Feedback Friday: Pressieport.ie steps up
So the first company in our brand new feature “Feedback Friday” is Pressieport.ie who are also one of the newest members of the IIA. The idea with Feedback Friday is to allow members of the IIA to seek feedback on their site and in fact Fred from Pressieport.ie describes what he hopes to get from it himself:
Pressieport.ie launched in November 2007 and then re-launched in June 2008 on a brand new platform (you live, you learn). We focus on trying to provide our customers with a different and original range of products/gifts than might generally be available on the High Street in Ireland and we pride ourselves on our Customer Service and the fact that we deliver to your door overnight anywhere in Ireland. In addition to this we provide a gift-wrapping service and personalised greeting card service. We are constantly looking for and working on improvements, but being in the thick of it means that sometimes it can be difficult to have objective or detached opinions about different aspects of the site. It is for this reason that we would really welcome feedback and suggestions from fellow IIA members and readers of this blog whether it is negative or positive.
The site can be viewed at www.pressieport.ie. You can leave comments below or pingback from your own blog. And, if you don’t mind, a few pointers in order to make this a pleasant and constructive experience for all:
- We are looking for feedback on the site: on its navigation, usability, accessibility, design, optimisation and any other nuts and bolts aspects that you in your own specialised expert field might notice.
- Tell us what you like about the site, not neccesarily the service or goods Pressieport are offering.
- Tell us what you don’t like about the site and please try to express exactly what it is that irks you. “I don’t like the photographs.” is not as helpful as “I think photographs that give a better idea of the recommended usage of the product would be better.” (A hypothetical example
) - Make sure you let us know where you blogged your contribution to Feedback Friday.
- Have a look at this wiki from Wikihow.com which I think sums feedback up generally.
- If you can ‘t say anything nicely maybe you should go for elocution/ creative writing lessons
Thanks!
We’ve been nommed – hurrah!
And what illustrious company in the business blogs category in the Irish Blog Awards! We’re also delighted to see so many of our members being nominated for their business and, indeed, personal blogs. A nomination for an award shows that somebody sat down and chose you over all the other blogs they could have chosen for that category so it’s kudos no matter how the shortlists turn out. So a big thanks to whoever nominated us. It is a great reflection on us and all our guest bloggers.
You can see the entire list of nominations here. Do put some time aside before clicking on that link as you will find yourself being amazed, inspired and riveted to all that is going on in the Irish Blogosphere.
How to do Business Online – Securely: Review by Puddleducks
Aedan Ryan of Puddleducks recently attended the IIA event “How to do Business Online – Securely” and even though he was completely exhausted after taking in all that information he wrote this summary of all he heard on the day. Thanks Aedan – we’re glad it was a worthwhile trip for you.
How to do Business Online – Securely « PuddleDucks Blog.
Free Rockets!
Okay not strictly true But I have something free from RocketJobs, one of the IIA’s first new members of 2009.
RocketJobs is an industry-wide job site with the focus on removing as much clutter as possible and keeping the focus on making search quick and easy. Launched in December, our list of jobs and clients is growing rapidly. Following RecruitIreland’s recent good example, RocketJobs has gone one step further and is offering three free posts to any employer in Ireland. Check out their own blog post about this.
For any additional roles over and above these free postings we are offering 30% extra roles free to all IIA members.
Nice!
Those SitesToGo sure are going places!
I just read this great post from Maggie Bowen in SitesToGo. Some of you may have heard her on RTÉ’s The Business competing in the speed tests. Her recent post describes her tour of duty around Donegal with a Dongle. It’s a real eye-opener in relation to the use of the internet as a business tool in Ireland: good quality broadband is just not available. While this situation continues many businesses of all sizes throughout the country will feel the recession bite harder as they continue to spend money on communications that could be saved by any kind of reliable, accessible broadband.
Would you like feedback? Get it on Feedback Friday!
A lot of companies join the IIA after launching their new, improved or indeed very first website. Many of the new members ask me for feedback on their site. Generally I try, as is my wont, to be helpful and offer constructive advice based on my experience. But I always feel uneasy doing this because I am just one person with only so much experience of the web. I have my own likes and dislikes and although, yes, I might have more exposure to business websites than most, I do not feel that my opinion should be granted any extra weight because of this.
However, I also know how difficult it can be to get good, qualified feedback on your site that you have spent hours breaking your heart over one way or the other. With this in mind, I thought we might try a little crowdsourcing. If you are a member of the IIA and you would like some feedback on your site with a view to making it look, feel and work better then please email members at iia dot ie with your URL. Please include notes about any particular aspect to which you want to draw visitors attention and a 100 word blurb about what your company wants to do/ is doing with the site. I will then blog about it here and we will invite feedback from all comers via the comments and trackbacks.
We’ll call it Feedback Friday and I’ll publish the sites looking for feedback on, yep you guessed it folks, Friday!
Guest Post: The Benefits of having a Web Site in a Recession
The following guest post is written by Leon Quinn of Reverb Studios Multimedia & Web Design. Reverb Studios recently rejoined the IIA which I was really glad to see. Leon Quinn, the company owner, had been on my radar through twitter and had made some valuable input to the Social Media Working Group’s recent blogging workshop through the live twittering (You’ll hear me passing on his inputs in the podcast where I mistakenly say that he is based in Co. Clare when he’s actually in lovely Leitrim – my bad!)
I ask all new members what prompted them to join the IIA. Leon told me that “Good key worded anchor links from a site like the IIA’s with a Google page rank of 6/10 and Alexa rank of 135,562 should help promote my web site so I guess you could say I’m mainly using the IIA site for link backs but in return you should get some useful content via my 2 blogs through your excellent RSS feature.”
Over to Leon:
The dominant mood in the current economic climate amongst the general public and businesses especially is to cut costs, save money and look for deals. Bearing this in mind, and if you run a business looking to increase your sales leads, now might be a good time to look at your marketing methods and spend.
‘Old fashioned’ marketing methods such as Print, Radio, TV, Brochures, etc.. remain effective at least in a local context but they also remain very expensive. If you are a business manager who has managed to avoid going down the online route to find leads until now then you should realise that according to recent statistics more and more people are using the internet to find services and purchase products online and you may not be able to afford to ignore this fact for much longer.
Web Design companies, if they have morals! will realise that companies may turn to the net in the current crisis to service their sales needs and therefore will hopefully lower their prices in the face of greater competition so hiring a web development company should no longer break the bank like it used to.
So what are the benefits of having a web presence over traditional marketing means?
-
- The web has a much greater reach, anyone with a PC and internet connection, anywhere in the world can find your site and potentially do business with you.
- The web never sleeps. Your website will not keep normal business hours but will continue to sell your services 24/7.
- It’s easier and quicker to find a product or service on the web thanks to excellent search engines such as Google therefore people will use this method to find companies much more.
- You can say more and sell yourself better on a web site than any other media. Consider the cost of an ad in something like the yellow pages and what you get for that price as opposed to a web site on which you can have text, photos, audio, video, news and as many pages as you like!
- The ongoing cost of a web site is quite small compared to other media. If you are managing the site yourself then the only repetitive costs will be your domain name and hosting and these should be reasonable.
- Spending money on something like Google Adwords to get people to your site is a much more efficient way of spending your marketing budget and you can monitor the effects of a campaign much more closely.
- You can use Google Analytics on your web site for free and gain very useful information about the type of people visiting your site and what they looked at most while there. This information can allow you to optimise your site to maximise the amount of people who actually contact you and give you a valuable sales lead.
Article by Leon Quinn
Reverb Studios Multimedia Design, Leitrim
Podcast: Workshopping the Draft Guide to Business Blogging
At the beginning of December the IIA Social Media Working Group invited interested parties to join them in person or remotely in order to workshop their draft guide to business blogging. A very interesting session ensued with plenty of input from those in the room which you can hear on this three part podcast.
You can also subscribe in iTunes to the IIA podcast and receive any future podcasts from us.
We also had input from others via Twitter which caused me no end of half-brained responses. You can actually hear me saying “Ye wha?” as I try to respond to a tweet and a real live person at the same time. Nice. If we ever do this kind of workshop again I have a different plan for the live tweeting.
Much thanks for Brendan Hughes for chairing this event, Krishna De for facilitating the session and editing the podcast and to all those who participated. Input is still welcomed on the draft guide so please feel free to add your comments.
Guide to Business Blogging: we need you on the case
The IIA Social Media Working Group are reworking the draft of their recently shared Guide to Business Blogging after the recent workshop (3 part podcast now available and well worth a listen). One area that we felt needed some attention was the case studies and we this in mind we are inviting all to participate by completing the following questionnaire with a view to be included as a case study. This survey takes about ten minutes to complete and the working group would really appreciate your input.
QR Codes lead to Prosperity
I mentioned QR Codes in a previous post and lo! as is often the way three virtual buses come along together and I found this post from Prosperity about the various uses being made of QR codes in entertainment and media in Japan in particular.
Typing out loud here, I could see them working very well for making content from our events available to mobile phone users attending those events. For example the QR Code on the right should bring the user to the Events page on the IIA website. I have a QR reader installed in my phone (Nokia E51), having read about it back at the beginning of summer. I suspect it’s a poor reader but so far I have not convinced it to read any QR codes that I have since happened upon! I must find a better one me thinks. I’ll keep you posted on my success or otherwise. I’d love to hear about any innovative uses people have found for the codes.
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