It used to be a case that simply having a website for your business was enough to give you a competitive advantage. This is no longer the case as now the vast majority of Irish businesses have a website – so to gain competitive advantage, your site needs to be better than your competition. We see a lot of good websites and a lot of bad websites and while this can be subjective, below are the top 10 common mistakes we see on business websites.
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New Logo – Making The Web Work For You
Today we’re delighted to launch our new logo which is a revamped version of our old logo. The logo also features our new slogan
“Making The Web Work For You”
However this is more than a slogan, this is our purpose. But what does it mean?
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for – The importance of SEO
The internet is a vast collection of websites, pages, files and resources scattered around millions of web servers around the world. In the mid 90’s many companies tried with different levels of success to index the internet and make it possible to search for websites and pages. By the turn of the millennium one clear winner emerged and not surprisingly they have become one of the biggest companies in the world. In fact they have had such an immense impact on the world, their name has become a verb! I am of course talking about Google.
Google have become, for many, the front door to the internet. It’s a place where people come to begin their voyage of discovery. It is reputable and it can’t be fooled. It goes without saying that if you’re in business, it is very desirable to be on top of the search results for your chosen keywords and this is why SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is so important.
Your Website – How many miles do you get to the gallon?
One of the key decisions when shopping for a website is value for money. You can pay from as little as a couple of hundred euros to tens of thousands of euros. One thing to be careful of is understanding that the terms ‘value for money’ and ‘cheap’ are very different things.
All websites are not equal in the same way that all cars are not equal. If you were in the market for a reliable & safe family car, you wouldn’t open up a search engine and type in ‘Cheap cars for sale’. I think most people would have a fair idea on what makes and models they had in mind and this would shape their budget. So if you want a brand new German jeep, you’ll have different expectations and search parameters than if you wanted a second hand family saloon. You’ll see the difference between both – shapes, colours, comfort, technical features, power etc.
The same tells aren’t necessarily visible in a website. So when it comes to a website (and let’s stay with the car theme here), you may be in the market for nice new Mondeo but if you don’t ask the right questions, you could easily buy a 15 year old Fiesta that has 4 bald tires, a rusting engine and no NCT!
SSL / TLS– Do I need it?
First of all let’s briefly examine what SSL / TLS means. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and was developed in the mid 90’s to serve as a security mechanism in the infancy of the internet. The main benefit SSL gave was to protect from ‘man in the middle’ attacks whereby somebody eavesdropping on a network connection could gather sensitive information (usernames, passwords, credit card details etc.) and also manipulate network traffic to trick clients into thinking they were talking to an authentic server and vice versa. SSL underwent a number of version updates over the years and in 2015 was replaced with TLS (Transport Layer Security). SSL & TLS are effectively the same concept, TLS is just a newer and more secure version of SSL – however SSL remains the most commonly used term for historical reasons.
So do you need an SSL / TLS certificate on your website? If you’re running an e-commerce website where customers can log in and pay for items on your site – you absolutely need a valid certificate. If you are the victim of a ‘man in the middle’ attack and you don’t have this protection, your customers sensitive information will be visible to the attackers – and that is very bad news for you and if you’re found to be negligent, will have serious legal consequences.
Some Of Our Clients
