Adnet - Building for Business

Love, uncomplicated and unreserved,
inspired by a sometimes howling often sleeping,
little bundle of beauty and joy.

Magiced into being by the mysteries of the Universe.
What will you be?
Who will you become?

As I watch you form - so quickly, I wonder,
did I have the right to inflict mortality on you?

Realising this is not my question to ask, I return,
to the bliss of my love,
uncomplicated and unreserved.

Oh Clarity!
Cast thy benign shadow across the prow
of our distressed ship,
Enfold us in thy comforting womb,
and lay us gently to rest on the shores
of tranquility.

Suffering from a bad case of "Cobblers Shoes" and a relatively slack mid-March we decided it was time to take a serious look at our own sadly neglected web site. Its something we've been avoiding for a long time and we all felt it was about time to "do more" and "explain less" when it comes to the web.

We commenced the process with the following simple yet powerful ideas

• Become our own client.
• Look at our competition.
• Define our main target markets
• State our business objectives.

The business objectives we defined for the Adnet web site are:

• Engage more fully and effectively with our marketplace.
• Generate more enquiries from potential clients.
• Solicit communications from potential new channel partners.
• Create a better first impression with visitors to our web site.
• Improve search engine visibility and ranking.
• Demonstrate our capabilities and expertise directly.

The next steps are to decide on the mechanisms we were going to employ in order to achieve our stated business objectives.What particular bag of creative genius and technical wizardry will help us stand out from the crowd and get us that important next client.

The vital next steps in the process are:

• Generate draft ideas for the site's visual look and feel.
• Develop the core site messages and impressions.
• Design the user interface and interactive site elements.
• Generate, select, obtain and structure appropriate initial content for the site.
• Choose the online tools you wish to employ e.g. Blogs, Mailing Lists, Enquiry forms etc.

We believe, at this stage, that case studies will be the single most important part of the site content. We have a number of compelling stories to tell about our clients and their web sites. These stories say almost everything we need to communicate to our target market. Telling these stories well should help serve our business objectives well.

Well it looks like my new new blog is up and running, thanks Fergal. I am Managing Director of Adnet, Irelands longest serving web design and development company. I will be using this blog to document and discuss some of the issues relating to business, technology and websites that crop up during the course of our work. I know there are plenty of you out there dealing with similar issues all the time and I welcome all input, comments and feedback.

Further to recent internal company discussions, my colleagues and I agree it's time to start using blogs. For all sorts of reasons.

We're often asked to assist in 'Search Engine Optimisation' - getting yourself listed as high up the ladder as possible on the search engines. While we do provide some services in fine-tuning a client's website to optimise the quantity and quality of traffic they get from the search engines, our advice is always to start by focussing on the content of your website.

As Paddy has explained on Adnet's main site, there are a few simple principles which can be easily applied to your site to maximise your visibility and profile on the search engines.

One of our flagship clients, the Burren Yoga Centre, has applied these principles to excellent effect.
Dave Brocklebank, principal of the Burren Yoga Centre, has spent the last several years composing and compiling a large volume of Yoga-related content, both general and specific to the courses and activities available at the Centre. He has seen his traffic and level of bookings rise accordingly.

In 2005, we updated his site to provide him with an improved platform for reaching and retaining visitors to the Centre, and have recently added a Yoga Teacher listing service. Constant, incremental improvements like these are key to growing and maintaining the 'reputation' of your website, and this pays off when it comes to getting traffic from the search engines.

email remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to use the Internet for your business. As part of our ongoing development, we are constantly upgrading and improving this vital channel of communication. Our latest development is the addition of segmented mailing lists for Rennicks.

Working closely with the client, we have extended the standard single mailing list to cater for a large number of 'sublists', each containing a number of recipients sharing a common sectoral interest or customer category. The extension has also enabled us to add a 'live preview' facility which provides the client with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get view of the mailshot as it will finally appear to the recipient.

We are currently in the middle of developing a new website for the Department of Adult and Continuing Education in NUI Maynooth. As part of the University, the Department’s website must comply with high standards of accessibility and style guildelines, while appearing fresh and well-designed to appeal to a non-academic audience.

The challenge is to combine our highly designed look with a stringently standards-compliant technical implementation.

Some of the criteria:

• Compliant XHTML
• WAI Accessibility to AA standard
• No tables for layout

Our design achieves all these criteria (and goes beyond some of them), while appearing better, if anything, than it would have had we used the tried and tested table-based methods of page layout.

Welcome to my blog. Here over the next few months, I'll be keeping you up to date with developments here at Adnet.

As you may know, Adnet is Ireland's oldest web design and development company. Since early 1995, we have been delivering 'built for business' websites to clients large and small. This blog will hopefully give you a flavur of the issues we deal with and how we address them for our clients.