a memorial website for their deceased loved ones with photos, stories and online book of condolence.

It’s the first year of the awards set up by Damien Mulley, following the success of the Irish Blog Awards. We’ve made the long list in the Best New Web Application / Service category and we’ve got some tough competition:

Irish Web Awards

• Pix.ie
• PutPlace
• Locle
• Mortgages and Loans
• Nooked
• BookMeetingRoom.com
• Next Action
• Url.ie
• LouderVoice
• Twitterfone
• Zignals
• eWrite
• Album Shopper
• Edenbee
• PropertySwap.ie
• Poll Daddy
• Decisions For Heroes

There really are some great web apps and services in that list. I think it will be difficult to make the short list with such a competitive category. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I felt a little cheated that I wouldn’t get a chance to judge any of the categories in this years awards as we had a nomination. However, I just read on the awards.ie blog that Damien is doing something quite unique with our category. He’s getting us to judge all the other nominees in our category, which will then be added to the other judges scores before the final short list is announced. A great idea Damien.

Well, I just want to wish everyone the best of luck and looking forward to meeting familiar faces and new ones on the night.

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.

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve been blown away by an application for the Internet but yesterday I was. I got an email from a fellow designer (thanks Aoife) to a cool application that works for Internet Explorer, Firefox (pc and mac), and Safari. The application is PicLens and in a nutshell, it’s an image gallery viewing tool that sits above your browser (in full screen when open) and makes life much easier than traditional thumbnail listing, click for larger image, next page, etc.

If you’ve ever tried navigating a photo gallery on somebody’s bebo, myspace or facebook page, you’ll know what a headache it can be. With this application installed, you click an icon on supported images and it loads all the images into a cool interface that shows all the images on a “virtual wall” that you can skip along quickly, zoom in, zoom out, start a slideshow, and more. It’s hard to describe how it works but the best thing I can suggest is to just try it. For Mac users our there, it’s like looking at images in cover view.

My First Implementation

Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall
This got me thinking about the application of such a tool into my every day life and I’ve come up with my first implementation. I subscribe to css galleries to keep a fresh of new techniques and designs. I put the collection into a little web app for my viewing pleasure. However, it’s not that easy to browse and find what I’m looking for so I decided to integrate PicLens into it. I’ve come up with a cool Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall that I can quickly flick through, find a site I like and open it directly all from within PicLens. You can try it out for yourself but make sure you are using FireFox and have the PicLens extension installed as I haven’t configured it for IE or Safari yet. I’ve got a number of ideas floating around for this in my head but I imagine any site I create in the future that has a photo gallery will have support for PicLens or similar apps. I can’t see me ever browsing a gallery using standard pages if I can use PicLens instead.

Using PicLens for Web/Stock Image Searches

There’s a built in search facility that allows you to search for images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr and DevianArt. The results show up in the app and when you find a pic you like, you can click a button (top left) and it will bring to the page it is from. Way cool! We were chatting on Irish Webmaster Forum about the app and James came up with a great use of the app. I, and a lot of other designers, love iStockPhoto for images for our websites. It can be very annoying and time consuming trying to find the right image so instead of using iStockPhoto’s built in search, you can use PicLens to search Google Images for “site:istockphoto.com business” and you’ll get business related results. You can quickly browse them and open the iStockPhoto page that has the image for sale. I’m sure this same technique could be used on countless other websites too.

Well, that’s it for now. Hope you like the app and let me know what you think with a comment below. Any other good uses of this tool you can think of? Tricks? etc? To finish… Here’s a few screenshots of PicLens on my Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall. 2 thumbs up to the guys at who created it! Superb!

Screenshots

Well over the past few months, I’ve been working hard with a couple of the guys on my team to launch a new website called ourmemoryof.com. This website is aimed at people who may have just suffered the recent loss of a friend or family member, and will allow them to create a memorial website in their tribute. The website they create will allow visitors to view messages from the family, photos, videos, messages of condolence and contribute to the site with their own messages of condolence.

We’ve just moved into alpha testing and we’re welcoming people to sign up for the beta test or to be notified when the new site goes live in early Spring 2008. You can visit the website by visiting the link below.

Memorial Websites

If you like to know more about the project or have any feedback at this early stage, please do not hesitate to contact me directly or leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading! Rgds, Dave

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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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 »