Are online website builders a good or bad thing?

Over the past few years, the use of online website builders such as Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify has exploded in popularity. These web builders offer users an easy and affordable way to create a website without the need for coding or technical skills. However, there are potential dangers associated with using these platforms that should be taken into consideration. So, should you use Wix? Squarespace? Shopify? In this article, we’ll explore the problems associated with online website builders and introduce WordPress as a safer and better alternative for Irish business websites.
Continue Reading


10 Common Website Mistakes

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.
Continue Reading


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.

Continue Reading


Buzzword Bingo

One of the most important tasks in my job is to speak to clients in a language that they can understand. We techie nerds need to understand the lingo of how a website runs, we don’t need to overload our clients with too much unnecessary jargon. I thought I’d write a blog to explain some of the buzz words you may hear from web designers.

Hosting

For a website to be visible on the internet, it must be hosted on a web server. Think of hosting as the process of housing your website on the internet. We have accounts with some of the top hosting companies in Ireland and will look after the hosting for you.

Server

A server can mean 2 things in relation to the web

  • A server is the computer on the internet that hosts your website (Windows, Linux etc.)
  • A server is the software that runs on a computer that processes requests and responses to your website. Think of it as a container for your website.

Continue Reading


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.

Continue Reading



Case Study – Wexlow.com

Technologies Used

  • ASP.NET
  • MSSQL Server
  • HTML
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • JQuery
  • SSL/TLS

Description

Wexford Low Energy Homes is a family run company based in the south east of Ireland. They specialise in the construction of low energy housing developments and in 2017 we worked with them to create websites for 2 of their latest developments – gleannanghairdin.com and arduisce.com.

They then asked us to create a website for their own company which can be seen at wexlow.com. As part of this project we designed and built some custom functionality and portals for their contractors and home owners to log in to.

Continue Reading


Moy Materials Website Goes Live

Moy Materials is an Irish founded, international roofing specialist firm. With offices in Dublin, Glasgow and London, Moy have a raft of high profile clients across all sectors.

They wanted a comprehensive CMS (Content Management System) that showcased their products and services. We’re delighted with the end result – it is as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional.

This is a classic example of where we can transform business processes with a content management solution. Call us today to see how we can help you. Click on website link below to visit the site.

https://moymaterials.com/

Continue Reading


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.

Continue Reading


Wexlow.com Website & Online Portal For Contractors Goes Live

This week, www.wexlow.com went live which is a project we’ve been working on over the last while for Wexford Low Energy Homes Ltd. The site is comprised of a modern & clear front-end and more importantly a powerful bespoke back-end that serves as a portal for their contractors to login to download and submit forms.

Visit the site at www.wexlow.com. If you’d like to see how we can transform your business, get in touch.

Continue Reading


Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Tag Cloud

Connect

Some Of Our Clients