Hosting: March 2007 Archives

Crazy one week domain offer - register or transfer a .ie with Blacknight for a mere 25 euro. Full details here Go to the Blacknight site to order!

A couple of days ago I came across a post on Ken's blog about the new Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann website. It seems that it's now being talked about in other places. I'm not a designer, so I won't get into the entire debacle about whether Irish designers are "good enough", though you won't find me using non-Irish designers anytime soon... What does rile me however are a couple of other things about the new site:

1. It's not hosted in Ireland
2. The .ie and .com are aliased not redirects, so it's splitting on the search results

Point 1 is directly related to point 2 from an SEO perspective. From a business perspective I think it is deplorable that a state funded organisation would choose to host their online presence outside this country: blacknight@siracusa:~$ geoiplookup www.comhaltas.com GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States Irish tax payers money funds organisations like Comhaltas and the GAA (who obviously don't think Ireland is good enough for them either) Back in the 1990s I would have understood why companies and organisations chose to host their websites outside Ireland. My first few sites were hosted in the USA in the late 1990s simply because there was so little choice available in the Irish market, and what was available was expensive and lacking in features (ie. no php, mysql or anything else). It's 2007. Hosting in Ireland has come a very long way, with most of the larger Irish hosting providers actually running their own networks etc., Just take a look at the membership list of INEX these days!

I love reading marketing material. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you giggle. Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair. According Amas' latest report:

Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.

Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:

Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more

(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)