Adnet - Building for Business

With everyone talking about Web 2.0 this weather, it's nice to just deliver something simple and elegant like our recently launched site for the BDI (stands for Biomedical Diagnostics Institute, but I prefer the acronym) at Dublin City University.

As usual with a site designed by one of our design partners - Dara Creative - the site is tight and crisp. Our biggest contribution, apart from implementation and attention to detail, was the dynamic navigation index. (Visit the site now so you can see what I'm talking about).

The overriding idea (originally developed for Rennicks, another Dara Creative design) is to empower the site visitor to explore the content quickly, hiding unnecessary information until just the moment when she chooses to view it. Then the content is delivered without the disorienting gap caused by waiting for a whole page to load.

The details of the Web 2.0 technology which delivers this user experience are not the important thing, just as long as it works.

Well what do you know, I do believe we've actually pulled it off. A couple of hard grafting Saturdays saw the vision implemented. Not perfect, but good and there to be built upon. Check out the New Adnet Website, personally I'm very pleased. It captures the tone, creates the right impressions and the initial feedback had been varied and mainly positive. I think our web site is now making a positive contribution to our business rather than being a lacklustre placeholder. Thank you Fergal and Alan (and me) now back to the graft :-)

We've hooked ourselves up with Google Analytics, the new name for the system bought as Urchin last year. Once off the waiting list and signed up, you simply add a website to your (currently limited) list of sites, and embed a little Javascript in your pages.

As our most popular site, the Burren Yoga site was clearly the one to look at first. As ever, Dave has been an ideal beta tester, asking me exactly how many people from the UK were leaving one of links pages as soon as they arrived, and then exactly what keywords these people had used to get there.

A service which has had less fanfare is Google Sitemaps, which allows a webmaster to provide an XML feed of page URL's to the search engines. As part of the deal, you get information from Google about link errors on your pages, how your PageRank is distributed through the site, and - maybe best of all - how your top 20 keyphrases perform on actual searches.

More on these as we get to know them better

..or did I?

This mushroom image is great, I'm sure you'll agree.

Myself and a client / networking colleague considered using it on her website, but ultimately it didn't really have a part to play (Annette of Jikijela - a company WELL worth a look at).

Then we considered it might have a place on our own recently updated website, so I went ahead with the download from iStock, the online stock image resource. That cost like a whole dollar. Just before going live, we decided to use a different image. So. I had a cool, paid for image, in danger of not being displayed online anywhere - I DON'T THINK SO.