Tom Doyle :: TALK

Just as the rumours suggested, Windows Vista SP1 was released yesterday. More info http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx

I haven’t received my new laptop yet to tell you if it’s any good, but when I get it I will!

Dated: 7th March 2008
http://www.tomdoyletalk.com/2008/03/07/im-still-waiting/

On Tuesday Google launced a new portal for non-profit organisations. The site brings together all the great features of Google to one location and offers “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.”

It includes links to the obvious tools such as Google Docs, Calendar and Gmail. The site also provides links to Google Grants.

Google Grants allows non-profit organisations to “Get free online advertising on Google.com that can help raise awareness and increase traffic to your website”.

For more information visit http://www.google.com/nonprofits/ or http://www.google.com/nonprofits/grantstutorial.html

Well this doesn’t look like it’s going very well now does it?

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/h365/signatures.html

In a bid to prevent Hosting365 / Register365 bringing in fee based phone support for its customers, Joe Molloy set up a petition for disgruntled customers to show their disapproval with Hosting365’s move to paid support. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/h365/index.html

I don’t think if this even got 1,000 signings is it going to make any sort of a difference!

A close relative rang me today. “You can get plasma TV’s for €60 on eBay”, she said. Continuing the conversation, she went on to say that it was in fact a Garda auction and they were selling off goods that were never reclaimed.

Although it sounded too good to be true, I’d hate to think that I could miss out on a deal like this!

So I ventured off on my merry was to eBay.ie to see what I could find. I searched for “Garda” first just to see what came up and unsuprisingly there were no results. So I thought I’d be better off searching for “Plasma” since that’s what I was told they were selling. The search for plasma gave me the results that I was expecting, “GAR DA AUCTlON PHILIPS 50″ PLASMA TV 8O%OFF RETAlL PRlCE“. Since they had clearly spelt “Garda” wrong, it was obvious that this was definitely a scam.

Looking a little deeper, you could see that the seller had over 180 positive comments - however, they were all made today and generally by the same person, who had spect € with them.

I really feel sorry for those people that have purchased something from them since they have in fact purchased 80% off the retail price of whatever the item sells for in the next Garda Auction and not a TV at all.

This person had many other items for sale such as Sony PS3 for €64, Sony Vaio for €64… God, wouldn’t it be great if they were eh?

But anything that is this good, you know it can’t be true!

I read an interesting article today that was brought to my attention through the Enterprise Ireland mailing list forum. The full article can be read here >>

Sadly, I have to say it comes as no surprise to me that SME’s have lost their faith in web designers. Let’s face it, for years, especially in the late 1990s, web designers were “creaming it” so to speak. A simple brochure website set you back over £15,000.

Nowadays, it’s just not the same. A similar website would set you back on average €2-3k. You can get cheaper than this of course, but it’s like everything else, you get what you pay for.

One of the differences nowadays is that there seems to be a lot more students / part timers / graphic designers doing websites. And the way I feel about that is, if you want to get a cheap and nasty website, go one of those. But if you want to get something back from your website… talk to professionals!

Hosting365 announced to their customers today that they will no longer be offering their Freefone line for customer support. Instead, if you need support, you will be expected to ring a premium rate number at €0.95 per minute. (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055252378)

Although I don’t agree that it was fair to announce this to clients all of a sudden, I do think it’s not a bad thing.

I have been in this industry long enough and I can only guess the type of calls they receive on a daily basis. I know from my web business that we are always getting calls from clients telling us their websites are down, when in fact it’s their internet connection and not us at all. That’s just one example of what we get, imagine being a hosting company!?

I think from their point of view, they would have been best advised to have certain levels of support calls based on price of service provided. But that opens up another can of worms.

My only concern is those clients with serious support issues. In the past Hosting365 haven’t exactly been the most honourable responsive business when it comes to customer support.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of servers going down for maintenance without notice, or being delays in responses to support tickets etc. So if it was hard to get answers when something serious happened then, what’s it going to be like now trying to talk to people through the live chat facility!?!?

Recently, the growth in requests from clients to target their websites at specific countries has been huge. I put this down to the recent hype that SEOs have created around Googles geo-targeting in their Google Webmaster Tools service.

For me, this is a lot of hype over nothing. In some cases it’s great to be able to target a specific area. For example, I’m in Ireland, I host my website in the US and I have a .com domain name. I really only want business in Ireland and I really need to appear in the “Sites from Ireland” search in Google. So what do I need to do?

Well the steps for that are quite simple. There are a few options available to you, here they are:

1. Register a .ie domain name
   The easiest way to geo-target without a doubt. If your website has been up and running for a while, you will need to implement a 301 Redirect from your old domain name to your new .ie domain name. It will take time for Google to pass all the trust and popularity that your website has built up over time on to your new website, but it will be worth it in the end.
2. Change hosting or IP Space
   The next thing you should look at is moving hosting to an Irish based hosting company. Now, by that I mean physically located in Ireland, not a hosting company that resell hosting in the US. If this isn’t an option, talk to your current provider about providing you with an Irish IP address.
3. Use Geo-target tool
   Your final option is to use the Google Webmaster Geo-targeting tool. I personally am still not convinced this is a very good option. Although it works, you are at the mercy of Google. If at any stage Google feels that you are not in any way related to that area, you are easily disconnected!

Now let’s think of a different scenario that could in theory be quite common to a lot of Irish businesses. Let’s say we wanted to target Northern Ireland, how would we do this?

There’s a lot of debate over this, but for me there is only one real solution that will always work!

1. Create a new website
   It’s horrible to think of going through that process all over again, but for me it’ the only viable option. All content will have to be different, which will be an absolute pain. But you should also think of contact information. Will someone in the UK expect to ring an Irish Number? Not likely, so you need to think about things like that.
2. Register .co.uk domain name
   As before, I would register a .co.uk domain name.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
   Unfortunately it’s a brand new website. The process of developing links etc will all have to be done seperately to your main website.

Just remember, geo-targeting is all about localised results. It’s in your best interest to spend more time focusing on the keyphrases you need to be found for and making sure you website appears for them no matter where you are in the world.

Let’s face it, if I was to search for a Solicitor in Google using the “sites from UK” option, would I want to see solicitors from Ireland appearing here? Would I even bother doing business with any of them? Unlikely!

So what other ways can you target business from other countries? Well the most obvious is by language!

For example if I’m in Poland, I don’t speak English and I need a solicitor in Dublin. How can you catch this potential client?  

Here’s a good example of how we did it for one of our clients. Instead of geo-targeting Poland, we focused on the Polish language and keyphrases that may be used. From the results below, you will see that it doesn’t matter what country specific search engine you search in, if you have targeted your phrases properly, you will get results!

“prawnik w dublin” - Google.com - Result No. 6
“prawnik w dublin” - Google.ie - Result No. 5
“prawnik w dublin” - Google.pl - Result No. 7

On top of that, it’s more likely for this person to be a qualified lead, that someone that has found you because you tricked the search engines!

I’ve just installed Internet Explorer Beta 8 and I’m a little disappointed to say the least.

Although it runs a lot quicker than previous versions, namely IE7, it has actually “broke” a number of websites.

So here’s my list of sites so far that IE8 has borked in their attempt to compare more standards compliant.

This site at least…. and ….
www.revenue.ie
www.recruitireland.com
www.argusrentals.com
www.eircom.net
www.rte.ie
www.goldenpages.ie
www.irishjobs.ie
www.paddypower.ie
www.2bscene.ie (My god, I know IE7 broke a lot of sites, but not this bad!)
www.blacknight.ie
www.redflymarketing.com
www.carshowonvid.ie

From my little research this morning, the only sites I see that are not falling foul to th new IE8 are those that are basic in design or those that are legacy HTML websites, i.e. non standards compliant (don’t take that out of context! There are standards compliant websites without any issues, but they tend to be prety basic in design).

I’m hoping that the actual release will have addressed all these issues.

As expected, FireFox does nto have any of these issues… why can’t Microsoft follow their lead?

It’s been just over 2 weeks now and I haven’t received my new laptop from Dell

Worse still, it seems to be still in pre-production, which means they haven’t even thought about putting it in a box yet, never mind building it.

I wonder if this delay is because of their decision to start selling their laptops in PC World?

While my old laptop trundles along, I just feel like it gets slower every day. Come on Dell boy, send me out my laptop …. please!!