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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WordPress – the importance of staying current
WordPress is the most popular website content management system in the world and powers a reported 34% of all the worlds websites – that’s over 75 million sites! So it should come as no surprise that here at ClearSoft, we have a number of WordPress sites in that 75 million.
WordPress is robust, extendable, usable and has a vibrant community constantly working on enhancements and new features. Many of the top websites in the world such as TED, CNN, People Magazine, UPS amongst others use it as their chosen platform.
With great popularity comes great threats. Given the scale of its user base, it can be very attractive for hackers to probe for back doors into this system – and they succeed regularly. And when they succeed once, it’s very easy for them to propagate an attack to hit millions of WordPress installations around the world. The WordPress development community is in a constant ongoing battle to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.
LEO Online Trading Voucher Changes – Finally some good news for small business
I hope this post finds everybody safe and well.
The last number of weeks have been a very challenging time for many businesses and there has been little in the way of good news. This week the Local Enterprise Office have announced some significant changes to one of their business support schemes that is very good news and we feel worth sharing at this time.
A Website is for life – not just for Christmas
They live an unloved existence in the shadows. Forgotten by their owners & creators, scoffed at by visitors. They were once the golden child, shiny, bright and new – admired and showcased. But now they go unnoticed, uncared for and abandoned. These are the orphaned websites.
An orphaned website is one which is in need of maintenance but the owner struggles to find somebody to carry this out. Every month we get a number of queries in from website owners who set up their site with a different web designer or an online website creator and they’re looking for our help to make changes to the site. Unfortunately we don’t take on this business, our websites are built to a certain standard that not all web designers follow so we politely decline maintenance request contracts from customers who have sourced their websites elsewhere.
Would you like fries with that? The dangers of online website builders
This post is mostly cantered about why I don’t like online website builders. Am I biased? Of course I am! Is a part of me jealous of these companies? Sure. Is the technology impressive? Absolutely. Am I a website snob? Maybe ….
That said, I genuinely don’t believe these solutions are good for most businesses for a number of reasons that I’ll outline here. But first we must go back in time to 2006.
I established ClearSoft in 2006 and had visions of developing a product that would provide an affordable set of tools for non-technical people to create a website from nothing. This system would be web based and while it would work for sports clubs, community organisations and personal sites – it was specifically aimed at small business. Sound familiar?
Some Of Our Clients
