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.

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

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.