# http://myit.ie llms-full.txt ## Web Design Services ## About MyIT Web Design MyIT Web Services (MYIT Ltd) is a 100% Irish, Dublin based Web Design, Development, Hosting & Marketing Company, founded by the MD [Gerard O'Leary](http://ie.linkedin.com/in/gerardoleary) in 2006. We have decades of experience to share with you in [Web Design](https://myit.ie/website-design.html) and Development, whether you're building a large custom built website or a smaller starter website. We are also an experienced Open Source development company, building websites on the standard and dependable 'LAMP' framework - Linux, Apache, PHP & MySQL / MariaDB. Our web experience comes from a host of corporate sources including established UK and Dublin software teams. **Creative Website Design** The programmers and graphic designers working on all MyIT projects are experienced, talented and exacting in everything they do, and these are the skills that we would bring to your website project. We're also the right people to talk to if you want a bigger website build, like a custom database driven website or a custom website shop. We can also assist you with that frequently disliked job of preparing your product material for the new website. Here is [our web design portfolio page](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-portfolio.html) with some recent client website links. This will give you an idea of what we can do for you, but going through your requirements at a face to face meeting will always be much more informative for you, in terms of seeing what we're like to work with. This will truly show you the type of company we are. **We Have What Your Website Needs** From that meeting we can then prepare a custom proposal document and quotation for you, which we'll email to you. This document will give you a very clear picture of everything that you need for the new website. We know how to focus on the details & benefits of your products, your services and your company. And we know how to give your website visitors exactly the information they want from your website. **We'll Work Harder On Your Website Design** We'll also be great to work with because we'll work harder than any other company at understanding your business needs and your customers' expectations - here are some [Testimonials](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-testimonials.html). That means that we'll both be on the same page all the time with respect to what your website needs. We do this in a number of different ways, for example: examining your product/service information and brochures in more detail, by finding out more about the profile of your customers, by studying your competitors and perhaps looking at some UK competitors to get a wider view of your industry. **We Prefer A Longterm Website Relationship** We'll also do a lot of listening to you to ensure that we gather all of your requirements, and make sure that you only have to tell us once what you actually want. We know the questions to ask you and that will save you time and money. We're genuinely better than our competitors because we really are more interested in a long term business relationship with you, so we work hard to establish and maintain that relationship. We'll find out early on which website features and requirements are priorities for you and which are not, and we'll focus on your priorities. **Get A Custom Proposal From MyIT For Precisely The Website That You Want** If you have any questions about your current website, a new website, website hosting, adwords advertising or anything to do with the web, then save yourself time and money and call us. We'll talk you through whatever you're planning, and we'll create a targeted, well priced proposal for you for exactly the website that you want. **Call us on [01-6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) for more information.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] [LET'S START TALKING](https://myit.ie/contact-myit-web-design.html) ## Why Choose MyIT? - Longevity: In business as MyIT Ltd since 2006. - Local Expertise: 100% Irish-owned with a physical presence in Dublin 12/22. - Response Time: 24/48 hour turnaround for maintenance requests. - Direct Support: No anonymous ticketing systems mean direct access to Irish-based developers and designers. ## Recent projects [**Roxford Lodge**](https://roxfordlodge.ie/) Site Design & Hosting for a Dublin Victorian Hotel [VIEW PROJECT](https://roxfordlodge.ie/) [**Community Response**](https://communityresponse.ie/) Website Management for Dublin Support & Advocacy Group for those impacted by Hepatitis C [VIEW PROJECT](https://communityresponse.ie/) [**Amárach**](https://amarach.com/) Website Design & Hosting for a Market Research Agency [VIEW PROJECT](https://amarach.com/) [**RSG**](https://rsg.ie/) Website Design, Management & Hosting for Roscommon Disability Support Group [VIEW PROJECT](https://rsg.ie/) [**about myit**](https://myit.ie/about-myit-web-design.html) MyIT is an experienced and creative, 100% Irish, Dublin 12 based Web Services Company serving an extensive customer base across the country as MyIT Ltd since 2006. [LET'S CONNECT](https://myit.ie/about-myit-web-design.html) [**Website Shop**](https://myit.ie/website-shop.html) Chances are you can sell some or all of your products and services online. Talk to us about how you interact with your customers and we'll put a plan together to increase your sales in a web shop while reducing business costs. [READ MORE](https://myit.ie/website-shop.html) [**LOGOS & BRANDS**](https://myit.ie/logo-design.html) All growing businesses have a logo and a brand and they use that recognisable image to generate familiarity, initiate repeat business and instill trust in their new and existing customers. Call us to discuss how you can do the same. [START HERE](https://myit.ie/logo-design.html) # Web Design Dublin MyIT Web Design D12 is a 100% Irish Web Design, Development, Hosting & Marketing Company, founded in 2006. We have decades of experience in Website Design and Development. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Domain Name Search # Website Domain Name Search So, you're looking for a new website name (aka domain name) and you need a few pointers. Once you have a name, or ideally a few website name ideas and possibilities, you can go to any of the website name registrars and they'll register the name for you - or MYIT can register the name for you and we'll register it in your own name so that you are the sole owner. There are a few helpful tips below if you are registering the website name yourself. **Domain Name Management** MYIT can also act as domain manager and renew the name each year for you and manage the DNS for that domain name too. DNS stands for Domain Name Systems and it is the 'phone book' of the Internet. Web users access information online through domain names, like rte.ie or irishtimes.com. Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and DNS translates domain names into IP addresses so that web browsers can load Internet web pages and other web resources. **What Does DNS Do?** DNS servers eliminate the need for web users to memorize IP addresses such as 190.151.11.12 or 2000:ca00:2408:1::c129:d1a2 and leaves web users with the simpler task of remembering a domain name like rte.ie or irishtimes.com . Most of the website name registrars provide a good service and when you are using the search box on their websites you just enter the 'body' part of the website name you're interested in e.g. 'websitename' in the case of 'www.websitename.com', and they'll check the availability of all the website name possibilities such as www.websitename.com , www.websitename.co.uk , www.websitename.ie etc. **Being Organised Will Make Your Domain Search Easier** Sometimes your web name search will be difficult because you are trying to balance a number of separate requirements at the same time, so be as organised as you can and that will simplify things. Write down your website name requirements and put them in order of importance. When you search for a website name and see that it's already registered by someone, mark that down in your 'already registered' list so that you don't have to search it's availability again. Being organised will make this as efficient a process for you as possible and prevent you from doing the same searches more than once. **Try The Trusted Hyphen** Maybe your first choice name is available? ... so do a few quick searches to see if the obvious website names that you want are still available. If you are stuck and can't find the name you want use a hyphen '-' , but be aware that people may forget the hyphen or have difficulty remembering to include it. Google will figure it out quite quickly if your name is entered as a search without the hyphen though and will probably make helpful suggestions to the website searcher. For a good few years .com website names in particular are getting registered at a huge rate, so people are getting more used to calling out, using and hearing website names with hyphens in them and numbers too. So, if you can't find a better name, maybe using a hyphen will work for you. **Use Other Keywords From Your Industry** Know the important product names, services and key phrases for your industry. You can use them as part of your web name search. Also consider your target market name e.g. Ireland or your target market county or city e.g. Dublin. Using a territory keyword will give you more website name search options and might give you a good branding lift too as a niche operator in that area. Think about your business - is there an existing company name that has to be in the new website name? Or is there a product name or service name that is more important? Is your product for a target market so that that territory name could go in there? **Time To Decide What Your Website Name Priorities Are** Which of those website name priorities are the most important to you? Perhaps you could put all of these considerations in an ordered list so that you know where your priorities lie for your new website name. Think about related words - you might want a .com like 'daviscarpenters' but 'daviscarpentry' might be a good option too if it's available and the first one isn't. Try make your new website name easy to remember and keep it as short as possible. This will not always be possible, but incorporate that good rule of thumb into your other considerations above. A relatively short and catchy website name might be a good plan-b if your initial web name searches are not proving fruitful. **Consider Domains That Are For Resale** You could also consider buying a 2nd hand website name but you would be well advised to get a website company to do an analysis of the domain name for you and see what the site was used for before and how Google views that domain. A 2nd hand website name that Google marked as a spam site previously for example, would be very difficult or impossible for you to rank well for in the future, even though it might be a nice website name with the right keywords in it for your business. If you are going to target more than one country market you should consider getting the various domains that you will need e.g. .co.uk for UK and .ie for Ireland. Google likes you to have the local country code domain name and will give you a better ranking - all other things being equal. Don't use hard to spell words or a complicated play on words. You might understand the clever or funny spelling but others may not, and as a a result they may not be able to type it or remember it. **Check New Names In Google Before You Commit** Before you decide on a website name have a look in Google for it and see if there are already some big or small companies or products on page 1 of the search results with that same name. Check if you are going to have naming issues there too e.g. naming trademarks. If you are targeting the Irish market check your trademark details here: [www.patentsoffice.ie](http://www.patentsoffice.ie/) . **Some Companies Don't Have Their 1st Choice Website Name** Your website name may not be 100% what you wanted but that doesn't mean it isn't going to be a huge success. When your website has a huge amount of visitors coming to it each day and you are on page 1 on Google for a lot of the important searches in your industry, you won't be thinking of changing your website name. You'll want to protect your new website name too because now you have built a whole business and brand around it. Lots of business owners have a website name that isn't exactly what they originally wanted but now they're 100% committed to it as a brand and their business has been built up around it. If you want to discuss your website plans and website name plans give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email us at [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) . ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Management Services # Website Management & Maintenance **We Offer A Complete Website Management & Maintenance Service For Businesses Of All Sizes. Does Your Company Need:** - New website functionality (website features) designed, built, tested and installed. We can also prepare and schedule training for you and your staff. - New website graphic design work for the whole website or a section of your website. - Website maintenance or software upgrade work performed on the website code - as a once off or at regular intervals. - Website administration tasks e.g. regular website backups, virus scans, website software upgrades, online marketing, website monitoring, website training, email management and secure managed website hosting. It can be expensive and time consuming to train new and current staff to professionally carry out and test website updates when they and you have a business to run - so for most companies it is more cost effective to outsource those tasks. Equally, there are a lot of website updates and website redesign work that non technical employees just can't do because computer programming and/or graphic design skills and experience are required. **How Much Work Do You Need Carried Out?** The cost of website updates does naturally depend on how much work you need done and on how your website is setup, what kind of changes are needed and how easy it will be for us to get access to your website code to make those changes. We can complete a considerable amount of work in a few hours once we have easy access to your website code, so minor website updates should not take long to complete. In a lot of cases we'll take a copy of your website and do the website updates on our web development servers so that we can show you the changes and then put the updated website code live once you have signed off on the work. If you have ongoing work that needs to be carried out we can also provide you with a customised website management & maintenance contract and we would naturally need to gather some details from you to quote you accurately for that piece of work - so call us on [(01) 6216866](tel:35316216866) for more details. **Your Website Content Needs To Be Managed And Maintained** All websites should keep their content up to date as well as keep their website looking fresh and inviting. Customers can detect in minutes if your content is out of date and then you've lost their interest ... they don't want to waste their time reading old website information. Equally, your website as a whole should be up to date with company, product and industry announcements, product user manuals or downloadable forms - anything that makes your customer's visit to your website better, easier and more informative. Make it easy for them to choose you to do business with. With web site management there are also web hosting (web server) issues that need to be managed, and there are server security concerns which will be outside of the capabilities of most of your staff. These jobs are just as important for a website as your website content updates so. **Website Management And Maintenance Tasks Can Be Time Consuming** Our website developers can be your website developers, looking after anything to do with your website. We would consult with you at all stages so that you remain in full control of the website, but we're doing the work in the background. This work can include managing your website content itself, social media accounts, your [Adwords](https://myit.ie/google-adwords.html) marketing account and security updates for the website. We're experts at [designing](https://myit.ie/website-design.html) and managing websites and we can look after your website with the same attention to detail that you would employ yourself. **Experts In Wordpress, Opencart, EVO, MODX, Joomla, Drupal, Magento** Is your website design agency able to look after all of your website repairs and additions? Can they also perform all the Content Management System (CMS) upgrades and security patches that your website needs? If not, then call us and we can help you to have a fully managed and secure website - one that doesn't have a host of error messages on the CMS control panel each time you log in and one that has no website downtime. The errors from an unmanaged website often appear on the front of the website and that's bad for business and good for hackers as they can find out more about your already vulnerable website code situation. Having an updated CMS is essential for your business security and website security - call us now for a chat to see what precisely we can do for you and how inexpensive it can be. **Call For A FREE Consultation And Discuss Your Plans** Have a read of some [client testimonials](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-testimonials.html) from customers who have their website managed and give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we will answer all your questions and prepare a tailored proposal for your business. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Hosting Services # Website Hosting MyIT can host and manage your website and [Content Management System](https://myit.ie/cms-website-content-management-systems.html) (CMS), as well as manage your website name registration, [email accounts](https://myit.ie/email-hosting.html) and website updates. Having us manage all of that will allow you to have a lot less website and IT work to deal with each week so that you can focus all your energy on your new and existing customers. **Time Well Spent Dealing With New Customers** Most website owners 'know something about' websites and IT, but they don't have the time to gather all the information they need to know how, to carry out all the tasks that their website and/or IT needs, e.g. updating website software, nightly virus scans, nightly backups, modifying email setups, updating all types of website content, creating new web page templates or adding products and photos to a [website shop](https://myit.ie/website-shop.html). When you have [your website hosted and managed](https://myit.ie/website-management.html) on our high performance and monitored web servers, you'll know that you have the backing of an established web company, ensuring that your website is online and functioning without any problems. **Premium Hosting & Customer Support** For those rare occurrences when a web server does have a problem, we would know about it within seconds and there will be an engineer working on it immediately. Server downtime is a rare event nowadays on constantly managed and monitored high performance server systems but we have tested processes in place for when an issue does occur. If there are any issues we'll keep you informed and update you when the issue is resolved. **Website Server Reliability** We host & manage your website on high performance, professionally managed, secure, modern web servers located in data centres in Ireland and Amsterdam. To achieve high availability the servers are protected by emergency backup systems for internet connectivity, electrical power, air conditioning and fire suppression. The servers are also cloud based so the servers can be quickly transferred to spare server nodes if a hardware defect is detected. **Website Security & Backups** We ensure that your website is secure and that ongoing backups and virus scans are performed. The need for a website backup is not something that occurs that often, but it can occur and in those instances it is a recent, virus free complete backup that is needed. When your website is down, you lose customers, so we manage security and website backups so that your website is protected on all fronts. **Your Business Email Accounts** You may already have an email address like james11@yahoo.com, but now that you have your own website name, you will need [email addresses that match the website name](https://myit.ie/email-hosting.html). This gives you a more professional image on the web when you're in contact with new and existing clients. We can register whatever new website names you need and setup the corresponding emails accounts for you. You can access these email inboxes in a host of ways including Microsoft Outlook. We can manage those accounts for you, as well as manage everything else associated with that website name. We can also provide webmail access so that you can access your email using a party computer or during emergencies when you can't access your own PC or laptop. We provide anti-spam / anti-virus scanning on your email server, so as to clean up your inbox and free it of spam emails and viruses. Over 40% of the emails received each day are typically rejected because they are spam or contain a virus, and some email inboxes are naturally worse than others. **Lower Website Hosting Costs** Many companies base their decision on web hosting on price alone and while cost is a very important factor, it's not the only factor. 'Total Cost Of Ownership' encourages you to look at all the important factors when deciding what company should be supporting you, your website and your business. You should consider what is best for your website and your business in terms of reliability, the type of customer support that you want, response times to fix a problem etc. You should also put a high value on your own time. Many business owners assume that they are making huge savings by spending a hours each week working on their own website and email and fixing issues. They may be trying to edit/fix website problems that they're not fully up to speed on. In actual fact they would save money and time by letting website and IT professional manage their website and IT, and they could then focus on their new customers and their business, and that will quickly pay for a whole year of website management and support. **Get A Custom Quotation For Your Website** If you would like to know more about having an experienced web services company like MYIT manage your website, hosting and email, call us on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie). We would be happy to go through your requirements with you and prepare a tailored proposal for you, customised to your specific business needs. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Logo Design Services # Logo Design **Your Logo And Business Brand Are Important So You Need To Plan Them Out And Decide What They Need To Say To New Sales Prospects** Carrying out a logo branding or rebranding for your company over the email/web is not going to get your what you want - you need to sit down and discuss it with logo professionals who have created hundreds of brands and logos. You need to chat it out, discuss your ideas, look at competitors here and abroad, and let us make some suggestions to you from our experience. Together, the conversation migrates in the direction of what your business brand and logo needs and that is what our graphic designer can create for you. **We Stay In 'Design Mode' Until You Are 100% Happy** Whether you have a brand new business or you're looking for a new logo for an existing business, we know how to design the perfect logo and brand. We can create a number of logos and design permutations so that you can decide what looks best to you and we'll keep the logo in 'design mode' until you are 100% happy with it. All of our logos are custom designs and are tailored for your business, industry, image and target market. Once the logo design is complete we'll email you all the graphic files for safe keeping so that you have everything to hand when your printers is looking for the logo to do printing or signage for you. **Your Logo Needs To Work For Your Business And Match Your Clients' Expectations** Your new logo needs to be a perfect fit for your company, as it will be [representing you on your website](https://myit.ie/website-design.html), business cards, brochures and billheads for many years to come. You need to get it right now as changing a logo in a few years is an expensive undertaking. The logo needs to sit well within your industry, so that new and existing clients are comfortable with it. For your new logo design we would gather all the information from you that we would need to build up a perfect picture of what you want, including: - Describe your products & services - Who are your typical clients? - What image do you want for the business and logo? - Who are your main competitors? - What actual text, imagery and colours do you want on the logo? - Does the logo have to tie in with any old billhead or graphic? - What designs have you seen and liked? **Give Us A Call And Discuss Your Logo Plans** You can see [designs and testimonials from satisfied customers here](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-testimonials.html). Give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we would be happy to discuss your logo design ideas with you, and explain how we can get you exactly the logo and branding that you are looking for. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Online Store Solutions # Website Shop Have you every been to a Tesco store that didn't have a payment facility? Of course not - it never happens because they want to make the sale to you so they make it easy for you to buy the products and pay. If you have a product in your business that could be displayed and bought online, then you need an easy to use website shop where people can simply and quickly buy from you and pay with a credit card. **Secure Website Shop Payments** We build website shops that are easy for your customers to use and easy for you, the website owner, to manage. We can of course do any web shop management that you need - from website price changes to photo updates and new product additions. Paypal can be used to authenticate your customer's credit card transactions for ~4.4% of the total sale price - here is a link to [Paypal's information page on their fees](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees). **Peace Of Mind Working With Paypal** You can rest easy too as the shop is 100% secure because all the credit card information is handled by Paypal and stored with them, and they're the biggest payment processing company in the world with over 100 million active account holders. Your customers do not need a Paypal account - Paypal is just the payment processor and they accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Consumers love the internet as they know that they can get choice and value online. They want to buy and they want to make those purchases from the comfort of their smart phone or PC/laptop. And, if you make it easy for them to buy on your website, they'll buy from you. **Add A Modern Web Shop To Your Existing Site** Our website shop solutions can also be inserted into your existing website, if it already looks well and is up to date ... and just needs a website shop to be added. If you would like to know more, contact us in Dublin on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie). We'd be happy to go through your web shop requirements and questions with you and prepare a tailored website proposal document for your specific website shop needs. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Design Solutions # Web Design **Everything Your Website Needs - In One Place** We're a 100% Irish company in the website business in Dublin since 2006. We've built over 2,000 websites of all shapes and sizes in that time and we have everything you will need to get a great looking, customer focused, affordable and well planned website in place that will continually win you new business. **And After My Website Goes Live?** We also have everything else that you'll need to manage and market that website after it goes live. A good website design with good content will generate a large return for your business when it's well planned and correctly marketed online. Call us on [01-6216866](tel:35316216866) and you'll know within a few minutes that we're the kind of web company that you want to work with now and in 12 months time when your website needs different services and expertise. **Do You Also Do Starter Websites?** If it's a Starter Website you need, we have you covered too. We have excellent brochure type website packages that contain everything you will need: smart phone friendly starter website, website name (if required), email setup, website hosting, logo design (if required), online marketing (if required). Below are a few elements that your website will need to have no matter what size or type of website you're planning. **You Need The Following From Your Website:** - Your website needs to look great and appear perfectly on all smart phone and PC devices - Your website pages and content need to be up to date and it needs to be an easy and quick process to get updates done - You need to have a web company on standby to do website updates for you or you need to be trained on how to do website updates yourselves - You need to have your products & services in front of new customers every day on Google and the website needs to get you new customers - You need to have a recognisable logo & brand that works for your business and industry sector **More About What Your Website Needs To Do For You:** - An attractive website design so that your business looks professional and inviting online. It also needs to be a design that suits your industry and makes you look good beside your competitors. Website visitors will often make a judgment call based on your website and their first impression of it. This is obviously not a good way for them to select a new supplier but if you have a good looking and enticing website in place then you'll be in the mix to get that sales call. - An easy to use layout so that your website visitors can easily find what they want. Remember that a brand new website visitor has never been on your website before so it needs to be obvious to them how to find what they want. Make sure that your web design is mobile friendly - nearly all of your customers will check you out at some point in the 'sales cycle' on their smart phone and your website needs to be perfectly readable on all devices. Doing a website redesign is a great opportunity to get your website tested across numerous mobile devices. - Your website needs to have all the information in place so that the website visitor can make a decision in your favour regarding your products and services. Make it easy for your customer to like your website and indirectly your business. Give them the information they need in whatever format they might need - for example: product information in a table and/or in a downloadable pdf document, present data in a graph, offer a Powerpoint presentation, have an easy to use photo gallery etc. Also remember that not every corner of Ireland has super fast broadband so ensure your content can be accessed by all your website visitors on fast and slower internet connections. - Make it easy for your customers to buy from you. Maybe that requires a website shop or maybe it just requires a full listing of all your products, Google map to show where your premises is located, a complete product/service order form, full archive of user manuals etc. Consider having a [website shop](https://myit.ie/website-shop.html) if that suits your product or service. Maybe you can get your web customers to fill in a small online form with their enquiry in it or encourage them to phone in their order once you have given them all the product/service information they need. You need the website to generate a connection with these website visitors before they move on to another website. The more you think about the customer the more it will become clear what they will need to find on your website in order to consider it a useful website and you, as the website owner, a good prospective supplier. There are a lot of buzzwords rolling around when we talk about the internet, but the only ones that matter are the ones that involve you making more contact, and communicating better, with your new and existing customers. Unfortunately, the same applies to your competitors so you need to stay alert and make sure your website represents you well and that you're getting good advice regarding your entire web presence and your online marketing. **Experts In MODX, EVO, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Opencart** Is your web design company able to take care of all your website issues, repair all the website bugs and perform all the content management system upgrades? If not, then give us a call and we can supply you with a managed website - one that doesn't have a a host of error messages on the control panel each time you log in. Having an up to date (CMS) Content Management System is vital for your website security and business growth. **Our Experience Is Your Guarantee** We can provide you with a great website and get all your product and service information in place and looking great - exactly as your customers want it to be. We've built over two thousand small and large websites since 2006 [across all industry sectors](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-portfolio.html) in Ireland so we know what works and what doesn't. We're also good listeners and we know how to bring your website ideas together with our website suggestions and create a superb web presence. A good web design team does matter - it is important that your website looks as good if not better than your competitors. Your product information is vital too but your web design and image is essential for a successful website. **Encourage More Website Visitors To Contact You** Whatever you search for on the internet, hundreds of results come up and only the good sites with relevant information and quality products will get your attention. You need to stand out on the web and you need to be memorable. Your website visitors will generally have seen other sites before they arrive on your website so you need to encourage them to buy from you - and we can show you how. **Have A Look At Our Work & Give Us A Call** You can see examples of our [web designs and testimonials here from satisfied customers](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-testimonials.html), from all across Dublin and Ireland. If you want to talk to a creative and experienced web design team about making your website generate more sales and look more professional, then give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866). ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Effective Google Adwords Marketing # Google Adwords Google AdWords allows you to connect with new customers at the exact moment that they're searching for your products or services on Google. They enter various search terms into Google.ie to find the product or service that they're looking for and your Google adverts appear on the Google search results page in front of them. For example: Your Adwords advert could be triggered to display at the top of Google.ie by a shopper searching for a term like "plumber Blackrock" or "solicitor Rathmines". Your advert, when clicked, will then send the website visitor to the relevant product or service page on your website which will further explain your service or product to the website shopper and encourage them to make contact and/or buy from you. **Only Focus On 'Key' Keywords** We can research the keywords that will perform best for your business and create the advertising campaign for you, show you how to use it and run it with you for a few weeks until you're happy to manage it yourself. We can of course continue to manage your Adwords account in the future if you prefer. **Control Your Own Online Advertising** Adwords is a powerful and very accurate way for you to target your customers. You have huge control over the advertising process - including the following 5 important areas: - What Irish county or country your adverts will appear in - The total amount that you spend per day advertising with Google - What times of the day your adverts will appear at - What days of the week your adverts will appear on - What pages on your website your Adwords adverts will link to when clicked **We Can Setup Your Adwords Marketing & Manage It** It is easy for a business to setup Adwords incorrectly and waste their advertising budget. So, getting an expert to prepare your Adwords account will pay for itself hundreds of times over. This is where our experience with Adwords campaign management can help you: - Increasing your Adwords performance by better keyword and landing page selection - Increasing your Click Through Rate (CTR) by better advert design/wording - Reducing your Cost Per Click (CPC) by matching up your keywords, advert designs and your website landing pages - Extensive and ongoing testing and measuring of the Adwords performance **Google Adwords Changes Are Live Within Minutes** Another powerful feature of Adwords marketing is that you can add a new advert for a new product/service that you're selling, and it will go live in minutes, once signed off by Google. No other large scale advertising medium can update itself at that speed. Equally you can edit your existing Adwords advert text and the updated text will also be live in minutes too. **You Get Live Adwords Account Reporting** Once your Adwords account has been setup by us, we will then closely monitor your advertising campaigns with you, ensuring that it remains optimised for maximum performance. You can log into your Adwords account at any time and see a live report of what's going on. This live report will tell you many important things about the campaign including: - How many appearances your different adverts and search terms made - How many times your different adverts and keywords were clicked - How much those advert clicks cost - How much of your daily budget has been used so far that day - Which keywords are being searched for and which ones are not - You can compare today's performance to any previous day's performance **Give Us A Call And See What We Can Do For You** Contact us today on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) to find out how easy it would be for you to get a great AdWords campaign running for your business and generate more sales leads every day. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Update Importance # Website Updates **3 Great Reasons To Do Ongoing Website Updates** How often have you had a conversation about website updates with your web designer? Chances are – many times over the years But what you might not realise is that, if that conversations with your web site design team goes without follow-up action, your business operations could be at risk. Here are three great reasons why your web site designer should frequently update your website. **1\. Website security** Like any creative activity, designing a website takes a great deal of passion and commitment. However, the professionals developing your company’s website have no control over their product unless you, the website owner, are willing to continually update the site. When you work with any reputable provider of web designing services, their primary focus will likely be building a site that’s secure from hackers and scammers. That’s Web Design 101 for them If your service provider is worth the money you pay them, then there’s one other thing they will strongly advise you to do: Make sure you update your website frequently. **So, what’s the danger to not applying frequent updates?** \-\- Hackers are always looking for ways to get into your online system. When they detect a vulnerability, they’ll quickly explore it to compromise your system, and your user’s data. The only way to prevent that is to make frequent updates a part of your web site design strategy \-\- If the backend of your system looks and feels slow, chances are that spammers have taken control of it and are using your website to spam other sites. You could end up getting blacklisted for that – and there’s not much your web designing agency might be able to do about it – except work with Google to get you re-listed. Regular updates can help prevent that situation from taking hold. \-\- Most of the websites run off popular content management platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and SharePoint. Unfortunately, all of them discover vulnerabilities from time to time, and issue updates for their plug-ins. The only way to secure your website therefore is to make sure your web design service applies those plug updates frequently. The onus for updating and maintaining the site is up to the client. That’s the basic rule that any website designing agency works with. So, if you want your company’s website to remain safe and secure for your visitors and clients, you need to insist that your team applies frequent updates to your website platform. **2\. Enhance your visitor experience** Security of your website, and everything that comes with that secure feeling, is the number one reason that web designing professionals advocate frequent updates. However, there’s much more that happens to your website – perhaps as a “by product” of getting secure. \-\- Most frequent updates contain tweaks and enhancements that add speed to the various components of the site. So, while your latest update might enhance your security, it is also delivering faster content downloads and page refreshes to your visitors and clients – a great reason for them to come back, over…and over…and over again \-\- You may have asked your web design agency about adding a particular new feature or functionality to your website. And while your design team has the capability to deliver, they might not necessarily have the technical tools to satisfy your requirements – because of limitations of the platform. Well, the next update could very well deliver exactly what your website designer is looking for. \-\- Website update cycles are often a great time for businesses to take a fresh look at their online marketing strategies. So, while the techies are applying the updates, this is a great time to also get your website designing team to work with them to come up with fresh user experience-enhancing ideas and content too. If a first-time visitor enjoys his/her experience on your website, statistics tell us that he/she will tell at least 8 other contacts on their social media about it. Those 8 contacts spread similar good news to 8 other contacts…and there’s a snowball effect. If your website design team can provide you this kind of “free word of mouth” publicity by making frequent updates to the site – is that a bad thing? **3\. Attract BOTS and Spiders to your website** Ask any web designer, and chances are they love Spiders, and Crawlers…and Bots These are elements that search engines (like Google) use to rank and rate websites. The thing about these intelligent algorithm-based components is that they undergo frequent updates themselves, and are often trained to “sniff out” stale website design. If your design team doesn’t apply updates more frequently, chances are that your site could be flagged by the Bots and Spiders as being outdated and irrelevant for search queries. To avoid that from happening, you need to instruct your web designer to apply all the latest patches and updates that are released frequently. **Only you can do it** While your website design team might have the technical capabilities to manage and apply frequent website updates, only you can mandate that they comply with such a policy. At the end of the day, if hackers and spammers do compromise the site, it’s you that will be the biggest loser for not embracing frequent website updates ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Maintenance Services # Website Maintenance Website maintenance is essential for the health and growth of your website and your business and we can provide you with a custom designed Website Maintenance Plan starting from one or more hours of website updates, as a once off piece of work, to a few hours each week. You could also choose to simply email website update requests to us as required and we will get those new web page updates in place for you within 24/48 hours. Call us on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) to discuss your requirements further. **What Are The Costs?** The price does depend on how your website is setup, what changes are needed and how easy it will be for us to get access to your website code and make those changes. We can complete a considerable amount of work once we have easy access to your website code so minor website updates should not take too long to complete and test. We can also provide you with a yearly website maintenance contract and we would need to gather some details from you to quote you accurately for that piece of work. We can also manage everything else to do with your web presence, for example: [website hosting](https://myit.ie/website-hosting.html), website backups, virus and security checks, CMS ( [Content Management System](https://myit.ie/cms-website-content-management-systems.html)) software security updates, virus and spam removal from your [email inbox](https://myit.ie/email-hosting.html) and new email account setups. **Website Maintenance Contracts Save You Money** Outsourcing your web site maintenance allows you to focus on your business and customers, while having experts do your website and IT jobs for you and you're contacted when the work is complete and has been fully tested. By having a maintenance agreement in place, you're not paying each and every time you need an update done - your maintenance agreement looks after that. You can get a maintenance agreement for 3, 6 or 12 months. If you don't want to setup a maintenance agreement, then you can opt to get the website updates done to your website as the need arises. This is ideal if you're not on average getting a lot of updates done in a given year. **Email Us Your Website Updates** With our highly skilled [web developers and designers](https://myit.ie/website-design.html) we can supply your company with any type of website update or maintenance that you need - and you just need to email us the details and material (photos, text, specific instructions) each time you need work done. Most of the clients that we've worked with still come back to us for website updates, [website hosting queries](https://myit.ie/email-hosting.html), or website redesign work. We can do work in the following areas on your website: - Web Design - Custom Web Programming - E-Commerce - [Website Shop](https://myit.ie/website-shop.html) Updates/Installs - Graphic Design & [Logo Design](https://myit.ie/logo-design.html) - PHP, Javascript & CSS - MySQL Database - Sitemaps - Photoshop - Blogs - [Website Hosting](https://myit.ie/website-hosting.html)/ [Email Hosting](https://myit.ie/email-hosting.html) - Domain Registration - Website Management **Experts In MODX, Wordpress, Opencart, EVO, Joomla, Drupal, Magento** Is your website design agency able to look after all of your website repairs and additions - and perform all the content management system upgrades? If not, then give us a call and we can support you fully so that you do not see any error messages on the website or CMS control panel. Having an updated (CMS) content management system is essential for your web security and business security. **Get A Website Maintenance Consultation Over The Phone** To find out more about setting up a website maintenance plan give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we'll go through your requirements with you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Dublin Web Design # Website Designer MyIT's web designers provide you with a complete website solution from our new Dublin office. We know that you're quite different from your competitors and we know how to focus in on those differences and highlight those through your website. Great Dublin Web Designers - Our Sole Job Is To Make Your Website A Success We'll thoroughly analyse your current site, your competitors' websites and your new ideas, and we'll develop a custom website design and marketing plan that will improve every aspect of your online business image. **Web Designers In Dublin** We use the latest design/development methods and technologies that are smart and efficient, and which will future-proof your website investment. Our web designers and development experts will work on your website build and ensure that it becomes as great a website as you had planned it to be. Along the way we'll also make sure that everything we do will make your website compelling and easy to use, and get it to speak directly to your target audience. **You Need A Great Website** **Marketeer &** **Designer** A great looking website is only one part of the pie. We'll also help your grow your website visitor numbers and make sure those potential clients are getting what they want on your site and are encouraged to contact you regarding those products and services. This is achieved using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Google Adwords, inlinks, external articles, email advertising etc. Our web designers and developers also know how to get the most value out of your Google Adwords advertising budget as we've been managing these accounts for clients for many years. **Website Hosting That You Can Trust** We provide managed hosting services so that you can be assured that everything gets done for your website, and you can focus on your business. Our services include: content updates, nightly backups, website inspection when new browsers are released, website security, security patches applied etc. **Superior Customer Service** You understand that customer service is essential for your long-term success ... and we do too. We see it that we're the Dublin web designer partner in your website's success and we'll do whatever is required to make your website a success. Check out some of our happy customer testimonials at the link below. **Give Us A Call & We'll Answer All Your Questions** We are only a [phone call or email away](https://myit.ie/contact-myit-web-design.html), and we're eager to help you with your website. So have a look at some of our [designs](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-portfolio.html) here and some [testimonials](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-testimonials.html) here, and see what we can offer you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Email Hosting Services # Email Hosting We all need allways available, business standard email services to manage our businesses, interact with clients and order from suppliers. Your email service needs to be secure, always there and easy to access on your PC and smart phone. Having a strong, professional business image on the internet is essential, so you should not be using Eircom, Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo accounts when contacting important new clients - instead you should have your own website name registered and have email accounts matching that domain for, for example, info@, sales@, john@ and mary@. If you need your own email addresses, but you don’t want the hassle and cost of running your own email servers then we can register, setup and manage your email hosting service for you at a fraction of the cost. **Your New Email Accounts Can Be Live In A Few Hours** We'll setup all the email accounts that you need and send over the connection details to you so that you can connect immediately with your current email client program e.g. [Outlook](https://www.office.com/), [Thunderbird](http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/), Android Phone, Apple Phone. We can also prepare the logins so that you can access your emails securely through webmail i.e. through a 3rd party website if you are using someone else's computer, or if there are unforeseen problems with your own current PC, laptop or smart phone. **We'll Manage The Email Account Administration** We can carry out the Email Service Administration for your email accounts too: backing up email accounts, adding new accounts when you need them, spam email filtering, email virus scanning, forwarding emails to multiple recipients e.g. you might want the general, for example, info@smithplumbing.ie to be automatically forwarded to all your office staff to make sure that every sales enquiry email is dealt with quickly. We can also manage and secure your IMAP, SMTP and POP3 access. **Call Now To Get All Of Your Questions Answered** You can't be without your email service and we'll put a corporate level, hassle free Email Management Service in place for you so you won't be without it. If you want to know more about how we can look after your email service give us a call on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we'll go through the details with you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Layouts Overview # Website Layouts If first impressions count in web design then the type of layout you use should be paramount. Your choice of website layout should reflect the kind of business you’re doing. You can’t use a casual looking layout to promote a law firm for example, that would give out the wrong message entirely. Layouts are aesthetically important to your website in attracting visitors and encouraging them to perform whatever action you want them to such as making a purchase. Before you design your website think about the different types of layout and select one that it most suited to your kind of business. **Fixed Layout** This is one of the most commonly used web design layouts because of its simplicity and ease of access. Web designers make use of fixed size to establish web pages and columns in a way that visitors will find easy to access. The measurements in a website with fixed layout are accurate and it provides for perfect control of graphic elements. If you want to build a site with fixed and unchanging images, a fixed layout will do the work for you. The only issue with it is that your site may become outdated as sites with dynamic image presentation are becoming more popular. **Flexible Layout** As the name implies this layout is flexible and continuously dynamic with respect to the size and volume of the content you’re adding. When you incorporate text and images into this web design layout you’ll see that the design will grow. A small amount of content leaves the layout looking smaller so that the home page presentation is professional and neat. If you want to build a site where you can make regular updates then this is the best option for you. **Liquid Layout** If you simply want to add easy flowing content that will occupy the browser screen of your visitors then the liquid layout style is for you. This layout takes whatever space is available to it and then resizes to fill up the browser without consideration for the screen resolution or size. **Grid Layout** This type of website layout has existed for some time but was made popular by the image based social networking site Pinterest. The style makes it easy for you to present all your content on the front page without visitors having to click on tabs and sub-tabs to get to the page they want. All you need to do is upload images and content and it will appear on the front page as a separate grid. This can be the best option if you want to start a website based on sharing information through images to support the text. **Hybrid Layout** If you’re not sure about using any of the above styles or any other types of website layout then the safe thing is to opt for a hybrid. This layout is effective because it combines different types of layouts to give you the perfect website that will adapt to the browser’s screen while keeping custom elements under control. The opportunity to combine different types of web design layout using the hybrid style will give you the perfect presentation by combining the best of the other layouts. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Marketing Services # Website Marketing You want your website to be in front of your prospective customers and we can help you do that. We'll discuss your plans and requirements with you, talk about your product and target market and then prepare a web marketing plan on how to achieve your marketing objectives. **Multiple Marketing Channels** Many companies have a marketing set which includes [Adwords](https://myit.ie/google-adwords.html), SEO ( [Search Engine Optimisation](https://myit.ie/seo-search-engine-optimisation.html) \- getting onto page 1 on Google) and Email Marketing, but every business is different and each requires a different set of marketing elements. Call us on 01-6216866 or email us at [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and lets have a chat about your online marketing plans, your products/services and your requirements. **How We'll Market Your Website:** - We'll understand your business, clients and website so that we can deduce what will work for you. - We'll share our decades of experience with you so that you get quality website visitors. - We'll ensure that you have a clear message right across your website and social media. - Once new customers start to arrive on your website, we know what they want to find there and we'll show you what needs to be in place so that they find what they want. **Check Us Out Before You Call** Don't just take our word for how good we are, have a look through some of our latest [client testimonials](https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-portfolio.html) and call us on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we'll answer all your questions. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Analytics Overview # Website Analytics - Web Visitor Statistics Your business needs Google Analytics, because to grow your business and website you need to be able to see the following website information: - Number of website visitors per day/month - How many of these are repeat visitors and new visitors - Number of times each page was viewed - Where the web visitors are coming from - what websites are they coming from - What search terms they used to find you - What country and/or Irish county are they located in - How long they are staying on your website per visit - Did they go to your contact page or the checkout page on your website shop This information lets you see what your website visitors are doing on your site and it allows you to improve their website experience and generate more sales. Google Analytics works by placing a piece of Javascript code on every page of your site, and this allows the Google Analytics system to track what's happening on every page on your website. **You Don't Need To Be A Web Expert To Use Google's Website Analytics Tool** Google Analytics is suited to non technical users as well as technical users. It displays clever graphs to show you what's happening on your website and you can get more information on each information section by just selecting whatever title you're interested in. The site itself has the high build quality of any Google product. We can also provide you with an overview on how to use Google Analytics. **Give Us A Call & Get All Your Web Analytics Questions Answered** If you have some questions about how Google Analytics can help you to grow your website and business call us on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we'll go through all of your questions with you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design FAQs # Frequently Asked Questions **How Much Does A Website Cost?** Every web design company will tell you that website prices vary depending on what you want - and that's true, because they do. The price depends on the size of the webiste, what features it contains, the custom functionality that is needed, the kind of custom graphics and branding that are needed and what ongoing website support is needed. Call or email us and we can gather some details from you and that will enable us to prepare a version one proposal and quotation for you for preciaely the website and support you are looking for. **How Long Does A Website Take To Build?** A small starter website, where you have your text and images largely to hand, could be built in a few weeks. A bigger website takes more planning and lots of material has to be gathered and arranged - so website builds will range from weeks to months. **What Is A Domain Name?** A domain name is another term for your website name e.g. www.yourwebsitename.ie . It is also the stem of your new email accounts e.g. stephen@yourwebsitename.ie . You can register a domain name yourself if you prefer, or we can do it for you. If you want a .ie website name you will need to have a Business Trading Name or Company Name registered with www.cro.ie . **What Are The Other Costs Involved In A Website?** Our Business Starter Website doesn't have 'other' costs as it is a Website Package Service. With non business starter websites, the website needs a number of things during the year: you will need to re-register your website name, you need to have good monitored hosting in place, you need to regularly backup your website files in case they get hacked or corrupted, you need software security upgrades installed into your CMS (Content Management System) and you need a trusted company you can ring when you need work done that isn't covered by a CMS. We can do all of this for you and we can also provide site management for any small website that you already have if you want that site managed externally. **What Is Hosting?** Hosting is the term applied to the service of putting your web pages live on the web. Your website needs a lot more than that to be a productive sales tool for your business. You also need a service to: monitor and manage your website, add content through a content management system, backup the website files regularly, perform software/security upgrades on your content management system, run anti-virus scans on your website files, add new email accounts as required etc. **What Is Needed For My New Website?** The most important first step would be to meet with some web design companies and see which one will work best for you. You also need to think of the website after it goes live as you need a website company that will be there for you in 6, 12, 18, 24 months too, to add new content if you're busy, add email accounts for new staff members or help you train up a new staff member on your CMS (Content Management System). Our next step would be to discuss what you want for the website; who are you targeting? what is your unique offering? where is your target market? what are your sales channels? At this meeting we will look at your website material: product/service list, photos, files, brochures, logo, branding etc. Once that discussion has taken place we can then prepare a plan for you to move from your current position to a live, managed website which is getting new sales leads continually. **How Much Do Website Updates Cost?** Doing website updates through the CMS (Content Management System) costs nothing if you do them yourself, and our website packages include training on the CMS so you and your staff can learn how to do the updates with ease. If you want us to do the updates for you we can do general web page updates for €80 (ex vat) per hour. Give us a call and we can give you an even more tailored quote once we know what work you're planning to do. **How Can I See The Visitor Numbers For My Website?** The best website analytics system is the Google Analytics system and we can install that into your website so that every web page that is viewed on your website will 'register' on the Google Analytics system and you will be able to see an amazing array of information about your website, for example: how many people were on the website today, last week and last month? Where did these people come from? How long did they stay? What page did they most often leave from? What kind of smart phone, tablets PC, laptop or regular PC did they use? **What About Email Accounts?** You can continue to use your current email account if you prefer and we could setup a new info@ or sales@ email account to match your website name and have those emails automatically forward to your current email account. Alternatively we can setup a new info@ , sales@ or name@ as an account so you can send and receive emails as the new email address , for example sales@yournewwebsitename.com. We can also add a contact for to your contact page so website visitors can send you and email or order directly from your website page. **I Want To Redesign My Current Website** If you already have a website and just need a redesign we can do that for you too. For a build like this we'll still meet up and go through your current website with you to see that most or all of the current photos/text will be moving to the new website. The focus then turns to the new design - you may want to retain your current logo and perhaps the main 'company colours'. The designer would then work under that remit, for example: we need a new design, while keeping most of the current content, our logo and some branding elements. Give us a call and we can go through the details with you. **I Want To Make My New Website Smart Phone Accessible** That's no problem, and it actually will be more cost efficient to get your website mobile friendly from the start rather than making an existing website mobile friendly as an after thought. For a project like this we would sit down with you and talk about the overall website and see if you have any preferences for the mobile material and layout. We will then go through some suggestions with you and also suggest that for the 'mobile content' we think of your new website visitor in a non wifi location with perhaps just 3G or less in terms of mobile phone data bandwidth. The mobile website cannot load slowly for them and you have to think of what material is of actual interest to a smart phone user versus a PC user. In a lot of cases there is overlap between the mobile and PC content but the mobile content will sometimes be shorter and more mobile focused. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Mobile Web Content # Mobile Website Content In a world that is rapidly going mobile, content experts are needed to make the experience of interacting with a mobile website as easy and comfortable as reading a well-designed traditional 'PC' website. The limitations of mobile devices such as smart phones require that special attention be given to how content can be adapted from the big screen to the little screen, so to speak. If content is king then it is natural that it should be given equal priority in the creation of mobile websites. Here are some key points to consider for creating good mobile web content. **Image Download Times** – Images are a large source of delay in the performance of mobile websites. Convenience is a major factor in keeping the potential customer interested, so page download times should be as fast as possible. This means images should be smaller and a 'less is more' approach to content in general e.g. video, image slideshows etc. If the potential buyer is being delayed and to a degree annoyed by your bulky, slow website, then it is likely that they will visit the competition. This is especially true of new visitors who have yet no sense of loyalty to your brand or to you. **Copy** \- Too much text is also slower to download but in itself it is a turn off for users, especially users ‘on the go’, as it seems like a chore to read - it might seem obvious that it needs an editor to extract the important details. You should consider having a minimised version of large pieces of text for the mobile phone audience. The delays can also be avoided by putting the essentials of a product or service on one page and the details on another. So, the 'browser' type customer gets to see the short version and he 'researcher' can click for the longer version. Also, dividing the text into short paragraphs will make it easier to consume. Minor page titles should also improve the browsing and reading experience. **Navigation** \- Navigation should be easy and intuitive just as it should be on a traditional site. If the visitor gets lost on your site because of poor information architecture then you can't blame them if they go and try the website of one of your competitors. Website navigation aids include a button that will take the web visitor back to the top of a page and a logo that will take them back to the home page. Users should be able to surf with their thumb or index finger so increasing the size of buttons could be necessary. The conversion process from the first page to the last should be made up of as few stages as possible. Content and navigation should be clear and simple so that the user gets the information they want quickly. **Social Media** \- It is natural that mobile devices should tap into the social media systems that are Facebook and Twitter. Sharing text, links, comments and images is the essence of these sites. All the 'share/tweet' buttons should be in place for someone who wants to share some of your web content with friends, family or colleagues. **SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)** \- Mobile phone searches are a major growth area on the internet, especially local searches. This is why a good keyword strategy is essential if you want to get on the first few pages of a search engine’s listings. The SEO best practise for regular websites is quite similar to that for the mobile web, so speak to your web designer to implement a system where you have good SEO tags in place for the mobile website and PC website at the same time. And a responsive website will help you out here in that it is the PC website and the mobile website at the same time. **Location** \- A visitors location can be discovered from the smart phone itself, allowing you to provide relevant information such as local services, inventory, appropriate content for the time of day etc. This lends a sense of familiarity to the browsing experience which will increase the chances of that visitor returning to your site. **Context** \- The context of someone’s visit can also be determined. It can be a search, in which case content relating to the search keywords should be provided. It can be an email click, in which case you should know the incentive that made them get in contact and take them to the next step of conversion to a sale. Context is important as it helps you to understand and meet the user’s needs. **Language** \- As with traditional websites, the style of language you engage the user with is important. Generally, a conversational tone works best but adapting it to mobile means making some changes. The language should be clear, direct and concise – more so than on a regular site. It is more to the point and immediate than conversational language. Of course, this is only one type of language. There are many different audiences and if you want to reach one you have to adapt your voice. However, simple and concise is generally good for mobile device reading. **Testing** \- Your mobile website needs to be tested thoroughly to ensure that it does what you want it to do as quickly and smoothly as possible. Your designer should test the site on different mobile devices in order to check for anomalies that will need fixing. Lastly, you should try the site yourself and make sure you are happy with it. If there are any problems or issues, talk to your web designer. These are some of the essentials of creating good mobile content. Together with the right design, the right content can make a mobile site a thing of beauty – admired by users and envied by the competition. It can also make a site a powerful business tool - this is why investing in good mobile content is a must. Contact MyIT Web Design Naas Road if you have any questions and we'd be happy to answer them for you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Mobile Website Design # Mobile Web Design Mobile website design is now the default and has been for a while. To talk directly to your mobile customers you need a mobile website design which is easily accessed by any smart phone. More than just a mobile website you need a ' [responsive](https://myit.ie/responsive-website-design.html)' website which is one which will adapt to the screen size of whatever device your site is being viewed on. - 93% of Irish consumers own or have access to a smart phone - [Deloitte.com](https://www2.deloitte.com/ie/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/global-mobile-consumer-survey0.html) - Fivefold increase in online shopping in 2018 from 2007 - [irishexaminer.com](https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/fivefold-increase-in-online-shopping-since-2007-469059.html) - Average Irish smart phone user picks up 55 times a day - [irishtimes.com](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/consumer/average-irish-smartphone-user-picks-up-55-times-a-day-survey-1.3703348) **Customers Want Easy To Use Mobile Websites** Some phones cannot display a full website properly and now customers are not content to zoom in and out with their fingers on a full sized website on their smart phone; they want a mobile/responsive website. The mobile web is fast becoming the next web platform and we can provide you with a complete mobile website solution including all the advice that you'll need. **Your Mobile Website Needs The Following:** - Simple navigation and general ease of use - A clear focus on the main business messages, products and services - Keep your brand/ [logo](https://myit.ie/logo-design.html) visible and match the mobile theme with that of your 'PC' site - Think about "mobile content" so that the mobile visitor can get a good "mobile overview" of what they need. They are on a smart phone and they are not on a PC so consider what they need right now. - The mobile website needs to keep the mobile users attention as they're more likely to leave a web page or website after a short visit than a PC website visitor. - Be conscious of the website visitor's reduced download speed and thus slower web page load times - Be conscious of the website visitor's smaller screen. - Test all web pages rigorously and continuously, as you add new content, on a range of smart phone and PC browsers **Mobile Phone Search Is THE Growth Area** If your website is not 100% compatible with smart phones then you are missing out on new sales from new website visitors and existing customers. Mobile phone web searches are the largest growth area on the internet and we will make sure that your website is compatible with every major device platform and screen size: Google Android, iPhone, iPad, PC and wide screen monitors, and your website will work with new phone screen sizes for years to come. Call us on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and we can discuss your mobile website design requirements in more detail and prepare a tailored plan for you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Responsive Web Design # Responsive Website Design **The Basics** Internet access is available to a huge variety of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, and you need to consider how your website looks on each of them. You may have a great looking website on a traditional desktop but when someone visits it on their mobile phone it just looks wrong. This is sure to affect your click through rate and conversion rate in a negative way and the figures for the amount of people using smart phones and tablets to view websites is far too high to ignore that. So what’s the answer? Responsive web design. **What Does It Do?** Using a web development technology known as ‘media queries’, responsive web design tells a website which device it’s being viewed on and adapts its layout and appearance accordingly. For example you might find that certain websites appear to be too wide to be viewed properly on your phone and it’s like your just viewing a snapshot of the site instead of the whole thing. Media queries allow you to view it just the same as if you were on your PC at home, as the dimensions and layout of the site will have adapted to your device. **What Are The Advantages?** One of the major advantages of responsive web site design is that it makes the user experience of visiting your website on any platform much easier and much more enjoyable. This is hugely important in terms of engaging your web visitor (prospective client) and turning them into paying customers which is the main aim of most websites. If a user is struggling to navigate through your site because it’s not adapted for their mobile device then they are likely to leave it and try one of your competitor's sites. Alternatively if they can easily access the information they need, sign up or make a purchase just like on their desktop computer then you are opening yourself up to a lot more customers. **Who Should Be Using It?** Most businesses should be thinking about a responsive design - any business where the customer base has smart phones and tablets and want to access the business owner's website. This content needs to be equally accessible with any device that the visitor may be using - the reader wants to be able to read the information you are providing as easily as possible, it’s as simple as that. Some other types of websites that would benefit hugely from responsive web design are ecommerce sites who sell their products through their site. For an ecommerce site the more straight forward you make it for the customer to make a purchase the better and so responsive design is a must. **Can You Afford An Responsive Design Versus An App?** The big brand companies all have apps specifically built for smart phones and tablet devices. That’s all well and good for them but the average website owner doesn’t have thousands to spend on getting a smart phone app developed and even if they did, getting it out there and into the public awareness is another battle entirely. With app development you also have to consider building an app for each of the mobile platforms: android, apple, blackberry, windows, etc. Responsive web design is the ideal solution as it can tick numerous boxes for your business - it can be your main business website, your mobile website and the platform you use to put mobile functionality on rather than getting new apps built on an ongoing basis. Is your website responsive and able to adapt its appearance and layout for the range of devices that your website customers are using? If not then you should really consider one as the advantages for you as a website owner and for your new and existing customers are huge. Contact MyIT Website Design Crumlin Dublin 12 if you have any questions and we'd be happy to answer them for you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Services Dublin # Web Design Services Dublin We all know that you need a good website - one that looks well and performs well - but there are loads of details involved here: the price matters, what really needs to be on the website and what are your competitors doing? All important points - in this post we'll tease those out, and more. **This guide will explore everything you need to know about web design services in Dublin, including:** - What Will These Services Do for the Business? - How Do I Find a Quality Company That Is Affordable? - Why It’s Important to Find a Good Long-Term Web Partner - What Tasks Need to Be Provided Once the Website Goes Live? - What Do I Do Now? **Let’s dive in!** **1\. What Will Web Design Services Do for the Business?** A professionally designed website is more than just an online brochure—it’s a powerful tool that can drive sales, enhance brand credibility, and improve user experience. Here’s how web design services in Dublin can benefit your business: **a. First Impressions Matter** 94% of first impressions are design-related (Stanford University). A well-designed website builds trust and professionalism. **b. Improved User Experience (UX)** A responsive, fast, and intuitive website keeps visitors engaged. Easy navigation reduces bounce rates and increases conversions. **c. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Benefits** Properly structured websites rank higher on Google. SEO-friendly design improves visibility and organic traffic. **d. Mobile Responsiveness** Over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. A mobile-friendly design ensures accessibility across all devices. **e. Competitive Advantage** A modern, functional website sets you apart from competitors. Custom features (e.g., e-commerce, booking systems) enhance customer experience. **f. Higher Conversion Rates** Strategic call-to-action (CTA) placements lead to more leads and sales. A well-optimized checkout process improves e-commerce performance. Investing in professional web design services in Dublin ensures your business stays relevant, attracts more customers, and maximizes online success. **2\. How Do I Find a Quality Web Design Company That Is Affordable?** Finding a reliable yet affordable web design agency in Dublin can be challenging. Here’s how to identify the best option for your budget: **a. Check Their Portfolio** Look for past work in your industry. Assess design quality, functionality, and creativity. **b. Read Client Reviews & Testimonials** Google, Trustpilot, and Clutch reviews provide insights into reliability. Case studies show real business results. **c. Compare Pricing & Packages** Avoid extremely cheap services (may indicate low quality). Look for transparent pricing with no hidden fees. **d. Evaluate Their Expertise** Do they offer SEO, UX design, and mobile optimization? Are they experienced in CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or custom development? **e. Ask About Post-Launch Support** Will they provide maintenance and updates? Do they offer training for managing the site? **f. Get a Free Consultation** Reputable agencies offer free quotes or discovery calls. Use this to gauge their professionalism and communication. Tip: Some affordable yet high-quality Dublin web design agencies offer flexible payment plans or startup discounts—don’t hesitate to ask! **3\. Why It’s Important to Find a Good Long-Term Web Partner** Your website isn’t a one-time project—it requires ongoing updates, security, and improvements. Choosing a long-term web design partner in Dublin ensures continuous growth. Here’s why it matters: **a. Consistent Branding & Updates** A long-term partner understands your brand and can evolve your site as needed. Regular updates keep your website modern and secure. **b. SEO & Performance Monitoring** Ongoing SEO improvements maintain rankings. Analytics tracking helps optimize performance. **c. Security & Maintenance** Regular backups, malware scans, and software updates prevent breaches. A dedicated team ensures quick fixes for technical issues. **d. Scalability for Business Growth** As your business expands, your website should too (e.g., adding e-commerce, multilingual support). A trusted partner can seamlessly integrate new features. **e. Cost Efficiency** Retainer agreements often reduce long-term costs. Avoids the hassle of switching agencies frequently. A long-term web design partner in Dublin becomes an extension of your team, ensuring your website remains a powerful asset for years. **4\. What Tasks Need to Be Provided Once the Website Goes Live?** Launching your website is just the beginning. To ensure long-term success, consider these post-launch tasks: **a. Regular Content Updates** Fresh blogs, news, and product updates keep visitors engaged. Google favors regularly updated websites. **b. SEO & Performance Optimization** Monitor keyword rankings and adjust strategies. Improve page speed and fix broken links. **c. Security & Backups** Install SSL certificates and firewalls. Schedule automated backups to prevent data loss. **d. User Experience (UX) Testing** Conduct A/B testing for better conversions. Gather user feedback to refine navigation and design. **e. Social Media & Marketing Integration** Connect your website with social platforms for wider reach. Run paid ads (Google Ads, Facebook) to drive traffic. **f. Analytics & Reporting** Track visitor behavior with Google Analytics. Adjust strategies based on data insights. A Dublin web design agency offering ongoing maintenance ensures your site remains secure, fast, and effective. **5\. What Do I Do Now?** If you're ready to boost your online presence with professional web design services in Dublin, follow these steps: **Step 1: Define Your Goals** What do you want your website to achieve? (Sales, leads, brand awareness) Outline must-have features (e-commerce, booking system, blog). **Step 2: Research & Shortlist Agencies** Look for Dublin-based web designers with strong portfolios. Read reviews and compare services. **Step 3: Request Quotes & Face To Face Consultations** Discuss your project with 2-3 agencies. Ask about timelines, costs, and post-launch support. **Step 4: Choose the Best Partner** Select an agency that aligns with your vision and budget. Ensure they offer long-term support. **Step 5: Launch & Grow!** Work closely with your web design team during development. Plan ongoing marketing and SEO strategies. **Final Thoughts** A professionally designed website is a game-changer for any business. By choosing the right web design services, you ensure a strong online presence, better customer engagement, and long-term growth. Ready to get started? Call or email MYIT.ie in Dublin today and take the first step toward a powerful, high-converting website! ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Building Your Own Website # My Own Website **What’s Needed To Have My Own Website?** If you are entering the world of online business or you just want your offline business to have an online presence then there are a few things that you should know which will make the whole process a lot less daunting for you. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by creating your own website, choosing a hosting service, buying a domain name etc. and that can put many people off. Once you know exactly what you need to do to get your website up and running and where to go to get it, then it all becomes a lot simpler. Let’s take a look at some top tips to help you get the website you’ve always wanted. **1\. Start With The Name** The first place to begin is with your domain name i.e. www.example-name.com which will be the address for your website. There are a few things to bear in mind when choosing your domain name - firstly, is it available? You may find that the name you want to use has already been taken and so you might have to change it slightly or buy a .net or .ie domain instead. A .com is the default website name is USA, even though lots of other website name endings are used e.g. .net, .org . Having .i.e. on the end of the domain will make it perform better in search results made in Ireland and if you’re targeting the UK market for example you’d be better off going with a .co.uk domain. When you buy a domain you’re merely renting it while having first refusal when it’s time to renew the domain agreement. Most hosting sites will rent out domains for 1, 2, 5 or 10 years and they are relatively low cost. Another point to consider is that having a domain that directly matches your service or product will probably lead to it performing better when people search for them in Google. For example www.specialisedblueshoes.ie should perform well in searches for specialised blue shoes in Google. There are lots of sites that you can use to find domains such as 123 Reg, IEDR and Register 365 to name a few. **2\. Find You’re Host** Once you’ve bought the domain name you can either let the service you bought it from host your website or you can find your own host which is usually recommended. Having a website host just means that your website is constantly accessible as it is part of a web server computer system that is always on. When someone visits your site they are accessing your web page information through the host company servers which usually have extremely powerful and reliable computers to ensure that your website never crashes and is always accessible when visitors are looking for it. They will also be able to give you specific company emails that match your domain name. Often when you get your website designed by a web design company they will also be able to host it for you which simplifies the whole process for you and brings me on to my next point. **3\. Creating Your Site** Now we get to the important part, actually getting your website made. Unless you have a good knowledge of web design and development then you’ll need to hire a professional or agency to do it for you. You can still have the ultimate say over how you want your site to look and you can even give them a basic design of the logo you want your business to have. Logos are important as they can be used as a marketing tool to install a recognisable image and association with a brand in the minds of consumers. Before you choose a web design service you first need to work out what it is you want from your website. Do you want a basic, static site which acts as an online business card giving visitors information about your contact details and opening hours, or do you want a dynamic site that you can constantly update with new content, images, offers and product prices? Dynamic sites are obviously more expensive than static ones but they are also much easier to manage as they come with content management systems (CMS) that allow you to easily edit them. Static sites are more old fashioned and require you to ask your developer whenever you need a change made to the site. A good web designer will be able to explain it all to you in a way that makes it all clear and easy to understand. **4\. SEO Is Important** Simply creating a website is no longer enough for it to be successful as you need to take search engine optimisation (SEO) into consideration. With a well optimised site you will be able to attract visitors who are searching for terms that are related to your business products and services, which will in turn generate sales leads for you. To achieve this you need to earn links from reputable websites within your industry and have an on-going strategy of link building and social sharing to improve your rankings within search engines like Google. Once again the right web design agency will be able to offer this service to you. Contact MyIT Website Design Walkinstown Dublin 12 if you have any questions and we'd be happy to answer them for you. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Local Web Development Ireland # Website Development in Ireland Selecting a local web company that you can trust, and meet with face to face when you like, to create a visually appealing website, is essential for your business. Whether you're a small local store or a large company, your website serves as the online face of your brand and having a local website service provider is many times better for your company than a foreign provider. In Ireland, the demand for high-quality website development has grown significantly in the last 10 years, with businesses recognising the importance of a strong online presence. Here we explore the aspects of website development in Ireland, including how a local web development company can help your business, how to choose the right partner, what ongoing work is needed after launch, and why selecting a local company over a foreign one can be very beneficial. **How a Local Web Development Company Can Help Your Business** A professional web development company in Ireland can provide tailored solutions to enhance your online presence and drive business growth. Here’s how they can assist: **1\. Custom Website Design** A local web development firm understands the Irish market and can create a website that resonates with your target audience. They ensure your site is visually appealing, user-friendly, and aligned with your brand identity. **2\. SEO & Digital Marketing Integration** Irish web developers are well-versed in search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, helping your website rank higher on Google and other search engines. They can also integrate digital marketing strategies such as content marketing, social media, and PPC advertising. **3\. Mobile Responsiveness** With a significant portion of web traffic coming from mobile devices, a local developer will ensure your site is fully responsive, providing an optimal experience across all screen sizes. **4\. E-Commerce Solutions** If you sell products or services online, a web development company can build a secure, scalable e-commerce platform with features like payment gateways, inventory management, and customer accounts. **5\. Ongoing Support & Maintenance** Local companies offer reliable post-launch support, ensuring your site remains updated, secure, and free from technical issues. By partnering with an Irish web development agency, you benefit from personalized service, local market expertise, and a team that understands your business needs. **How to Select the Right Web Development Company for You** Choosing the right web development partner is crucial for your online success. Here are key factors to consider: **1\. Portfolio & Experience** Review the company’s past projects to assess their design style, functionality, and industry experience. Look for case studies or client testimonials to gauge their reliability. **2\. Technical Expertise** Ensure the company is proficient in modern web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, and popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Magento. **3\. SEO & Performance Optimization** A good developer should prioritize fast load times, clean code, and SEO-friendly structures to improve your site’s visibility and performance. **4\. Communication & Transparency** Choose a company that maintains clear communication, provides regular updates, and offers transparent pricing without hidden costs. **5\. Post-Launch Support** Check if they offer maintenance packages, security updates, and troubleshooting services after your site goes live. **6\. Budget & Timeline** Compare quotes from multiple agencies and ensure they can deliver within your budget and timeframe without compromising quality. Taking the time to research and select the right web development partner will ensure a smooth process and a website that meets your business goals. **What Work Needs to Be Carried Out Once the New Site Goes Live?** Launching a website is just the beginning—ongoing maintenance and optimization are essential for long-term success. Here’s what you should focus on post-launch: **1\. Regular Updates & Security Patches** Software, plugins, and CMS platforms require frequent updates to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. A web development company can handle this to prevent hacking or downtime. **2\. Performance Monitoring** Track your site’s speed, uptime, and user experience using tools like Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix. Optimize images, leverage caching, and fix broken links to maintain performance. **3\. Content Updates & Blogging** Fresh, relevant content improves SEO and engages visitors. Regularly update product listings, blog posts, and news sections to keep your audience informed. **4\. SEO & Marketing Efforts** Continue optimizing for search engines by refining keywords, building backlinks, and improving meta tags. Run paid ads or email campaigns to drive traffic. **5\. Backup & Disaster Recovery** Ensure automatic backups are in place so that your site can be restored quickly in case of data loss or cyberattacks. **6\. User Feedback & Testing** Gather feedback from visitors and conduct A/B testing to improve navigation, calls-to-action (CTAs), and conversion rates. By investing in ongoing website management, you ensure your site remains competitive, secure, and effective in attracting and retaining customers. **Why Choose a Local Web Development Company Over a Remote or Foreign Company?** While outsourcing web development to foreign agencies may seem cost-effective, working with a local Irish company offers several advantages: **1\. Better Communication & Time Zone Alignment** Working with an Irish developer means no language barriers or delayed responses due to time zone differences. Meetings, calls, and support are more efficient. **2\. Understanding of the Local Market** Local developers know Irish consumer behaviour, industry trends, and SEO strategies that work best for Irish audiences. **3\. Face-to-Face Collaboration** Meeting in person fosters stronger relationships, clearer project discussions, and quicker problem-solving compared to remote-only interactions. **4\. Compliance with Irish & EU Regulations** Local agencies ensure your website complies with GDPR, accessibility standards, and other legal requirements relevant to Irish businesses. **5\. Faster Support & Troubleshooting** If an issue arises, a local team can respond immediately rather than waiting for an overseas developer in a different time zone. **6\. Supporting the Local Economy** Hiring an Irish web development company contributes to the local economy and helps sustain jobs within the community. While foreign companies may offer lower rates, the long-term benefits of working with a local agency—such as reliability, expertise, and personalized service—often outweigh the cost savings. **What do I do now?** Investing in professional website development is an essential step for any business in Ireland looking to establish a strong online presence. By choosing a local web development company, you gain a partner who understands your market, understands you and your team, provides ongoing support, can attend meetings and ensures your website performs at it's very best. Whether you're launching a new site or revamping an existing one, careful planning, selecting the right developer, and maintaining your site post-launch will help you achieve long-term digital success. If you're ready to take your business online, consider partnering with an experienced Irish web development agency like MYIT to create a website that drives growth, engages customers, and stands out in a competitive digital landscape. **Call 01-6216866 or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) if you want to discuss further.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## MyIT Web Design Portfolio # Examples Of Our Work Amárach Research (https://amarach.com) Over the past 30 years, Amárach has developed a depth of expertise in Market Research across the island of Ireland. Amárach have been carrying out Market Research 1989 – and their team of young enthusiasts and seasoned professionals have lots of practice unlocking the future for their clients. Amárach embraces change, innovation and opportunity like no other agency. Amárach share their own ideas and insights through their blog, twitter, ezine and slideshare resources – providing unparalleled insight into the mood and intentions of consumers and businesses. Gerard O'Neill - Chairman of Amárach Roxford Lodge Hotel - new website design and site management/hosting (https://roxfordlodge.ie) Roxford Lodge Hotel is a family-run business in Dublin 4, which prides itself on it's welcoming atmosphere and personal service. They provide an outstanding service to ensure that all of their guests feel comfortable and are taken care of during their stay at the hotel. Desmond Killoran - Managing Director RSG Roscommon - new website design and website management (https://rsg.ie) New website design and build for RSG (Roscommon Disability Group) is in place now. RSG was set up in 1989 for people with disabilities, by people with disabilities, based on the Social Model of Disability & the Principles of Independent Living. County Roscommon Disability Support Group is committed to improving the quality of life and the standards of services to all people with disabilities, older people and children. Support is also available for families and carers. Joan Dowd - Chief Executive Officer \ Ganson - new website design and website management (https://ganson.ie) Ganson Building & Civil Engineering Ltd. is one of Ireland’s most progressive building and civil engineering contractors. We undertake projects throughout Ireland and the UK with offices in Dublin and Castlewellan in Co. Down and are a leading contractor in all sectors of both Public and Private works. Stephen O’Callaghan - Head of Operations & Finance Woodstyle Stairs, Doors & Carpentry - new website design and website management & hosting (https://woodstyle.ie) WoodStyle is a family run business and was established over 45 years ago, specialising in designing, manufacturing, supplying and installing Doors, Stairs, Banisters and Flooring. Directors Thomas & Patrick White apply a hands on approach to every project to ensure that WoodStyle retains it's standing as Dublin & Leinster's Premier Joinery & Carpentry Team. They always work to exceed customer's expectations and Tom and Paddy are now continuing that family tradition with the grandson of Joe, David. Paddy White - Director Sante Therapy - new website rebuild, redesign work and site management/hosting (https://santetherapy.ie) Declan Bradley is a qualified practitioner in a suite of holistic therapies and his therapies combine to bring his clients away from the everyday stresses and strains of daily life and put them on a path to healing. This is a very cost effective way of maintaining your health and releiving stress and the therapies work together to strengthen our natual life force and help us to have a better functioning body and mind. Declan Bradley - Reiki Master Teksmoke Ireland Teksmoke paste is an exciting and new product on the Irish market from Tekeir. The natural paste is tobacco-free and can be mixed with tobacco products if required. Only premium European eco-ingredients are used, using a patented formula. MYIT provides Website Management & Support for Tekeir Teksmoke, which includes Website Security, Website Backups, Plugin Updates and Support for new website requirements. Peter Walsh - Director of Operations - TekEir Iceclean - new website design (https://iceclean.ie) Ireland’s premier supplier of cleaning equipment and janitorial supplies. Our team is here to help you save time and money. We achieve this by understanding your cleaning equipment needs and providing you with customised cleaning solutions to get the job done efficiently and economically - backed by expert service initiatives to boot! Industrial Cleaning Equipment has been a key part of the cleaning industry in Ireland since 1984 and in that time we have amassed a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise. Gerard Doherty, Director Irish Kidney Association] (https://ika.ie) The Irish Kidney Association is a charitable voluntary organisation founded in 1978. They are dedicated to meeting the needs of renal patients and their families and carers, living with and affected by end stage renal disease. We had a great experience working with Gerard at MyIT, who was extremely patient and knowledgeable. The work done on our website was completed quickly and resolved the issues we had been experiencing from a previous developer. We would recommend his services to anyone. MYIT provides Website Management & Support for IKA.ie, which includes Website Security, Website Backups, Plugin Updates and Support for new website requirements. Robyn Black, Communications & Database Officer Tekeir Services Tekeir offers the highest quality TV installations for home and commercial use - from producing a TV bracket for your wall mounting or something as complex as planning your entire AV system, there's nothing they can't do. Tekeir have many years of experience in building and upgrading systems for communal properties, hotels, commercial and domestic properties and this experience will enable them to recommend the best solution for each scenario - you can rely on their experience and expertise. MYIT provides Website Management, Hosting & Support - which includes Website Security, Website Backups, Software Updates and Support. Alianas Beauty - new website design and website management Aliana’s Beauty is a beauty salon based in the heart of Adamstown, Lucan, Co. Dublin and opened its doors in August 2017. We offer a wide range of up to date beauty treatments six days a week to help you forget about everyday routine and experience the luxury of pampering yourself with help from our top technicians and therapists. "We love our new website and shop. Really easy to use and the website demo we received made it easy to learn how to do the updates. We are very happy with MYIT - and glad they are there for us if we need them." Liana Kopeina, Director Peppy Parcels web hosting and support Peppyparcels.com is a 100% Irish owned Parcel Delivery Company. They have years of experience in parcel delivery services throughout Ireland, UK and Europe. When your normal delivery service just doesn’t cut it any more, you need to speak with Peppy Parcels. They offer affordable, next day delivery service throughout Ireland and anywhere in the U.K. or Europe within 5 days. They go above and beyond what other delivery companies do because your satisfaction is extremely important to them. Their service partners pride themselves on being the best and offering a premium service and every delivery is fast and efficient. "We have worked with MYIT for a few years now and they have supported us really well, after we had issues with our previous Website Management company. They provide quick replies, ongoing monitoring, website updates and support and we're very happy with their service." Peppy Parcels Management Community response - new website design https://communityresponse.ie) Community Response Ltd is a primary Alcohol and Liver Health service that also specialise in support & advocacy for those impacted by Hepatitis C. Our community led organisation is located in the Liberties, Dublin 8 where we have been serving the needs of the community since 1990. Community Response was initially established in response to the growing impact of heroin throughout communities in south inner city Dublin. Nicola Perry, Manager Amethyst dublin website design Amethyst Dublin is Ireland's leading wholesale supplier of Sterling Silver Celtic Jewellery. They are based in the heart of Dublin and are an Irish Owned Company. Amethyst's creator, Barbara Ward, began selling jewellery from a cart on Dublin's fashionable Grafton Street in the 1980's and now sells to wholesaler customers across the globe from her online shop. "Our old website was being managed by MYIT for the previous 2 years so we naturally turned to MYIT again when it came time to redesign and rebuild our website shop from scratch. MYIT were superb to work with and created a great looking website, which is easy to use and like before, they are a call away if we need anything. Would recommend them to any business for any web service requirement." Karen Woods, Manager Ajbathrooms - web design graphic AJ Bathrooms established in 2015, is a leader in designer bathroom fixtures, fittings and installations. AJ Bathrooms brings to their clients many years of experience in the supply and installation of premium quality bathroom products - supplying superior products and an outstanding service. "MyIT built a website for my company and they exceeded my expectations. Their customer service and support was excellent. They were very quick to respond to any queries I had and kept me informed and updated throughout the website build. I would highly recommend them to anyone thinking of upgrading their website or building a new one." James Galvin, MD Regina rogers fallon - web design Regina Rogers Fallon Design offers a perfectly personalised interior design company, striving to individualise each and every design concept. Her objective is not only to meet client aspirations but to exceed expectations. Regina infuses an abundance of creative energy and her passion for design into every project, with practicality and quality at the forefront. When generating a design concept, Regina's intention is to create a space for her client that is a personalised expression of themselves. A well planned design should not only leave a visual impact but enhance their lifestyle. "Finding a company that would follow a very specific design brief was challenging. MyIT worked with me to create a website that represented my usiness well and I can update myself. 2018 was a busy year so it was important that the “redesign” didn’t interfere with my work. MyIT made the process easy for me and the end result was a visually great and informative site." Regina Rogers Fallon, Director Governance matters - web design Governance Matters is an independent management consultancy business. The company has carried out many engagements with both large and small, omestic and international, financial services businesses. It has provided governance, risk management and compliance services and has carried out temporary and part-time roles as CEO, Head of Function and project manager. "I recently had my Company Website redesigned by MyIT. The experience was easy and they brought significant value to the design and ultimate look of the site. They made the process easy and we are delighted with the result. I would have no hesitation in recommending them." Seamus Hughes, Director Governance Matters Limited Alder capital - web design Alder Capital is an Asset Manager offering Investment Products to retail and Institutional Investors. They are a leading Currency and Equity anager based in Ireland. The management business was established with the aim of delivering an alternative investment path to a broad range of Customers. They offer the longest currency programs in the world and also are specialists in Target Volatility equity. A long serving Currency Management Department serving clients across the world. We have a proven record of generating real returns from Currency trading through a unique system. We generate returns when other markets are not. We reduce losses and improve returns by our unique assets which are designed to raise investor portfolios. Mark Caslin, Director Alder Capital Wuff Restaurant - Dublin web design WUFF is a locally owned, cozy, neighbourhood Bistro serving breakfast, brunch & dinner. Their ever changing and evolving menus and wine list are driven by creativity, innovation and the use of prime produce from Ireland and abroad. Their friendly and professional service will ensure you receive prompt and professional service with food that will delight you. They offer a casual dining experience with indoor and outdoor seating. Wuff don't take Reservations for the Weekend Brunch but if you just pop by, they'll get you seated as quickly as possible. Please note that there is a maximum time allocation of 1.5 hours per table for Brunch and 2 hours for an early dinner sitting. Theresa Tierney, General Manager Alumina evc - new website design & website management Alumina EVC is based in Donabate, Co. Dublin and was started in 2018 with the growth in the Electric Vehicle Charger market. Their parent company Alumina Lighting has been in operation since 2011 selling LED lighting all across Ireland and has seen huge growth within this field, specialising in all areas of the commercial and industrial market, having completed high profile projects such as the Soundwave in the 3 Arena and the Titanic Exhibition in Belfast. "We eventually found a quality company in MYIT that could design and build the exact website that we needed for Alumina EVC. They worked well with us, even when we were busy, to create a great looking website that is easy to use and highlights all the business points we needed for our ustomers. We're delighted to have found MYIT and we found them great to work with and we're are happy that they're now just a call or email away if we need anything, including advice." Brian Templeton, Director ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Insights # Tech & Help Articles ### Below are some helpful posts on tech and web topics #### [Website Development in Ireland] (https://myit.ie/website-development-in-ireland.html) Selecting a local web company that you can trust, and meet with face to face when you like, to create a visually appealing website, is essential for your business. Whether you're a small local store or a large company, your website serves as the online face of your brand and having a local website service provider is much times better for your company than a foreign provider.... #### 4 Web Design Ideas To Create A More Appealing Website (https://myit.ie/4-web-design-ideas-to-create-a-more-appealing-website.html) When working with a website designer to improve and enhance your website, there’s always the question of time and cost. Well, putting some zing into ailing websites doesn’t have to be time consuming. And neither should working with a web design professional to make the site more appealing cost you too much.... #### Web design ideas for the coming 12 months (https://myit.ie/web-design-ideas-for-the-coming-12-months.html) If there’s one thing we can say for sure about the future, it’s that the next 12-months are about to be some of the most challenging for business owners and web administrators. ... #### 7 Tips for Better Website Performance (https://myit.ie/7-tips-for-better-website-performance.html) What does a well-designed website and your neighbourhood mall have in common? Answer: If you hang around both of them for long, you tend to spend more money buying stuff. So, is that what your website design doing to your visitors – encouraging them to stay longer so you can convince them to buy more of your products and services?... #### Web Design: Five design considerations for your next site update (https://myit.ie/web-design-five-design-considerations-for-your-next-site-update.html) Unless you are a DIY web designer, a hands-on coder and skilled website developer, chances are that you’ll depend on others to help you with your next website update project. The problem with most of us “non nerd types”, is that we often assume that website design is an exact science – like math or accounting. It is NOT.... #### What You Should Look For In Your Web Site Designer (https://myit.ie/what-you-should-look-for-in-your-web-site-designer.html) With so much technology and so many tools freely available online today, web design has become “commoditized”. In some cases, individuals and companies with little experience and capital can easily come into the website designing market and set up shop. Not that this is a bad thing. However, prospective web site building service clients must exercise some diligence before hiring a web professional.... #### Website Design: The value of Content Management Systems (https://myit.ie/website-design-the-value-of-content-management-systems.html) In today’s digital world, websites are your virtual calling cards. How you approach your website design says a lot to customers, prospective clients and visitors about your business. ... #### Web Design Agency Dublin (https://myit.ie/web-design-agency-dublin.html) In this digital age, having a strong web presence is no longer optional - it’s essential for all businesses. Whether you’re a small business, a start-up, or an established enterprise, your website is often the first point of contact for potential customers. And for a business in Ireland, this is where a web design agency in Dublin comes into play.... #### 4 Website Design Tips To Consider (https://myit.ie/4-website-design-tips-to-consider.html) Often, when you’ve had an established web site design for a long time – especially if you receive a steady flow of visitors to it – you get complacent. It’s usual to think that since traffic “seems” to be good, you don’t need to do anything. Well, your web designing apathy may actually be costing you more than you think. Read on to learn why, and how you can fix the problem.... #### Website Design Trends (https://myit.ie/website-design-trends.html) There’s an old saying that goes: “The trend is your friend. Embrace it.”. No truer words have been spoken about web design trends. The fast paced world of website development means that if you don’t embrace the right trends, you’ll likely be left chasing your competitors.... #### Website Refresh – it's time to act (https://myit.ie/website-refresh-its-time-to-act.html) There’s a school of thought about website design that goes something like this: Once you’ve got a great design – don’t mess with it That idea sounds eerily like the old web designing adage: Build it and they will come. Well, unfortunately, website owners that subscribe to that thought are doomed. We’ll explore just why that is. ... #### Website Redesign Dublin (https://myit.ie/website-redesign-dublin.html) In today's digital world, your website is quite often the 1st contact you have with a potential new customer. It's your internet store front as such, your business's digital home, and a crucial tool for driving new sales.... #### Effective web design: Forget about tech and re-focus on talk (https://myit.ie/effective-web-design-forget-about-tech-and-re-focus-on-talk.html) There’s a lot to be said about being on the cutting edge of technology. And that’s what many a website designer has been enamoured with over the past half a decade or so. However, most website owners hate “tech” simply for the sake of using it. ... #### Website Software Upgrades (https://myit.ie/website-software-upgrades.html) There is often a debate about whether you truly need to have your web designer upgrade your website, or whether simply patching and updating it is good enough. The truth is – you need to do both.... #### Website Design Done Right: Four website refresh principles you can't ignore (https://myit.ie/website-design-done-right-four-website-refresh-principles-you-cant-ignore.html) If you are an online business that has not had a website refresh in a while (anywhere between 18 and 24-months), it’s time to consult your web design agency NOW While you have been using the same tired old site, your competitors have gradually been wooing your customers with shiny, new, refreshed websites.... #### Getting Your Website Ready For The Coming Year (https://myit.ie/getting-your-website-ready-for-the-coming-year.html) With just a short time left before we turn the calendars, it’s that time of year when website designing takes centre stage. Now’s the time when business owners and website operators should be looking at their websites, in order to understand what web site design updates or changes might be needed to position the business for the New Year. ... #### Mobilising Mobile Web Design - Why your entire web presence must be mobile (https://myit.ie/mobilising-mobile-web-design-why-your-entire-web-presence-must-be-mobile.html) If you speak with any website designing agency today, and ask what services their clients are mostly asking for – it’s NOT what you might think. You may expect that many clients are looking to mobile-enable their web design. However, the truth is that most large and small businesses have already gone mobile – years ago.... #### Unleashing The Power Of Content Management Systems (CMS) (https://myit.ie/unleashing-the-power-of-content-management-systems-cms2.html) Now, more than ever, web site design professionals are advising their clients to embrace Content Management Systems (CMSs) as a way to help reduce overall maintenance costs, while also positioning them to reap the benefits of enhanced website traffic. Find out how your web designer can help you unleash the power of CMS for your website.... #### Web Design Tips Trends And Tricks For Your Next Website Refresh (https://myit.ie/web-design-tips-trends-and-tricks-for-your-next-website-refresh.html) It’s often thought that web design refreshes should be synchronised shortly prior to, or following, a new year - especially when there are four more months before the calendar turns. So, there’s no use planning for a website refresh just yet – is there? Well, any savvy web site designing professional would advise clients to do just that – and to start planning for their next website refresh NOW.... #### Integrating Content Management And Web design (https://myit.ie/integrating-content-management-and-web-design.html) There was a time, not too long ago, where web design service providers were primarily focused on creating web pages and building online user interfaces for end users. The idea was to give clients a blank website so that you (the client) could populate it with content of your choice.... (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=2) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=3) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=4) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=5) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=6) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=7) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=8) (https://myit.ie/myit-web-design-blog.html?arch_page=2) ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Dublin # Web Design Agency Dublin **Web Design Agency Dublin: Your Guide to Selecting the Perfect Team to work with** In this digital age, having a strong web presence is no longer optional - it’s essential for all businesses. Whether you’re a small business, a start-up, or an established enterprise, your website is often the first point of contact for potential customers. And for a business in Ireland, this is where a web design agency in Dublin comes into play. A professional web design agency can help you create a website that not only looks amazing but also performs exceptionally well - driving traffic, engagement, and sales. In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about working with a web design agency like MYIT in Dublin. We’ll cover what a web design agency can do for you, what to look for in a good agency, why you need to meet your web design agency, and why maintaining contact after your website goes live is crucial. Let’s dive in! **What Does a Web Design Agency Do for You?** A web design agency is your web partner in creating a website that reflects your brand, engages your audience, and achieves your business goals. Here’s a breakdown of what a web design agency can do for you: **1\. Custom Website Design** - Create a unique, visually appealing website tailored to your brand identity. - Ensure your website stands out from competitors with a modern, professional design. - Incorporate your brand colours, logos, and messaging seamlessly. **2\. User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design** - Design intuitive navigation to ensure visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. - Optimize the layout for a seamless user experience across all devices (desktop, tablet, and mobile). - Focus on accessibility to ensure your website is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. **3\. Responsive Design** - Ensure your website is fully responsive and functions perfectly on all screen sizes. - Test the website on various devices and browsers to guarantee consistency. **4\. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)** - Optimize your website’s structure, content, and metadata to improve search engine rankings. - Implement on-page SEO best practices, such as keyword optimization, alt tags, and internal linking. - Ensure fast loading speeds and mobile-friendliness, which are critical for SEO. **5\. Content Creation and Integration** - Help you create compelling, SEO-friendly content that resonates with your target audience. - Integrate blogs, videos, and other multimedia elements to enhance engagement. - Ensure all content is aligned with your brand voice and messaging. **6\. E-Commerce Solutions** - Build secure, user-friendly e-commerce platforms for online stores. - Integrate payment gateways, shopping carts, and inventory management systems. - Optimize the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment rates. **7\. Website Maintenance and Support** - Provide ongoing maintenance to ensure your website remains up-to-date and secure. - Offer technical support for troubleshooting and resolving issues. - Regularly update plugins, themes, and software to prevent vulnerabilities. **8\. Analytics and Performance Tracking** - Set up tools like Google Analytics to track website performance and user behaviour. - Provide detailed reports on traffic, conversions, and other key metrics. - Use data-driven insights to make informed decisions and improvements. **9\. Branding and Digital Strategy** - Help you develop a cohesive digital strategy that aligns with your business goals. - Create a consistent brand identity across your website and other digital channels. - Advise on digital marketing strategies to drive traffic and conversions. **What to Look for in a Great Web Design Agency** Choosing the right web design agency in Dublin is crucial to the success of your website. Here are some key factors to consider when making your decision: **1\. Portfolio and Experience** - Review their portfolio to assess the quality and diversity of their work. - Look for experience in your industry or with similar projects. - Check for case studies or testimonials from previous clients. **2\. Technical Expertise** - Ensure the agency is proficient in the latest web design technologies and tools. - Look for expertise in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Drupal. - Verify their knowledge of SEO, responsive design, and web accessibility standards. **3\. Creative Design Skills** - Evaluate their ability to create visually appealing and innovative designs. - Look for a strong understanding of UX/UI principles. - Ensure they can tailor the design to your brand identity and target audience. **4\. Communication and Collaboration** - Choose an agency that values clear and consistent communication. - Look for a collaborative approach that involves you in the design process. - Ensure they are responsive and easy to reach when you have questions or concerns. **5\. Transparent Pricing** - Request a detailed breakdown of costs and services. - Avoid agencies with hidden fees or unclear pricing structures. - Compare quotes from multiple agencies to ensure you're getting good value. **6\. SEO and Digital Marketing Knowledge** - Ensure the agency understands the importance of SEO in web design. - Look for experience in integrating SEO best practices into the design process. - Verify their ability to provide ongoing digital marketing support if needed. **7\. Post-Launch Support** - Choose an agency that offers reliable maintenance and support services. - Look for clear terms regarding updates, backups, and security. - Ensure they provide training or resources to help you manage your website. **8\. Reputation and Reviews** - Research online reviews and ratings to gauge the agency’s reputation. - Ask for references or speak to past clients about their experience. - Look for awards or recognitions in the web design industry. **Why Do You Need to Meet Your Web Design Agency?** Meeting your web design agency in person or via video call is an essential step in the process. Here’s why: **1\. Build Trust and Rapport** - Meeting face-to-face helps establish a personal connection and build trust. - It allows you to gauge the agency’s professionalism and commitment. **2\. Clarify Your Vision** - Discuss your goals, target audience, and brand identity in detail. - Share your ideas and inspirations to ensure the agency understands your vision. **3\. Discuss Technical Requirements** - Talk about specific features, functionalities, and integrations you need. - Address any technical challenges or limitations upfront. **4\. Set Expectations** - Agree on timelines, milestones, and deliverables. - Discuss the design process, revisions, and approval procedures. **5\. Ask Questions** - Use the meeting to ask about their experience, approach, and team. - Clarify any doubts or concerns you may have about the project. **6\. Ensure Alignment** - Confirm that the agency’s style and expertise align with your needs. - Ensure they understand your industry and target market. **Why Do You Need to Keep in Contact with Your Web Design Agency After the Website Goes Live?** Your relationship with your web design agency shouldn’t end once your website goes live. Here’s why maintaining contact is crucial: **1\. Ongoing Maintenance** - Websites require regular updates to stay secure and functional. - Your agency can handle software updates, backups, and security patches. **2\. Technical Support** - Issues or bugs may arise after the launch that require immediate attention. - Your agency can provide prompt support to resolve any problems. **3\. Performance Optimisation** - Continuously monitor and optimize your website’s performance. - Make improvements based on user feedback and analytics data. **4\. Content Updates** - Regularly update your website with fresh content to keep it relevant. - Your agency can assist with adding new pages, blog posts, or products. **5\. SEO and Marketing** - Ongoing SEO efforts are essential to maintain and improve search rankings. - Your agency can help with digital marketing campaigns to drive traffic and conversions. **6\. Scalability** - As your business grows, your website may need to scale accordingly. - Your agency can help you add new features or expand your website’s functionality. **7\. Stay Ahead of Trends** - Web design trends and technologies evolve rapidly. - Your agency can keep you informed and implement the latest innovations. **8\. Long-Term Partnership** - Building a long-term relationship with your agency ensures continuity and consistency. - They’ll have a deep understanding of your brand and goals, making future projects smoother. **Make a Call to MYIT Today** Working with a web design agency like MYIT in Dublin is an investment in your business’s online success. From creating a stunning, user-friendly website to providing ongoing support and optimisation, a professional agency can help you achieve your digital goals. By understanding what a web design agency does, knowing what to look for, and maintaining a strong relationship, you can ensure your website remains a powerful tool for growth and engagement. Whether you’re launching a new website or revamping an existing one, partnering with the right agency can make all the difference. Take the time to research, meet, and collaborate with a web design agency that aligns with your vision and values. With the right team by your side, your website can become a true asset to your business. **If you’re ready to take your online presence to the next level, start your search for a web design agency with MYIT in Dublin today - call 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Services # Web Design Services # Web Design Services: A Working Guide A strong online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. A well-designed website is often the first point of contact between a company and its potential new customers and repeat customers. This is where **web design services** come into play. Whether you’re a small business owner, a start-up, or an established enterprise, investing in professional web design services can make a significant difference in how your brand is perceived online. In this article, we’ll explore what web design services cover, why you need them, how your business can benefit, and how to identify a good web design services provider. * * * ## 1\. What Do Web Design Services Cover? Web design services encompass a wide range of tasks and expertise aimed at creating a functional, visually appealing, and user-friendly website. Here’s a breakdown of what these services typically include: 1. **Website Planning and Strategy**: - Understanding your business goals, target audience, and brand identity. - Creating a sitemap to outline the structure and navigation of the website. - Defining the user journey to ensure a seamless experience for visitors. 2. **Custom Web Design**: - Designing a unique layout that reflects your brand’s personality. - Selecting color schemes, typography, and imagery that align with your brand identity. - Ensuring the design is responsive and works seamlessly across all devices (desktop, tablet, and mobile). 3. **User Experience (UX) Design**: - Focusing on usability and accessibility to make the website easy to navigate. - Creating intuitive interfaces that guide users toward desired actions (e.g., making a purchase or filling out a contact form). - Conducting user testing to identify and fix any pain points. 4. **Content Creation and Integration**: - Writing or editing website copy that is engaging, SEO-friendly, and aligned with your brand voice. - Incorporating multimedia elements such as images, videos, and infographics. - Ensuring all content is properly formatted and optimized for readability. 5. **Search Engine Optimization (SEO)**: - Optimizing website structure and content to improve search engine rankings. - Implementing on-page SEO techniques, such as meta tags, alt text, and keyword placement. - Ensuring the website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly, as these are key ranking factors. 6. **E-Commerce Functionality**: - Setting up online stores with secure payment gateways. - Integrating product catalogs, shopping carts, and inventory management systems. - Ensuring a smooth checkout process to reduce cart abandonment rates. 7. **Website Maintenance and Support**: - Regularly updating the website to ensure it remains secure and functional. - Fixing bugs, broken links, and other technical issues. - Providing ongoing support for content updates and feature enhancements. * * * ## 2\. Why Do I Need Web Design Services? A professionally designed website is more than just a digital brochure—it’s a powerful tool for attracting and engaging customers. Here are some compelling reasons why you need web design services: 01. **First Impressions Matter**: - Your website is often the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. A well-designed site creates a positive first impression and builds trust. 02. **Stand Out from Competitors**: - In a crowded online marketplace, a unique and visually appealing website helps you stand out from competitors. 03. **Improved User Experience**: - Professional web design ensures your site is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and functional, which keeps visitors engaged and encourages them to explore further. 04. **Mobile Responsiveness**: - With the majority of web traffic coming from mobile devices, having a responsive design is essential. Web design services ensure your site looks and works great on all screen sizes. 05. **SEO Benefits**: - A well-designed website is optimized for search engines, making it easier for potential customers to find you online. 06. **Time and Cost Efficiency**: - Hiring professionals saves you time and effort, allowing you to focus on running your business. It also reduces the risk of costly mistakes that can arise from DIY web design. 07. **Scalability**: - Professional web design services create a website that can grow with your business, accommodating new features and content as needed. 08. **Technical Expertise**: - Web designers have the skills and knowledge to implement advanced features, such as e-commerce functionality, membership portals, and custom integrations. 09. **Consistency Across Platforms**: - A professional design ensures your website aligns with your brand’s identity across all platforms, including social media and email marketing. 10. **Accessibility Compliance**: - Web design services ensure your site meets accessibility standards, making it usable for people with disabilities and broadening your audience reach. * * * ## 3\. How Can My Business Benefit from Web Design Services? Investing in professional web design services can have a transformative impact on your business. Here’s how: 01. **Increased Traffic**: - An SEO-optimized website attracts more visitors from search engines, social media, and other online channels. 02. **Higher Conversion Rates**: - A well-designed website guides users toward taking desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. 03. **Enhanced Brand Credibility**: - A polished and professional website builds trust and credibility with your audience, making them more likely to do business with you. 04. **Better Customer Engagement**: - Engaging visuals, compelling content, and intuitive navigation keep visitors on your site longer and encourage them to interact with your brand. 05. **Improved Customer Retention**: - A positive user experience encourages repeat visits and fosters customer loyalty. 06. **Competitive Advantage**: - A high-quality website sets you apart from competitors who may have outdated or poorly designed sites. 07. **Data-Driven Insights**: - Web design services often include analytics integration, allowing you to track user behavior and make data-driven decisions to improve your site’s performance. 08. **Streamlined Operations**: - Features like online booking systems, customer portals, and automated workflows can simplify business processes and improve efficiency. 09. **Global Reach**: - A well-designed website can attract customers from around the world, expanding your market reach. 10. **Higher ROI**: - By attracting more visitors, converting them into customers, and retaining them, a professionally designed website delivers a strong return on investment. * * * ## 4\. How Will I Know a Good Web Design Services Supplier? Choosing the right web design services provider is crucial to the success of your website. Here are some key factors to consider when evaluating potential suppliers: 01. **Portfolio and Experience**: - Review their portfolio to assess the quality and diversity of their work. - Look for experience in designing websites for businesses similar to yours. 02. **Client Testimonials and Reviews**: - Read reviews and testimonials from past clients to gauge their satisfaction and the provider’s reliability. 03. **Range of Services**: - Ensure the provider offers a comprehensive range of services, including design, development, SEO, and maintenance. 04. **Technical Expertise**: - Verify their proficiency in relevant technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Shopify. 05. **Communication and Collaboration**: - Choose a provider that communicates clearly and involves you in the design process. - Look for a collaborative approach that values your input and feedback. 06. **Customization Options**: - A good provider will offer tailored solutions rather than relying on generic templates. 07. **SEO Knowledge**: - Ensure the provider understands SEO best practices and can optimize your site for search engines. 08. **Post-Launch Support**: - Check if they offer ongoing maintenance and support after the website goes live. 09. **Transparent Pricing**: - Look for a provider that offers clear and transparent pricing with no hidden fees. 10. **Timely Delivery**: - A reliable provider will deliver the project on time and within the agreed-upon budget. 11. **Innovation and Creativity**: - Choose a provider that stays updated with the latest design trends and technologies to create a modern and innovative website. 12. **Accessibility and Inclusivity**: - Ensure the provider follows accessibility guidelines to make your website usable for all visitors. 13. **Data Security**: - Verify that the provider implements robust security measures to protect your website and customer data. 14. **Scalability**: - A good provider will design a website that can grow and adapt as your business evolves. 15. **Cultural Fit**: - Choose a provider whose values and work style align with your business culture and goals. * * * ## What To Do Now? Web design services play a pivotal role in creating a website that not only looks great but also drives business growth. From planning and design to SEO and maintenance, these services cover every aspect of building a successful online presence. By investing in professional web design, you can enhance your brand’s credibility, attract more customers, and achieve your business objectives. When choosing a web design services provider, take the time to evaluate their expertise, portfolio, and commitment to delivering a high-quality product. With the right partner, your website can become a powerful tool for achieving long-term success in the digital world. **Call 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie if you'd like to discuss your web design service requirements and we can answer all your questions and prepare a tailored service pack for you.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Effective SEO Solutions # SEO - Search Engine Optimisation You need to be on page 1 on Google for some or all of the important keywords for your industry and we can get you there. Give us a call to discuss your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plans and what search terms and product terms are most important to your business. - We'll only do the SEO in a 'white-hat' fashion, so you're current Google position won't be compromised. - For some of your basic keywords (search terms) we'll have you on page 1 in a number of weeks. - We're an experienced, Dublin based Irish SEO Company so we understand the Irish SEO landscape like no others. Call us for more information and we'll get your SEO campaign in place for you and it will pay for itself many times over and help you to really grow your business. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of promoting a website by using a search engine, e.g. Google or Bing to direct search engine users to your website. It is a very effective tool for increasing the number of targeted website visitors to your site and increasing your sales. **Identify Your Top 10 Search Terms (aka keywords)** Every business wants to be on page one of Google for the search terms that apply to their business e.g. "accountant Dublin" or "plumber Dublin", and that generates huge competition for those page 1 places on Google. SEO also has to compete with Google Adwords to get the attention of the customers on that Google search results page. **Know Your Most Important Search Terms** We would work closely with you to identify important search terms for your industry. We'd then inspect the keywords that your current competitors are working with and we'd also make sure you have a dynamic XML sitemap in place, which Google, Bing and Yahoo support. This XML Sitemap will allow the search engines to see your website page structure and at a glance they can see how often your content is being updated, which pages were updated, page names etc. Another useful tool to have as a website owner, is good [web statistics](https://myit.ie/website-analytics.html) so that you can see how your website visitor numbers in Ireland are growing and where this growth is coming from: what country, what websites, what keywords led the web visitor to your website etc. **If You Have Questions About SEO Give Us A Call** We can go through everything with you and prepare an analysis of your website and industry, and present to you the steps needed to get more targeted visitors onto your website and to encourage them to engage with you for increased sales. SEO is a very important area for your website success, so contact our Dublin Office on [01 6216866](tel:35316216866) or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) and find out how we can grow your website visitor numbers and your business. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Management Services # Website Management Services: A Complete Guide Your website serves as a virtual storefront, a marketing tool, and a platform for engagement. However, creating a website is just the beginning. To ensure it remains functional, secure, and up-to-date, ongoing website management is essential. Website management services are designed to handle the technical, operational, and strategic aspects of maintaining a website, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations. In this article, we’ll explore what website management entails, why it’s important, and how to choose the right website management service for your needs. **What Do I Need Website Management For?** Website management is not just about fixing broken links or updating content. It encompasses a wide range of tasks that ensure your website runs smoothly, remains secure, and continues to deliver value to your business. Here are some key reasons why you need website management services: **1\. Regular Updates and Maintenance** Websites are built using software, plugins, and themes that require regular updates to function properly. Without timely updates, your website may become vulnerable to security breaches or experience performance issues. **2\. Security Monitoring and Protection** Cyber threats are on the rise, and websites are a common target for hackers. Website management services include monitoring for suspicious activity, implementing security measures, and performing regular backups to protect your data. **3\. Content Updates and Optimization** Keeping your website’s content fresh and relevant is crucial for engaging visitors and improving search engine rankings. Website managers can help you update blog posts, product descriptions, and other content to reflect current trends and customer needs. **4\. Performance Optimization** Slow-loading websites can drive visitors away and harm your search engine rankings. Website management services include optimizing your site’s speed, fixing broken links, and ensuring compatibility across devices and browsers. **5\. Technical Support** From resolving server issues to troubleshooting errors, website management services provide technical support to address any problems that may arise, minimizing downtime and ensuring a seamless user experience. **6\. SEO and Analytics** A well-managed website includes ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to improve visibility and drive organic traffic. Website managers can also analyze performance metrics to identify areas for improvement. **7\. Compliance and Accessibility** Websites must comply with legal requirements, such as GDPR for data privacy, and adhere to accessibility standards to ensure they are usable by all visitors, including those with disabilities. **8\. Scalability and Growth** As your business grows, your website needs to scale accordingly. Website management services can help you add new features, expand functionality, and accommodate increased traffic. **How Does Website Management Benefit My Website and Business?** Investing in website management services offers numerous benefits for both your website and your business as a whole. Here’s how: **1\. Improved User Experience** A well-maintained website provides a seamless and enjoyable experience for visitors, encouraging them to stay longer, explore more pages, and convert into customers. **2\. Enhanced Security** Regular security updates and monitoring protect your website from cyber threats, safeguarding sensitive customer data and maintaining your business’s reputation. **3\. Higher Search Engine Rankings** Ongoing SEO efforts, such as keyword optimization and content updates, help your website rank higher in search engine results, driving more organic traffic. **4\. Increased Reliability** With technical support and regular maintenance, your website is less likely to experience downtime or errors, ensuring it remains accessible to users at all times. **5\. Time and Cost Savings** Outsourcing website management allows you to focus on your core business activities while professionals handle the technical aspects, saving you time and reducing the risk of costly mistakes. **6\. Better Conversion Rates** A fast, secure, and user-friendly website is more likely to convert visitors into leads or customers, directly impacting your bottom line. **7\. Competitive Advantage** A well-managed website sets you apart from competitors who may neglect their online presence, helping you attract and retain more customers. **8\. Data-Driven Decisions** Website management services often include analytics and reporting, providing valuable insights into user behavior and helping you make informed decisions to improve performance. **What Do You Need to Look Out for in a Website Manager?** Choosing the right website management service is crucial to ensuring your website remains in good hands. Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a website manager: **1\. Experience and Expertise** Look for a website manager with a proven track record and expertise in managing websites similar to yours. They should be familiar with your industry and the specific tools and platforms you use. **2\. Range of Services** Ensure the website management service offers a comprehensive range of services, including updates, security, SEO, and technical support, to meet all your needs. **3\. Proactive Approach** A good website manager should be proactive in identifying and addressing potential issues before they escalate, rather than waiting for problems to arise. **4\. Transparent Communication** Clear and consistent communication is essential. Your website manager should provide regular updates, reports, and be readily available to address your concerns. **5\. Customization and Flexibility** Every business has unique needs, so your website manager should offer customizable plans and be flexible enough to adapt to your changing requirements. **6\. Security Measures** Ensure the website manager prioritizes security by implementing measures such as SSL certificates, firewalls, and regular backups. **7\. Pricing and Value** While cost is an important factor, it shouldn’t be the sole deciding factor. Look for a service that offers good value for money by balancing affordability with quality. **8\. Customer Reviews and Testimonials** Check reviews and testimonials from previous clients to gauge the website manager’s reliability, professionalism, and effectiveness. **9\. Scalability** Your website manager should be able to scale their services as your business grows, ensuring your website can handle increased traffic and functionality. **10\. Support Availability** Technical issues can arise at any time, so it’s important to choose a website manager that offers 24/7 support or has a reliable response time. **So, What Do You Do Now?** Website management is an essential aspect of maintaining a successful online presence. It ensures your website remains secure, functional, and aligned with your business goals, while also providing a positive experience for your visitors. From regular updates and security monitoring to SEO and performance optimization, website management services cover a wide range of tasks that contribute to the overall success of your website and business. When choosing a website manager, it’s important to consider factors such as experience, range of services, communication, and security measures. By partnering with the right website management service, you can save time, reduce costs, and focus on growing your business, knowing that your website is in capable hands. In a world where your website often serves as the face of your business, investing in professional website management is not just a luxury—it’s a necessity. Whether you’re a small business owner or managing a large enterprise, the right website management service can make all the difference in achieving your online goals and staying ahead of the competition. **Call or email if you would like to chat about any of the above and we can prepare a plan for you on how to improve your website performance.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Contact MyIT # Contact MYIT MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] Web Design, CMS, Website Development, SEO, Hosting, Adwords, Mobile Website Design, Website Maintenance Sales: [sales@myit.ie](mailto:sales@myit.ie) Information: [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) Customer Support: [support@myit.ie](mailto:support@myit.ie) Accounts: [accounts@myit.ie](mailto:accounts@myit.ie) [www.myit.ie](http://www.myit.ie/) [www.twitter.com/MyITwebdesign](http://www.twitter.com/MyITwebdesign) [Privacy](https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/) \- [Terms](https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/) Whereabouts::: We're in the Riverview Business Park on the New Nangor Road in Clondalkin, Dublin 12. We're 1 minute drive from the An Post Mail Centre, Dublin 12. We're just 5 minutes drive from the Naas Road and the Red Cow Hotel, Ballymount, Walkinstown, Tallaght Dublin 24. We're just inside the M50 motorway near Junction 9. Web designer services looking after all your online requirements: website hosting, email hosting, website designer, domain management, online marketing and ongoing support and web maintenance. ## Website Photo Essentials # Your Website Photos - The Essentials You may often hear your web designer say: "A picture paints a thousand words" - well it does and they can make or break your website. The logic behind the saying comes from sound research about human behavior, and how we react to a particular web design based on the photos that are chosen for each page. As humans most of us tend to understand a message illustrated by graphics much better than we process a text-based message. A good website designer understands and exploits that human characteristic to it's fullest, by making liberal use of photos in their web design to make your company, products and services look better on the web. **Web Imagery - Essentials** When it comes to using photos for a website, blog or web shop, what guiding principles should be kept in mind? Well, here are a few essential pointers that will help put you and your website designer on the right path: **1)** Originality Is Priceless: Where possible, a professional web designer will always lean towards using original photos rather than stock photos. Website visitors usually gravitate to sites that serve original content and that includes original pictures too! Sometimes you have to use stock photos but it's worth putting in some time and money to make sure you have the original photos you need. If you are a company going from project to project remember to continually take photos of the job for the website - you may need photos for a case-study page, before and after photos, general photos of examples of your work etc. **2)** Quality Is King: Investing in a good quality camera to take your photos, or engaging an affordable photographer, if required, will result in high-quality web design photos. Keeping the images in jpeg format, with 2000 pixel width is also advisable. 2000 pixels in width is pretty much the maximum width you will need and for general photos on your website 400 - 600 pixels width is perfect. Using top-of-the-line photo editing tools when resizing, cropping or touching-up photos will also ensure that the image quality isn't compromised when you resize the photos. **3)** Ordinary Can Be Extraordinary: If you are the owner of a new web design for a coffee shop, you're more likely to make a good impression depicting how your product is the preferred brew of ordinary individuals. Using photos of extraordinarily "good looking" model customers (even though they may be real) could sometimes have a negative impact. Well taken photos of real people in real events will always look more realistic. **4)** Leveraging Emotions: People are emotional creatures and we often make buying decisions by reacting to the emotions that the web design generates. A good website designer will often use photos depicting an emotional situation and of course these can be positive emotions too - happiness, surprise, comfort, security. Appealing to your customers emotions while they are on your website will enhance the sites conversion rate and generate more customers from your website visitors. **5)** Be Selective With Public Domain Photos: Public Domain (PD) photos are sometimes a great ally for a website designer as they are preparing your new website. However, be discerning about the sites from where you get stock photos - e.g. http://www.bigstockphoto.com has a great selection of PD photos to choose from. Regardless of where you get your photos, make sure you are not infringing on copyrights - as this will be damaging for your company and may initiate legal action from the owner of the photos. **6)** Location, Location, Location: A good web design can attract the attention of a visitor very quickly, and since photos are a great attention grabbers, placing them in the right location, often higher up in the page or blog post, is a good idea. So, rather than have the top of your web pages very text heavy, focus on having more images on the page and higher up and have perhaps less text and lower down. This grabs the interest of your website visitor quicker and will generate more sales calls and sales. **7)** Photo Alignment Is Key: Give some thought to how your photos are going to be positioned, e.g. landscape, portrait, slide show, thumbnail (small) photo etc. Where appropriate, ask your website designer to leave space on some photos to accommodate captions and sales messages across the photo. It is a good idea to think about your photos. If you have taken the time to choose your photos carefully then it is worth a little extra time to decide what is the best way to display them, how the website visitor will want to consume them, should they be displayed in a set of photos or on their own? **8)** Image Relevance: Take great care to design the website in a way that relevant text appears in the vicinity of related photos. A website that doesn't relate photos to text will soon become irrelevant to visitors. Relevance must also be the keyword when choosing captions for your photos. Each page and section on your website must tell a small story so the photo and text to tell that story must be beside each other and it must all make sense to your website visitor as it may be their first time on your website. **9)** Reality Rocks: Wherever possible, stay away from "abstract" or animated/cartoon photos and aim as much as possible for reality. For instance, if your site is about car repairs, use real pictures from the mechanics shop in the web design, instead of stock photos or generic car photographs or cartoon gif images of cars and wrenches. Visitors will relate better to a photo showing the owner of the shop, or their workers, busy repairing a car than they will to a generic stock photo highlighting the same theme or situation. You also need to keep and eye on photo detail - if you are choosing photos or stock photos have a good examination of the photos to ensure it doesn't contain elements that you don't want in the photo e.g. cars with American number plate's for a garage that is in Galway, or photos of trucks that are actually American trucks. **10)** Often, Less Is More: Ensure that your website designer knows that moderating the number of photos on a web page can often result in a better website. For example, if you have a slide show comprising of 100 photos, do you really think visitors have the time to scroll through each one of them? A rule-of-thumb is about 20/30 pictures - no more. Equally, if you arrive on a web page and it seems to be a wall of photos with little explanatory text, then this is not a good website visitor experience. Think of the website visitor - what do they need? What do they want to find on your web pages? **11)** Linked Interests: Use photos to link to other pages with related or useful content. There's nothing better that a web designer can do, to encourage interest in your website visitors, than to use photos to link to relevant content elsewhere on the site. We are all curious creatures by nature, and if there is a photo that is clickable, which pertains to the article we're reading, we will most likely click on it. **12)** Be Mindful About Mobility: You need to consider all the different devices and broadband data connections that will be looking at your photos. You can have large image galleries trying to open up on a 3G connection on a smart phone as it will take all day, and they will leave your website. Talk to your web designer about your photos and what will be needed for the various screen sizes and devices. You need to plan ahead and ensure that all your prospective customers are having a good website experience before the pick up the phone to contact you. **Making Photos Work** Keep the above points in mind as you plan your website and discuss each with your website company to make sure you are getting what you paid for. Your customers need a good website experience and your photos play a very big part in that so you need to plan ahead. Give us a call or email if you have any questions. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Local Web Design Dublin # Website Design Near Me **Creating a Digital Presence That Really Connects with Your Target Audience** In today’s digital-first world, having a well-designed website is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Whether you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, or a large corporation, your website is often the first point of contact between you and your potential customers. If you’ve found yourself searching for “website design near me,” you’re already on the right track. A locally sourced and professionally designed website can elevate your brand, attract your target audience, and drive business growth. But what does it take to create a website that truly resonates with your audience? Let’s have a look. * * * **Why Do I Need to Get My Web Design Right for My Audience?** Your website is more than just a digital business card; it’s a reflection of your brand, values, and offerings. Getting your web design right is crucial because it directly impacts how your audience perceives and interacts with your business. Here’s why: 1. **First Impressions Matter** Your website is often the first interaction a potential customer has with your brand. A poorly designed website can drive users away within seconds, while a polished, professional design can build trust and credibility. 2. **User Experience (UX) is Key** A well-designed website ensures seamless navigation, fast loading times, and mobile responsiveness. These factors contribute to a positive user experience, which can increase engagement and conversions. 3. **Target Audience Alignment** Your website should speak directly to your target audience. A design that aligns with their preferences, needs, and behaviors will resonate more effectively and encourage them to take action. 4. **Search Engine Optimization (SEO)** A well-structured website with clean code, optimized images, and proper metadata improves your search engine rankings. This makes it easier for your audience to find you online. 5. **Brand Consistency** Your website should reflect your brand’s identity, including your logo, color scheme, and tone of voice. Consistency across all platforms strengthens brand recognition and loyalty. 6. **Competitive Edge** In a crowded digital marketplace, a standout website can give you a competitive advantage. It shows that you’re professional, modern, and invested in your business. 7. **Conversion Optimization** A strategically designed website guides users toward specific actions, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or contacting you for more information. * * * **What Material Do I Need to Gather for My New Web Design?** Before you start working with a web designer or agency, it’s important to gather the necessary materials to ensure a smooth and efficient design process. Here’s a checklist of what you’ll need: 01. **Brand Guidelines** Provide your logo, brand colors, fonts, and any other visual elements that define your brand identity. This ensures your website aligns with your overall branding. 02. **Content** Prepare all the text, images, videos, and other media you want to include on your website. This includes your homepage copy, about page, product or service descriptions, and blog posts. 03. **Target Audience Information** Share details about your ideal customer, including demographics, preferences, and pain points. This helps the designer create a website that appeals to your audience. 04. **Competitor Analysis** Provide examples of competitor websites you admire or want to differentiate yourself from. This gives the designer insight into industry trends and standards. 05. **Website Goals** Clearly define the purpose of your website. Are you looking to generate leads, sell products, or provide information? Your goals will influence the design and functionality. 06. **Sitemap and Navigation Structure** Outline the pages you want on your website and how they should be organized. This helps create a logical and user-friendly navigation system. 07. **Call-to-Actions (CTAs)** Identify the actions you want users to take on your website, such as “Buy Now,” “Contact Us,” or “Subscribe.” These should be prominently placed and strategically designed. 08. **SEO Keywords** Provide a list of keywords you want to target for search engine optimization. This ensures your website is optimized for visibility. 09. **Technical Requirements** If you have specific technical needs, such as e-commerce functionality, membership portals, or integrations with third-party tools, communicate these upfront. 10. **Inspiration and Examples** Share websites you like for inspiration. This helps the designer understand your aesthetic preferences and design style. * * * **What Will My New Web Design Do for My Business?** Investing in a professional web design can have a transformative impact on your business. Here’s how: 01. **Boost Credibility and Trust** A polished, professional website builds trust with your audience. It shows that you’re a legitimate business that cares about its online presence. 02. **Increase Traffic** An SEO-optimized website ranks higher in search engine results, driving more organic traffic to your site. 03. **Enhance User Engagement** A well-designed website keeps users engaged with intuitive navigation, compelling content, and interactive elements. 04. **Drive Conversions** A strategically designed website guides users toward taking action, whether it’s making a purchase, filling out a form, or contacting you. 05. **Improve Mobile Experience** With more users accessing websites on mobile devices, a responsive design ensures your site looks and functions perfectly on all screen sizes. 06. **Showcase Your Products or Services** A visually appealing website effectively highlights your offerings, making it easier for customers to understand what you provide. 07. **Strengthen Brand Identity** A cohesive design that reflects your brand’s personality helps you stand out and creates a memorable impression. 08. **Provide Valuable Insights** With analytics tools integrated into your website, you can track user behavior, measure performance, and make data-driven decisions. 09. **Support Marketing Efforts** Your website serves as the hub for all your digital marketing campaigns, from social media to email marketing. 10. **Scale with Your Business** A well-designed website is built to grow with your business, allowing you to add new features, pages, and content as needed. * * * **How Do I Maintain My New Web Design Going Forward?** Once your new website is live, the work doesn’t stop there. Regular maintenance is essential to keep your site running smoothly, securely, and effectively. Here’s how to maintain your new web design: 01. **Update Content Regularly** Keep your website fresh and relevant by regularly updating your blog, news section, or product offerings. This also helps with SEO. 02. **Monitor Performance** Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. This data can help you identify areas for improvement. 03. **Check for Broken Links** Regularly scan your website for broken links or outdated content. Fixing these issues improves user experience and SEO. 04. **Backup Your Website** Schedule regular backups to protect your website from data loss due to technical issues or cyberattacks. 05. **Update Software and Plugins** If your website uses a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, ensure that the core software and any plugins are up to date to maintain security and functionality. 06. **Optimize for Speed** Regularly test your website’s loading speed and optimize images, code, and other elements to ensure fast performance. 07. **Ensure Security** Implement security measures like SSL certificates, firewalls, and malware scans to protect your website and user data. 08. **Test for Compatibility** Regularly test your website on different devices, browsers, and screen sizes to ensure it works seamlessly for all users. 09. **Engage with Your Audience** Use your website as a platform to interact with your audience through comments, reviews, or contact forms. Respond promptly to inquiries and feedback. 10. **Plan for Future Updates** As your business evolves, so should your website. Plan for periodic redesigns or updates to keep your site aligned with your goals and industry trends. * * * **Finding the Right “Website Design Near Me”** Searching for “website design near me” is the first step toward creating a digital presence that truly resonates with your audience - a local web design business is always better on an important project like this. By understanding why web design matters, gathering the right materials, and maintaining your site over time, you can build a website that not only looks great but also drives real business results. Whether you’re working with a full web design agency or a freelance designer, investing in a professional website is an investment in your business’s future. So take the leap, and watch your online presence transform into a powerful tool for growth and success. **Call 01-6216866 or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) if you'd like to discuss your upcoming website build or design refresh - we'd be glad to chat it out with you.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Choose the Right Designer # Choosing The Right Website Designer It used to be that having the right product or service was all it took to run a successful business. No more! Today, highly successful businesses must also have an appealing website design to entice prospective clients to take a closer look at those great products and services they offer. And in order to create a great website, you need an experienced website design professional. Otherwise, the best product or service in the world won’t be enough to make your business a success! **Why good web design matters** In today’s highly digital age, prospective clients often get their initial impression about your business through online sources. And while social platforms can help create a positive impression, it is your web designer who has the ability to truly leave visitors with the most favourable impression about your site: \- Your website tells visitors a lot more about who you are and what you can do for them. Poor content can leave future clients with more questions than answers! \- Websites help to differentiate your business from your competitors \- Professional web designing practices can leave visitors with a sense of trust about your business. They’ll feel more confident placing an order or providing their credit card or personal data to your website \- Efficiently designed web sites can give visitors all the information they want, including the exact products and services they were looking for. And that means they won’t leave disappointed to browse at a competitor’s website! The work of professional web designing services is like a huge flashing neon sign on the digital highway that says: Pick me – I can help you. **Qualities of a great web designer** So, how do you find a professional web design services provider? What should you look for in order to separate run of the mill designers from the truly professional service providers? Well, here are some things for you to evaluate: \- Do they have a professional-looking web presence? \- Is your prospective website designer a part of a team, or are they “lone wolves” working on their own? \- Do they have experience in creating mobile websites? \- Have they designed business-critical websites for other small and medium enterprises? \- Does the website designing firm you plan to work with offer a whole host of allied services, like content creation, content management and consulting? \- Will you receive web hosting support from your web services provider? \- Do they provide on-going support, in case you have issues with your website once you go live? \- Is this design team committing to provide security updates and other design upgrades once the site has been implemented? \- Does this web designing agency offer you written contracts, with all their responsibilities and fees clearly documented? The answers to these questions will help you determine whether this is the agency you should work with. Most of these questions are designed to understand whether the service provider you are evaluating can help your business survive and thrive in today’s digital era. Move forward with the selection process only if you are satisfied that the web designer you are talking to has what it takes to create an appealing website. However, before you do make a final decision, make sure you: \- Speak with more than one web design service \- Ask to see samples of their work, preferably websites they may have designed for businesses in your niche \- Check for references – ideally via a phone call and/or through video interaction(Skype or Messenger) \- Thoroughly review the contracted terms and conditions to ensure everything that you discussed is fully documented Finally, while price should never be the deciding factor on which web designer to choose, you should do a cost comparison to ensure that you are receiving comparable value for the price you are paying. **Making the right web design choice** It’s clear then that, your choice of the perfect web design agency for your needs can impact more than just the quality of your website. In fact, choosing a “bad fit” web designer can pose serious risks to the very survivability of your business. Not only does a bad website prevent new customers from doing business with you, but poor web site design can cause existing clients to move elsewhere – to competitors with more professionally-designed websites. So, before you choose your next website designing agency, consider all of the factors discussed above, and then make your choice. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Visibility Tips # How To Get Your Website Noticed Increasing the visibility of a website involves creating a good online product in the eyes of your target market and making sure it is SEO friendly and Mobile Responsive. Social Media channels are a great way to leverage your website promotion efforts and get more target market visitors onto your site. **Beat The Odds With Good Website Marketing Planning** How to get noticed on the web is a question that crosses everyone’s mind the moment they are the owner of a website. While having a website in today’s competitive market is a must for every single professional organisation, it will do little good if you don’t attract good volumes of targeted website traffic. The odds are all stacked against you as there are more than a billion websites on the Internet and hundreds or thousands across some specific business categories. **A Combination Of Promotion Tools** If you are in a highly competitive business area you would have to trawl your way through years of online promotion and competition. So how do you improve your odds of making your website a success and increase your visibility? There is no single nugget of wisdom here that will make your website a hit unfortunately, but a number of individual measures can collectively go a long way in giving you the exposure that your business needs. Here are some best practices that help your website get noticed in the midst of real online competition. **Start With A Good Website** The genesis of high visibility on the web lies in a good website base. Unattractive web design, copied content and poor functionality are the enemy to high visibility and good search engine rankings. If you have a bad website product it will do little good for your brand reputation online even if you are able to attract web traffic to your website. So you must start with a good website core and hire the services of a website design agency that has a proven track record in web design projects. **Grab The Readers Attention** They would develop your site from scratch or redesign your existing website to create a product that works well in the face of competition from your most successful competitors. The site must be unique in its design and be attractive to look at as this will register in the minds of website visitors and increases the percentage of returning users. The site must also be easy to use and a PC and on smart phones. Web visitors must be able to access the info they want with ease. **Take Time With Your Website Content Preparation** Spend some time preparing your page content too because your website visitors will be reading it. Make sure it is well written and you have all the associated photos that you need. Video is a favorite website material now with most audiences so ask your suppliers if they have any video that you could use or perhaps see if you can get a cost-effective piece of video made for you. **Search Engine Optimization** It is estimated that 70-80% of fresh traffic to any website comes via the search engines and these figures are even more the case of start-ups as they haven't any core base of clients at the start. If your website isn’t search engine friendly you stand to lose out on the bulk of potential traffic. Hence building a SEO friendly site should be top of the list for your web designer. Ask them to show you SEO friendly, mobile friendly websites that they have built in the past and ask them to explain everything to you. **Keeping Up To Date** The SEO friendly website build for the web design company involves writing clean code that attracts the search engine crawlers, captivating content for the website visitors and the search engines, website sitemap submissions and avoiding any and all practices that are red flagged by Google and other search engines. The Search Engine algorithms keep changing regularly and your web designer agency needs to make sure that they follow the latest conventions. **Work On The 'On-Site' And 'Off-Site' SEO** That is the 'on-site' side of SEO. On the 'off-site' side of SEO you need SEO optimisation done too and your web agency can help you with that. The 'off-site' seo will take some months to start to embed itself into the google search rankings so it is a medium term marketing strategy. From day one of your new website you could chat to your web agency about Adwords which will have you at the top of page 1 on Google from day 1 while your SEO work is just starting. **Captivating Content** We mentioned in a previous point that good content was important but this definitely deserves another mention. The content on your website isn’t meant to just fill empty space or to showcase your literary skills. It has to deliver a strong, informative message on what your business stands for, what are its USPs (Unique Selling Points) and what separates you from your rivals. **Make The Website Content Easy To Consume** Do not test the patience of your audience with long paragraphs of text that are hard to understand. Make the content crisp and to the point and make it 'speak' to the target market. Fresh and unique content also improves your SEO score with Google and you can even start a blog that provides you with the opportunity to regularly post fresh content and interact with your users. The best websites are the ones that regularly add new content for Google to chew on and for website visitors to consume. You can do this in a blog or by adding new news pages or new product pages. **Mobile Responsive Website** According to the latest website statistics for Ireland the share of mobile traffic is above 50%. Mobile traffic has witnessed almost 1000 times increase compared to figures of 2009. This obviously shows the shifting trend among Internet users – from PC based website visitors to smart phone visitors. Thus you need to have a mobile responsive website that offers an engaging and easy to use website experience. **PC Users and Smart Phone Users Are Very Different Users** Bear in mind too that the smart phone device is quite different to the PC. The website visitors in both instances are often in different browsing modes and different locations so they often need different information. For example, in a lot of cases the mobile user may want the 'overview' where they PC visitor may want more information. Photos have to be optimised to display perfectly and clearly for smaller smart phone device screens and font sizes may need to be larger on mobiles. Your web design company can go through all of these issues with you when you're preparing your website content. **Spread The Word** Some street businesses in certain parts of the world would use their lung power to attract the attention of the passing customers – and on the web you need to do something similar by using Social Media. Make sure that you create a strong presence in the different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest. These allow you to actively engage with your audience and also gain from viral promotion. **Get Busy On Social Media** You can promote your products, services and brands in a very informal way on social media where users can spread the word for you. With social media you also do need to adhere to the good content rules we mentioned above. The social media audience like compelling content too so you need to grab their attention and show them something of interest and show them how to get more information from your business. These are a few simple ways in which you can promote your business online. Remember you need the services of a professional web design agency that adheres to the above best practice and prepares a carefully planned strategy and methodically executes it. About Author: MyIT is an experienced web design company in Dublin that has witnessed the shifting trends in the web design industry in the last 15 years. If you want to discuss any of the above with an excellent web team please call **01-6216866** or email **info@myit.ie** . ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Hosting Provider # Having The Right Website Hosting Provider **Understanding the importance of a****web hosting****service provider is a lot easier when put into everyday context. If you were to have a friend hosting a party in your honour, assuming the occasion was important to you, wouldn’t you want to ensure that the host is up to the task? Or would you just call the first person on your contact list and ask him/her to be your host?** **More Than** **Just** **Servers And Routers** The web directories for **web hosting** companies across **Dublin** and Ireland are filled with options for hosting your site – but which are the good ones? When you review some of those sites, you’ll likely be impressed by the infrastructure listed: - • 100% UptimeVPS Servers - • Redundant Routers - • SSD DRIVES AND Multi Core CPUs - • RAID-10 disk drive arrays - • …and a lot more In reality however, it’s more than just servers and routers that go into hosting your website. Here are four important aspects of keeping y7our website visible on the web that you should consider when selecting your hosting service provider: 1. **1\. Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, VPS, Cloud, Cloud Dedicated** **?** Just like hosting your party in a public place, along with other parties, versus having it at a friend’s private residence - your choice of hosting service will impact the performance and availability of your website. While “shared”, “semi-dedicated” or “dedicated” might all sound ok for you, you must be aware that other websites running on the same 'shared' **web hosting** server as yours will sometimes encroach on your websites performance - much like the loud music from the adjacent party would spill over into your garden. You need to carefully study the other forms of hosting too, including Cloud hosting, Cloud Dedicated or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). If all of this confuses you, then you need to speak with an experienced and professional **website management** agency first, before making a decision on what type of host will host your website. 2. **2\. Regular Host Maintenance** Would you be happy with a web hosting provider that does frequent maintenance to its servers/infrastructure during the working week? What about being “down for maintenance” for an hour on 2 consecutive working days? If your friend organised the party so that catering staff walked in and out of the venue every half-hour or so, wouldn’t that be a huge inconvenience to your guests? Beware of hosting services that overdo maintenance – it could cost your site too much in down time! And remember, a hosting company is USA doing 4am server updates that take down your website are not too pushed about your Irish website where the local time is 9am to 11am approx. 3. **3\. Payment P** **lans: Annual, Monthly?** You may come across companies offering **web hosting** in **Dublin** on annual (or even longer!) payment plans. While doing the maths, you may even discover that it is less expensive to sign a 12 or 24 month deal, compared to making monthly or quarterly payments. While in some cases the discount offered in annual payment may be worth it...beware of making such payments. If you are just launching your website, you don't know how well (or badly!) the site will perform in a year's time, necessitating a decision to switch service plans or providers. Why tie yourself to a service that you may need to discontinue or alter in a year’s time? Generally speaking the small print with those hosters states that your payment is non refundable so you'll be leaving plenty of money behind you that you can't get a refund on – even though you're moving to a new hosting company. 4. **4\. Disk Space And Bandwidth**: Returning to our analogy of your party: What if your host planned for 50 guests, but three times that number showed up instead? Should the additional guests be hosted? If not all of them, then who gets to stay and enjoy your hospitality, and which ones are turned away? When hosting a website, similar constraints and limitations may be applied on the amount of disk space and bandwidth you can use. However, beware of **web hosting** service providers who offer “unlimited” disk space or bandwidth (upload/download capacity). Look into the fine print carefully to make sure certain types of files or content (videos, graphics etc.) aren’t omitted from your ‘unlimited quota’. The detail in these contracts is extensive and you need to take a few hours to go through everything and make sure you're not going with a poor company that will limit your website growth and have you leaving them in a few months and even more expense to you. **A Party Worth Having** Choosing a provider for **web hosting** in **Dublin** is akin to making the tough decision on which friend to ask to host your party. If you choose the right host, then your party will be worth having. Choose the wrong one and that could be the start of a split. In today’s business environment, a website is your primary online identity. If it is hosted inappropriately, your business brand could be irreparably damaged, and in some instances forever destroyed. So, before you make that decision on picking a partner for hosting your website, think carefully about all of the points discussed above. Then, reach out to a professional **website management** company and ensure all of the items raised here are addressed to your satisfaction. If you have some unanswered questions about your hosting we'd be glad to go through all the options with you and find a solution that is perfect for your company. Call us on 01-6216866 or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) . ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Branding Tips # 5 Web Design Guidelines For Branding **Thoughts On Building And Maintaining Your Image Online** When casual visitors stop by your website, what do you think is the first thing that strikes them? It’s the quality of your website design! Remember: Every website visitor is a prospective client. And every prospect that walks away because of website designing flaws, is revenue that you could have potentially earned – but now wont. But lost revenue is probably the least of your worries. Have you considered the “hit” to your brand image and reputation that a shoddy website can deliver? **It’s All About Branding** A good web design service will tell you: It’s all about branding! In the hypothetical case of a “lost visitor” above, you may lose out on a couple of hundred Euros (or Pounds) worth of sale with this one deal that didn’t close. But that single visitor could influence about 155 other Facebook friends (that’s the number of average friends a Facebook user has. ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12108412/Facebook-users-have-155-friends-but-would-trust-just-four-in-a-crisis.html ). Assuming those friends, and their friends in turn, hear about the less than perfect browsing experience, in theory at least, poor web design could cause your brand to receive 24,025 (155 x 155) negative impressions – within a few minutes of that initial visit. Now – isn’t that a scary thought? Branding is what resonates with first-time visitors, making them want to come back again, and again…and again. And a website designing agency that can create a good brand impression for clients, will also ensure that others in the online universe hear about your brand. The question now is: What should you do on/with your website, in order to build and maintain your brand? **Web Site Design Branding Guidelines** There is no real “secret sauce” to ensuring your online presence projects your brand. However, the secret lies in how well the web designing services you work with follow these common-sense guidelines: **1) Think First:** Before you embark upon your branding journey, make sure you understand what you want your brand to stand for. Think in terms of single words (Service. Quality. Honesty. Choice), or small statements (“We’ll beat any price!”. “Satisfaction comes naturally!”) to get a sense of what your website should convey. **2) Be Conscious About Colours**: IBM = Blue. Coke = Red. Decide up-front what colour palette you wish to use to identify with, and then use that scheme across your website. A word of advice: Choose one (or no more than two) primary colours that will dominate the theme, and then blend them with secondary (or tertiary) colours that either match or contrast each other for effect. **3) Chose Fonts and Typefaces Judiciously:** If your web designer has a penchant for using too many fonts or styles across the site, it’s time for you to have a polite conversation with him/her. Researchers agree that too many different fonts and typefaces tend to disorient readers. In the ensuing confusion, visitors and prospective clients can’t relate to the brand message you are trying to convey. **4) Watch Your Tone:** How your website designer writes content or formats layout sets the tone of your brand. Excessive use of bold letters and 20-pitch banners conveys an image that you are “shouting” or “screaming” at your audience. Also, remember whom you are appealing to: If your audience is people under the age of 20, then you need to set a tone that resonates with them. **5) Go Beyond Websites:** Work with your web design agency to integrate all of these branding elements into every online presence that you maintain – not just your website. That means your Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram footprint should all reflect this brand. Image identity deviations across online media will lead to mass confusion amongst your followers/visitors. As you can see, brand creation through good web site design isn’t all that complicated. However, as many entrepreneurs and website owners have learned the hard way – it takes skill, experience and commitment to initially build, and then maintain your brand. Deviating slightly from your plan could cast your brand negatively, driving traffic away from the site. That’s why it’s important to work only with web designing services that understand the process of branding and imaging well. **Good Branding = More Sales Conversions** The math is really simple: The better your web designer can project your brand’s image through your online presences, the more visitors you’ll be able to convert into paying customers. And the first step in good branding starts with having an open discussion with the web designing agency responsible for building and maintaining your brand. And just as one single unimpressed visitor can give your website 24,025 bad reviews, a solitary visitor, who is impressed by your brand, can produce the inverse effect age promote your brand by referrals. But good web designing will not only boost the power of your brand’s image. It will also provide a powerful lift to your bottom line in terms of real revenue inflows. **Give us a call or email if you'd like to discuss any of the above.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Improve Website Content # How To Improve My Website Content Creating compelling website content is an art as well as a science. Inexperienced [web design](https://myit.ie/website-designer.html) companies will often create websites but not plan the content, or substitute content for 'website gadgets'. You don't want to fill your website with every app, gadget and gizmo available - you want to put in place great content and an attractive design that works for your industry. **Content Is King** On the busy internet website content is king and great content is absolute monarch. The way to attract visitors is by focusing on high-quality content. It is for the content that people will visit a website over and over again. And if the content is really exceptional, visitors might even bookmark it for repeated and easy access. Better still, they will likely share it with friends as a "Go To" site. The question is: How do you improve your content? **Building Your Niche** Unless you are a site that has no specific focus, and many great sites fall within this category, your website content should focus on a specific niche or two. The objective should be to develop and publish content that separates your site from the competition. Experts often say: - Narrow the focus - broaden the depth What this means is your content should focus on what you, or your company, does best. That way you'll have a lot more information to submit on a specialised area. However, the content must also be in-depth about your expertise area. If visitors need superficial content they could likely get it from any other websites. **Write To Engage** Remember, it is not just people that know the subject you specialise in that may visit your website. There will also be a percentage of your visitors - perhaps a small percentage - that are curious to learn more about what you do and what you stand for. Your website content should be created with a view to engage all types of visitors. Imagine if you could convert even a tiny portion of those "curious" visitors and turn them into "regulars" visitors. Wouldn't that be a great revenue generating opportunity? **SEO Is Essential** [SEO](https://myit.ie/seo-search-engine-optimisation.html) stands for Search Engine Optimisation. While it is first and foremost "people" that you should create content for, do not overlook Search Engine Spiders, Robots and Crawlers. These are search engine programs driven by intelligent website content sniffing algorithms - an example being Google's internet crawlers. Their main purpose is to: - Find content that is fresh - Check that websites are relevant and appropriate - Rate and rank your website based on its content - Confirm content on the site does not break any written, and often unwritten, rules of the search engine Therefore, when putting your content together you need to give SEO it's due consideration. That means well researched keywords, appropriate keyword packing density, judicious use of links, good topic headings, and a whole lot more. **Get Copywriter Help If Needed** While many website owners create their own content, some are too busy to spend time doing so. If you are one of those then you would be advised to consult with a professional website content producer before you publish any content on your website. Unprofessionally developed content could do your website more harm that you realise and with good, well researched content you can really grow your business - the choice is easy - spend time to create quality content for your website because that's what your website visitors and the search engines are looking for. **Have A Chat With Us** Give us a call on 01-6216866 and discuss your plans over the phone. You'll get lots of free advice and we can schedule a meeting to discuss your plans further if you like. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Update Costs # How Much Do Website Updates Cost? Doing website updates through the CMS (Content Management System) costs nothing if you do them yourself, and our website packages include training on the CMS so you and your staff can learn how to do the updates with ease. If you want us to do the updates for you we can do general web page updates for €80 (ex vat) per hour. Give us a call and we can give you an even more tailored quote once we know what work you're planning to do. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Keyword Research Techniques # How To Find Your Best Industry Keywords The keywords that drive traffic to your websites can be identified by you with a little work - and note that long tail search terms (search terms with 3/4 or more words) are also more valuable because they are associated with more specialised requirements and more qualified traffic. To help you choose the right keywords and phrases and be able to target them, here's how to identify them: The best keyword search technique you can use is to try and get to the keywords before any one else, but that is not always possible. The above is possible if you already have knowledge about a new product or service and can tell your customers about it before anyone else - speed matters. You can be on the cusp of the latest news by keeping up to date within your industry online - watch for breaking industry news, new product licenses, check on youtube for news about your industry etc. **Use Your Website Logs To See What People Are Searching For** The next best technique is less glamorous but it is also far more applicable to a wider range of businesses. Always look for what people are looking for on your own website (by using your website visitor logs or google analytics) and analyse the search keywords and look for questions. Someone could have landed on your site by asking a question e.g. "how can i make pc faster without more ram" and perhaps you can build a service around that. But, this technique will also give you keywords which have a conversion capability and will bring you a stronger SEO performance e.g. a service to "make pcs faster". You should continually think about this keyword-search topic because no one tool or technique will give you all the answers you want or were expecting. And you should dedicate a little time and energy to it regularly and also re-assess it constantly. This task is frequently done too hastily and with little thought and this impacts on the entire success of the campaign. **Use Google Adwords To Further Research Your Key Phrases** Just like SEO keywords, paid search keywords (google adwords keywords) can tell you a lot about your most important search terms. Pay per Click (PPC) (Google Adwords) has a tactical element to it which can help you identify the keywords that will make a big difference to your business - e.g. you can see the volume of searches for different keywords for your industry (and it's country specific), you can see the per-click value that Google attributes to them etc. You should consider running an experimental PPC campaign to help you get more information on keyword-use volumes and to also help you find out more about click-through rates (a click-through is when someone finds you on google and clicks on your advert or listing to find out more), since the 3rd party tools like Google Keyword Tool are not necessarily 100% accurate or they may have no figures at all for the products/services you sell even though there is traffic there for those keywords. Always look for keywords which convert well so that your extra web visitors are turning into customers and not just browsers. Doing good keyword analysis can help you project how much your web marketing is going to cost and how many sales you can make from the marketing. If you have any questions you need answering why don't you email info@myit.ie or call us on 01-6216866 and get more information? ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Secure Your Website Name # Get Your Ideal Website Name By Acting Quickly So, you’ve been working on a website and marketing strategy for your business. You have the business name picked out. You’ve hired a professional designer to create graphics for your website, and you have produced marketing material tailored around the new company name – but what about your website name? When you go to register your domain name – will it be available? Did you check? Some other company could have registered it. Perhaps, you saw that it was available to register just a few week ago – and now it’s no longer available. You may have thought of an alternative and suitable website name under an appropriate Top-Level Domain (TLD) (e.g. .ie .com .co.uk) – but your web design agency tells you that it too has been taken. All your hard work and investment in creating that company brand and logo, and all your marketing collateral, is wasted? **Speed Is of The Essence** When it comes to getting your website domain name of choice, as any good website design agency will tell you, speed is of the essence. If you want your business to be easily recognisable, you need to have a memorable name within the appropriate TLD (like .ie, .com, .co.uk, .fr, .de etc.). Many internet-based organisations in fact rush to get their website names registered as the number one step in establishing their company and online presence. Everything else then follows. If you are in the process of developing your website design strategy, then here are some facts that you should keep in mind before proceeding any further: **a)** If you have an idea that needs a web presence, don't wait too long - Act quickly to get the preferred website name under your chosen TLD. **b)** The most effective way to do that is to contact your website builders immediately, to see how you can get an appropriate domain name and website name registered. They can register it for you and register it in your name. **c)** A well-known web designing “secret” is brevity of website addresses. Ideally, look for shorter names (they are easy for your audience to remember and use). Murphyengineers.ie is better than danielmurphyengineeringserviceslimited.ie . **d)** Look for names that are relevant to your niche - "ShoeRepairs" if you are in the shoe mending business; "KeepingBooks" if you are in the book-keeping/accounting business etc. The more relevant your website name is to the business you are in, the more web traffic you are likely to attract. You can also add in your name here e.g. diamondshoerepairs.ie . **e)** When it comes to naming your website, yet another web site design “secret” is to always look for options, if you find that your TLD of first-choice isn’t available. Remember - while short names are prized - they have been largely registered years ago, certainly for the .com TLD ...but there may be exceptions. A good web design company can help you look for alternate names by using powerful search tools like register365.com . If diamondshoerepairs.com is already registered, would you consider diamondshoerepairs.co ? **f)** Another critical point to remember is the difference between dot Com ( . com ) names and dot Ie ( .ie ) names. If a .com website name IS AVAILABLE, you can register it as yours, as soon as you see that it is available. That is NOT the case for Irish (.Ie) website names. Irish law states that you be an Irish company or entity in order to be allowed by the IEDR.ie to register it. That’s where the benefits of working with an experienced web designing agency comes in. They know the rules of the game, and can save you lots of time and money too. **g)** Even if your original name of choice is not available, that doesn’t mean your website design efforts should come to a halt. Perhaps there are new TLDs (like .accountant, .cafe, .club, .dentist, .furniture and even .Irish) that can fit within your overall web presence strategy. **Creative Alternate Website Name Strategies** While moving quickly can pay big dividends in your search for a good website name, working with a professional Irish website designing agency can also reap huge rewards. They know how to experiment with your company name and industry keywords and, with their experience, they can propose creative alternate website naming strategies that you might not have thought about. For instance, if you wanted “dublincafe.ie”, and found that it was gone, they may propose options like “cafedublin.ie”, “dublin.cafe” or even “dublincafe.co”. This introduces much needed flexibility in your web site name approach, which could result in not losing all that time, effort and investment that we spoke about at the start of this post. Your website agency could also help you with other ways of getting the website name that you want. For instance, if your desired website name is no longer available, and you don't see it being used, it's possible that it is for sale. Your web developers can work with you to help you find the registered owner’s contact details, and then make them an offer for the name. The bottom line: Acting quickly, and thinking “out of the box” can land you the website names of your choice and save you large amounts of time, effort and money. **If you have any website name questions give us a call on +353-1-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Future Web Design Trends # Web design ideas for the coming 12 months **Web design ideas for your website in the coming 12 months: An early start will put you way ahead of your competition.** If there’s one thing we can say for sure about the future, it’s that the next 12-months are about to be some of the most challenging for business owners and web administrators. So, you need to position your website design now to brace those challenges and turn them into opportunities! The price of delayed action Procrastination is a human trait and we are all guilty of it. But if you ask any web designing agency what they think about inaction in the face of oncoming changes to how we do business, they’ll readily admit that business owners will pay a huge price for such inaction: • It’ll cost you more to maintain websites with dated technology • Fewer operating systems and web hosting services will support your website design as you move forward • Hereto “loyal” clients and visitors will quickly switch to other websites and suppliers, because your outdated web design won’t connect with their devices In short, website owners and administrators who fail to anticipate the evolution of web trends 12-months or more from today, will likely have a web site design that causes them to lose, rather than gain, visitor traffic. A competitor’s web designer will likely poach them away. And you know what they say about converting casual web site visitors into paying clients: It’s just 40% about conversion and 60% about getting them to show up for conversion! **Coming website designing trends** So, how should business owners and entrepreneurs position their websites to leverage developments over the next 12-months or more? Well, here are three web designing trends that you should start embracing now, in order to make your websites future proof: **1) Embrace mobile first**: Over the past several years, Google and other search engines have been rewarding web designing services that have vigorously promoted their customers’ mobile sites. Most observers see this emphasis, from "mobile too" to "mobile first", as an imperative for a move to "mobile only" in future. If web site owners are stuck on "mobile too" iterations of their websites well into the next 12-months or so, it’ll be extremely challenging (and costly!) for them to catch up to "mobile only". Speak with your web design team now, so they can start that transition sooner rather than later. **2) Create Voice User Interfaces (VUIs):** The future of voice activated devices is already here! All leading device manufacturers are embedding voice directed features into their operating platforms. And within the next 12-months or so, with the proliferation of mobile devices and their status as the web surfing tool of choice, voice enabled website features will become the default, not an option. You need to work with your web designer at the earliest, to map out the key areas of your websites’ VUI. An early start to this initiative will give you more time to test the interface and even run it in pilot for several months. **3) Less** **Blogging … more Vlogging:** Web design services always encourage their clients to add a Blog section to their websites. This is not only a great marketing tool, but an excellent way to establish your site as a domain authority (especially in the eyes of search engines!). However, over the next 12-months or so, you’ll see more consumers thirsting for greater video content and less text based blogs. You might ask: Why? Well, we’re on the cusp of having 5G technology go mainstream. When that happens, every website designer will start pushing out more video and graphic intensive content – because it’ll be cheaper and faster to download. You need to start discussing video blogging (Vlogging) with your web designing agency today, so that your website is positioned to take full advantage of this new trend in the coming months! While many businesses are already incorporating all these three trends into their websites, the rate at which this evolution is taking place is measured. However, a web design that already integrates some/all of these features will be much better positioned to claim market share from sites that haven’t yet started to embrace these trends. **Plan of action** To help you map out a plan of action that’ll prepare your website for a smooth transition into the next 12-months or so, you need to open a dialogue with your website designing agency at the earliest. The agenda for such a discussion should include: • A complete web site audit, with a view of assessing where your website stands with respect to your competitors • A list of web design priorities that your service provider suggests you should focus on to position your site for the coming technological changes • An implementation plan to help your web designer implement those priorities in terms of the short, intermediate and longer term steps The longer you procrastinate the harder it will be to catch up with competitors who have already started embracing these trends. So, start working with your web design team today to start future proofing your own website. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website CMS Benefits # Why do I Need a Website CMS? In the past building a website involved building every page as a static page using web page creation software and pushing these pages through FTP to the web server so that they could be seen on the web. While this is perfect for small and simple websites, it brings forth serious limitations for modern website and websites with additional content. Building websites using a [Content Management System](https://myit.ie/cms-website-content-management-systems.html) (CMS) offers a host of benefits which we'll discuss below. While some might feel that using a CMS is going to add to the complexity and expense of creating a website, once you have navigated the often short learning curve, you will find that this is not true. Using additional tools does not necessarily make things more complex or expensive - especially since the vast majority of websites are now built with a cms in the background. **What is a CMS?** A CMS is a piece of software installed on your [website hosting](https://myit.ie/website-hosting.html) server. The same way you would install a website editor on your computer, a web designer will install the CMS software directly on your website so you can edit web pages. You are then expected to use your web browser to log into the website and use the CMS software to add photos, articles and any other thing you wish to display on your site. However, it is important to note the differences between a CMS system and website builder code provided by the web hosting company. With a CMS, you have control over the software and the visual design of your website as well as the end product - the website itself. What you create is in no way tied to the web hosting company. Should you need to change hosts, you can carry the entire website, lock, stock and barrel, to the new web hosting company. Secondly, a CMS is much more than just a website builder. You are able to use it in the creation of online communities (e.g. a social networking website), where your visitors are able to create their own accounts and have access to their own personal member pages. **A CMS Has An Array Of Tools At Your Disposal** Blog software is a subset of [CMS software](https://myit.ie/cms-website-content-management-systems.html). Though it is like CMS software, it has much fewer features and is designed for individuals who are just looking for an avenue to blog (publish short articles). However, with increased capabilities in blogging software, nowadays, they should perhaps be considered fully-fledged CMS systems. A website builder system is a piece of code that a lot of web hosting companies provide for their clients in order for them to be able to design and build a simple website. In a lot of cases these are not suitable for novices and it does take a considerable amount of time to end up with a comprehensive, professional looking website ... which you then have top move and install as you need on your hosting platform. **How Does A CMS Work?** In the traditional web development model, the designer builds the site; content contributors write articles and website editors submit content to the webmaster with directions as to where all this content goes. The webmaster has to have a strong knowledge of how websites function and has an intricate understanding of markup languages. The webmaster submits content to the web server via FTP and the site visitor could now be able to view the new content. The above process was inefficient as the length of time it took from writing content to publishing is was quite long. This led to content being late and of no relevance especially for urgent topics that had to be visible to the website visitors within a short amount of time. With a CMS in place, developers create page templates for content so that pages are generated from these templates for the desired new content pages. This user-friendly interface does not require intricate knowledge of website coding languages to update website information. Therefore people who want to update or contribute to your website, no longer have to wait for the webmaster to upload the content. This ensures that the latest information is updated almost instantaneously. **The Advantages of a CMS?** Firstly, with a CMS setup in place, you are able to separate content from code. Using static web pages, you have a mixture of both code and content, all in one place. This means that only an individual comfortable with editing website code can and should maintain the website. With a CMS in place regular end users can edit web pages. Secondly, the CMS comes with rich web features like RSS feeds and web blogs. It also means that you can quickly add a blog post to your website. This is particularly important if you wish your site to remain relevant in search engine results as well as keep your site fresh and keep your visitors engaged all the time. Thirdly, a CMS allows you to automate the process of creating particular pages. For example, you can have a page displaying a list of current and upcoming industry events in Dublin which is important to your business and customers. A CMS provides support for databases that can store the new events and have the next upcoming events automatically added to the events page as needed. When an event passes, the CMS can remove the event details - all this is done automatically to delete entries from your site and without you needing to lift a finger. When your website is large and complicated, installing a CMS provides you with a host of tools that will assist you in managing this large amount of content. This is because you do not need to learn markup language, and there is no need for a highly trained [website administrator](https://myit.ie/website-management.html) to create and update the website pages. When configured properly, the CMS can become a user management system with user controls controlling who can have edit, collaborate and author various sections of content within your website. **Other Benefits Of Using A Website CMS:** - Quick Turn Around Time (TAT) when making changes - More flexibility - Reduction of duplicate content - More allowance for growth of your site - Better website security - Fast content creation - Low website maintenance costs - Better website navigation - [Search engine friendly](https://myit.ie/seo-search-engine-optimisation.html) content For the above reasons, it is crucial that you consider building your site or sites with a Content Management System and let the CMS make your website management much easier. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Agency Services # Web Design Agencies – What Else Can They Do? The popular belief is that when you need a website designed, or when there are changes you need to make to the layout of your website, you call your web design agency and they’ll help you with the task. That was in days gone by though. Much has changed, and the web agency today has evolved into more than a designer of websites. In fact, you need to think “web/IT consulting” in order to comprehend the full range of services that today’s web service provider’s offer. Read on to discover what else they can do for you and how your web design agency may be able to help you in areas you hadn't considered. **More Than Just Pretty Sights!** A pretty website is indeed a great sight to behold, but to be successful on the internet requires more than a great site layout and well-crafted text and pictures. With the help of the right website design agency, you can harness everything that you need to ensure success on the internet: - **• Pictures Paint A 1000 Words:** While you could take your smart phone and take pictures of your products and your sales team, it really takes a professional to bring out the best in photos for your website. Most agencies have extensive contacts in the digital media sector and the publication industry. Use those contacts to help you choose the right photographer – they'll know talented photographers that will not charge the earth and will get you the results that you want. - **• Move Your Visitors To Action:** Unless your website has compelling “Call to action” buttons and boxes, you may not be able to convert a good proportion of your website visitors into paying clients. Today’s web developers rely heavily on videos to move visitors to action. The web agency you work with can help you produce powerful video content that “tells and sells” your business. We're all drawn to TV screens and videos on a website – we just like moving pictures. So why not get a quality, sales focused video for your homepage and makes you stand head and shoulders above all your competitors? - **• Content Is King:** The most beautifully designed website, with all the bells and whistles, can’t alone make you grab market share – unless you have well planned and equally moving content. Professional web agencies can also help you plan what needs to be said on your website and how it should be said. They can then help you build compelling content to appropriately compliment the awesome web designs they create. There are lots of moving parts on each web page so get your web design agency to help you bring everything together. - **• Branding Yourself:** You need your company to stand out from the completion, otherwise your presence will not be noticed on the web. A good web design agency can help you create powerful logos, stunning corporate themes and exceptional product presentations that will resonate with your customer base. Maybe your current logo is great but maybe it's not. Maybe it just needs a redraw – talk to a premium web agency and they'll go through some ideas and thoughts with you on your brand and your target audience. - **• Targeted Messaging:** Our world is a unique composition of multi-generational individuals. From 'Baby Boomers' to 'Millennials', and from 'Generation Xers' to 'Generation Yers' – we all respond differently to what we hear, read and see. A professional website design agency can help you position your products and services appropriately, for each type of consumer - and they can craft unique messages that resonate with each type of demography that visits your website. Each website visitor will feel as though your website is speaking specifically to them – and that’s the power of targeted messaging. - **• Website Hosting:** All of your time, hard work and expense in creating a web presence will be wasted if your website is down too often. People will presume that your company is somewhat undependable if your website is undependable. Without a premium website hosting service to support your site you won’t be accessible when and where future clients need you. Working with a quality website designing agency to also host your website offers a one-shop solution to all your web presence needs. You’ll have a reliable partner that manages your site and support, and a dependable website that’s always open for business for your customers. As with any other service provider however, it’s essential that you spend time picking the right agency to work with. There are hundreds of options but very few are experienced, dependable full-service providers. Speak on the phone to a range of providers and then go and meet a few that you think could be a good fit for your business. Ask them what can they do for you over the coming 3-5 years and how they'll achieve that. **Reaching Out Is The Key** As discussed, today’s website designing agency is a team that does more than just HTML coding or Java scripting for your website. The very fact that they can do those things (HTML and Java ‘stuff’), gives them a unique insight into how website visitors interact with websites, and how to enhance that experience. As a result of those exceptional insights, your web design agency can be an invaluable ally in your internet marketing strategy. They can offer you the benefit of their experience that spans from planning and designing websites and associated content, to strategising how to position yourself online in order to draw more traffic and increase sales. The key however, to taking advantage of these opportunities, is to connect with a knowledgeable web agency, and discuss all your needs in detail and see if they're speaking your language. If they can, then they can then build an effective web strategy for your business. **If you have any questions about how we can support your entire web presence and make you operate at a higher level then give us a call on 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Design Trends 2025 # Business Website Design Trends in 2025 And Beyond: **What Small Businesses Should Expect** For small to medium businesses, web designing is never a static activity – it’s constantly evolving. Every year, new web technologies come into play, making older ones dated. If site owners don’t keep their eye on the ball, they could miss out on some exciting web features and functionality – at best. At worse however, there’s a lot more at stake. Read on to find out what’s at stake, and what new trends to expect from your web design agency in 2025 and beyond. **More Than Just A Pretty Website** As new web technologies emerge, it’s essential for website owners to ensure that their websites are keeping up with the technical and technological changes. Not doing so can mean more than just not having a “pretty” website. Often, online marketers that quickly embrace new web technologies have first mover advantage. What that means is that they can quickly overtake their competitors, grabbing competitor market share in the process. Savvy web site design companies continually watch for emerging trends, and then act quickly to update or modify client websites to incorporate some of those new technologies. Here are a few trends in designing savvy websites, which have emerged since 2025 began, and that are expected to continue well beyond the year…and into 2026 and beyond: **a) Be Visual:** Consumer website viewing patterns have changed significantly over the past few years. Today, web design professionals are noting that their customers are asking them to incorporate more visual content, because their own clients are demanding that from their websites. Website visitors today want a lot of info fast…but they don’t have time to read long-winded text. Videos, animations, info-graphics are the way of the future. They enable the website owner to display product or service information, in an easy-to-process way, using clever graphic symbols and layouts, videos etc. **b) Be Strategic:** While web pages should continue to be designed with aesthetic appeal in mind, online marketers are now being more calculated in their site layouts. Landing pages are being more strategically designed to pack a bit more marketing ‘umph’ for the site. Businesses are embracing website design techniques which leverage up-selling and bundling of relevant and related products and services. Shopping cart designs should be undertaken with a view of ‘prompting’ customers to buy more – instead of just checking out with one or two items. 'talk' to you customers on the site - remind them that this product or service works perfectly with this other product or service here. Ask them do they want a call to help them make their mind up? Offer them a trail, if your business allows that, or perhaps a free consultation. **c) Social Validation:** Any professional working with a smart web designing agency knows the power that social media plays in online marketing today. Tap into social media and integrate those platforms into your website design. Consumers today crave social validation. So why not link your web pages to your Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram sites and provide them with an opportunity to validate your site in the process? **d) Be Convincing:** The online ‘connected world’ of 2025 and beyond offers exceptional web designing opportunities to convince consumers that YOUR product/service is what they want – NOT the competitors. Marketers are adding User Stories, Testimonials and Personal Reviews from satisfied customers to be more convincing about their offerings. The result: Visitors tend to be convinced about the value of a product or service that someone with their own background and social standing recommends. **e) Use Card Layouts:** 2025 has seen a growing website designing trend towards the use of Card layouts. These are Pinterest-like design features that separate blocks of content to provide a more reader-friendly layout. Expect more and more of your competitors to jump on this bandwagon too, because it makes websites cleaner-looking and easier to view. Other trends that 2025 has brought include the phasing away of annoying pop-up ads, and the toning down of pesky Live-chat sidebars and messages. Website owners seem to also prefer minimalist designs; where non-value-added bells and whistles are being shunned in favour of cleaner-looking web design and easy to follow layouts. **What The Future Holds** As website owners see more of their competitors embracing some of these newer trends, they too will start demanding that the web design agency supporting them offer the same choices. However, for those that hesitate and take a “wait and see” approach to making the necessary updates to their sites, opportunities may be lost with each passing day. If you are one of those site owners or business managers still considering whether to embrace some of these new trends, you need to contact your web designing agency to get the ball rolling. These trends will persist for the rest of 2025 and beyond. Act now to take full advantage of them. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Build Time # How Long Does A Website Take To Build? A small starter website, where you have your text and images nearly to hand, and perhaps you already have a website name and logo, could be built in a few weeks. A bigger website takes more planning and lots of material has to be gathered and arranged - so website builds will range from weeks to months. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Maintenance Tips # 6 Tips On Keeping Your Website Up To Date The online face of your organisation is your website. It might be relatively easy to create a website with the help of a good web design company but maintaining a successful website is something that needs to be worked on continuously and will take some planning. This is the place where your prospective clients will be visiting before and during initial conversations with your company. Maintaining an up to date and useful website for the web visitors is essential and below are some pointers on how to do that. **1\. Responsive Web Design** In today’s world users are not restricted to accessing your website from home or work using a desktop PC or laptop - they'll also access your website using a smart phone, tablet, net book or e-reader. Responsive web designs are now the standard for the industry. A responsive web design is a way of making a single website work across all browsers and devices. This can mitigate the cost and time of creating different versions of your website for different devices. The existing website can then be relatively easily reviewed and updated as required by making changes to just one website 'system'. When you look around the web you will see that some of the current trends include parallax effects with big fonts and retina display images – but in 18/24 months a new website design trend will be in place and you may want to make your website design keep pace with the trends. With a single responsive web design you just need to update one website 'theme' and that will be reflect across all devices and browsers. With a professionally built responsive design you're also future proofing yourself for new devices that will come to market in the next few years as the responsive design is 'fluid' and stretchy' so it can adapt to all displays perfectly irrespective of the device the site is being viewed on. **2\. Relevant And Updated Content** First impressions are the best impressions and this idea applies perfectly to a first time visitor to your website. Easy to read web pages, great look and feel, and the latest up to date information all entice the visitor to stay on your website for longer and read more content and be more impressed by your ability to look after their product/service needs. Various studies show that visitors are not reading entire web pages word for word, but they are extracting the important words and highlighted paragraphs, headings, bold text etc. While updating the web content, identify the most important data that your web visitor should see when they scan through the document and design accordingly by highlighting keywords and headings. It will not be a good user experience for your website visitor if your web pages do not contain the most up to date information – so you need to read your own website regularly and ensure that everything is up to date. This is one of the most important jobs that your website does so you need to allocate this job to someone so that it gets done regularly. This also will improve your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) too by having content that is continually updated with highlighted headings etc. **3\. Social Media & Blogging** The quickest and easiest way for your website to reach out to a mass audience is to have a strong social media system in place. Each of these social media websites are intended for different purposes. Based on how you want to interact with your end users, you may want to plan how to use these social media platforms. Think about which platforms are you competitors using? Do they use Facebook? all of them? none of them? If you see that all your competitors are using e.g. twitter then you should consider using twitter too. Blogging is another useful tool to use to encourage your customers to come back to your website frequently to read the new articles, updates and comments on previous articles. This can have a very positive impact on your SEO as well. Some of your blog articles can generate very unique streams of information and commentary that make for compelling reading for your industry – and you don't have to write all of it either! You only need to generate one quality blog article and the blog readers will provide the commentary and you can audit and manage this commentary and ensure that the commentary is on-topic, useful and appropriate. **4\. Use Your Web Design Company To Help With Updates** You may find that you don't have the time or staff resources to do updates on your own site regularly, yet you realise that you do need to keep your website up to date. This is where your web design company could help you. They are experts in getting content onto websites and they can do this through your existing CMS (Content Management System) or otherwise. As well as doing the updates they are also experts on what kind of content you should have on your website and they would also have good contacts for professional writers who could help you to write articles about new products/services in your industry as blog articles. Having a word with your web design team would be a smart first step to see what they can do for you, how long it would take and what it would cost. **5\. Client Testimonials** Your satisfied existing customers can give a huge boost to the rest of your business. Adding Client testimonials is an inexpensive way of enhancing the credibility of your company, your products and services. The best testimonials share the following characteristics: Concise, Credible, Specific, Outcome oriented. You probably have a few clients in your mind already, that you get on really well with, who would gladly give you a glowing reference so you should start with them. Make sure you include the most recent client testimonials to your website design too. Customers who visit your website would not be that interested in doing business after seeing testimonials that are 3/4 years old. **6\. Study Your Website Visitor Stats** It is always good to do an analysis on your website visitors statistics and on the conversion rates - this is the percentage of visitors who finally turned out to be customers. The stats will show you a feast of information about your website including: what pages your visitors are visiting, what pages they are not visiting, what pages do your web visitors leave from. This will give you an idea of the areas of improvement that are needed in your website which can increase your sales lead conversion rates. You can also see from the stats the pages that may need new content or more content. Once you have rewritten a web page remember to study the web stats for the coming week and see if they have changed as a result of the new web page content you added. There are many other ways to improve the conversion rates - one example would be to give the good headlines. Headlines are the first thing a visitor reads, so giving the right headlines can increase the conversion rates hugely. **Think About The Customer** You need to have a good think about your website content after it goes live - you need to keep it up to date and accessible to your visitors. Think about them - what do they want to find on your web pages and how do they want to access that information. Those answers will help you to decide what up\[dates you need to make on a continual basis.\ ## Importance of Mobile Websites # Web design: Do I really need a mobile website? When you engage a professional **web designer** to create your personal, corporate or small business website, one of the first questions you are likely to get asked is: Do you need the site to be mobile-enabled? The correct response, in all likelihood, should be a resounding “Yes!” Let’s explore why. **A Mobile World** It used to be that entrepreneurs, business owners and company executives had offices where they conducted most of their business; and going “out of office” meant stepping out for a quick lunch break, or for a couple of hours to meet with a client. Today however, all that has changed, and your **website design** must reflect that seismic shift. Chances are that, if you want to reach a busy customer or potential client today, he or she will be “on the go”. That does not mean they are out of reach. On the contrary, even when out of the office, most business owners are on their smart phone for extended periods – often 5 to 6 hours of the business day. For them, it is essential that they be in touch with their current clients, business partners and future clients. The question is: Is your website smart enough to be there for them if they need your products or services, or information on them, while “on the go”? **Speed And Agility Matters** Any **web development** company can put up a mobile-enabled website for you in no time. The question is: How agile and convenient is it to use “on the go”? - • If one of your clients (or prospects) is trying to look you up quickly, while on the road (at a traffic stop, in the train, while commuting, or while dashing in and out of meetings), does your website allow him/her to quickly find you? - • If your website is locatable, can they easily get to the information they need, about you or your products and services? - • Is your **website design** optimised with the right information for busy sales prospects that are viewing your web pages on a 4 inch screen and later on a huge Mac computer monitor? These are the considerations that need to be kept in mind if you wish to have a website that supports your sales work with your target audience. In a busy world of texting and instant messaging, the speed, agility and usability of your website really matters. If you fail to answer “Yes” to any of the above questions, then it’s time for you to seriously consider updating your site to reflect what your audience wants and expects. You definitely need a mobile website - failure to do so is inviting your competitors to move in and grab your market share and your customers! **The 8-Second Challenge** So what should you do in order to ensure you have an effective mobile web presence? Firstly, your **web designer** should consider the realities of our new mobile world. [Research](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/) shows that most individuals that use mobile devices have limited attention spans – down from 12 seconds in 2000, to around 8 seconds today. And that means you have a very limited window to grab your viewers interest – or the competition will! Here’s what you can do to make sure you stay ahead of the game: - • Make sure the layout of your mobile website isn’t leading to unnecessary confusion – simple and clean is what you want! Remember, it's 8 seconds of attention span. - • Consider whether you need separate pages, or different content for mobile websites. Mobile websites should be “lighter” (devoid of heavy graphics or video content) so they are quicker to load and easier to navigate. - • Do some field testing of your website and its content. Go on a road trip with friends, and get them to search for, access and navigate through your website. Ask them to be brutally honest and tell you what they found. You need the truth for the test to be useful. - • Did they reach the content they wanted in record time? Did they find what they were looking for without any problems? Were they looking for something else – which they could not find? Did they enjoy the experience of surfing through your site? What devices and screen sizes did they use? If your “test subjects” were able to get everything they needed from your mobile website; and if you were able to keep them engaged within the crucial 8-second window, then you may be well positioned to survive and thrive in the new paradigm known as the 'mobile revolution'. **If, however, you are not satisfied with what you see, then it’s time for you to consult with a professional web development company like MYIT and get the help you need to really 'go mobile'!** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Hosting Pitfalls # Web Hosting - Common Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them If you are new to the online world, you probably may not be aware that there are two main components to getting a successful online presence: Great web design, and equally great web hosting. And since both of these sides to your website are so entrenched, it’s sometimes difficult to decipher what issues you might face if you choose the wrong hosting company. **Making Sense Of It All** Just as it takes a good architect and an equally good builder to create that dream house for you, so too working with the right web designing company and the right web hosting service is vital to maintain a solid, safe and reliable online presence for your business. When it comes to creating your website, working with a good design company will give you that “full service” experience – where you end up with exactly what you want. The same applies to business standard website hosting – you need high-quality hosting that’s been tested over many months and years by a company you trust e.g. your web design company. **Here are some points to keep in mind when making the choice of a new web hosting company:** **1\. Often It's The Hosting Company's Fault:** When things go awry with your website, it’s not uncommon to think that the blame lies with the website developer or designer. While that may be true in some cases, most times the issue lies with the web hosting service – which provides the infrastructure (high-end servers (computers)) on which your website “resides”. If you're getting a web hosting service from a premium web design agency then they will ensure that the hosting they provide your website is high quality. A lot of work goes into this from server monitoring to server software updates. **2\. Frequent Server Downtime Can Be Avoided:** One of the key challenges faced by businesses is that their websites may often be “down”. Servers at the hosting company can go offline; DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks on those servers can disrupt committed web server up-times; and “routine” server maintenance may put your website out of commission for extended periods of time. Quality hosting services reduce these down times to a minimum, and maintenance work is carried out throughout the night while you and your customers are fast asleep. In the case of low quality hosting companies, downtime could be as frequent as every other day, which translates into a huge loss of revenue and lost opportunities. Since they’ve been in the business for a while, front-line web designing companies steer their clients away from poor quality web hosting services and they know the good apples from the bad. It's vital, after spending good money on a website, that you are online all the time. Your website being offline reflects badly on your business brand – especially if it is an ongoing issue. **3\. Customers & Google Dislike Slow Page Load Times:** Even when the site is up and running, with a poorly chosen web hosting service, your clients and potential customers may still face numerous challenges with accessing your website. Some hosting companies may only offer minimal “pipes” from and to their servers, resulting in excruciatingly slow response times to access your site. If you see your web pages taking 4 seconds or more to load a web page then you need to call in the experts to see what the issue is. As [Google explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpMfx_Zie2g&feature=youtu.be), site speed is a critical factor in ranking and rating your website. While web design and website build choices certainly play their parts in determining speed, the hosting company’s lack of investment in faster servers, switches, hubs and routers can prove decisive in compromising your websites’ rating in the eyes of search engines like Google and Bing. **4\. Bad Support Is As Bad As Bad Web Servers:** Very often, low quality hosting firms don’t have strong customer service operations. That means when your site does go down, or you are experiencing extremely slow web page load times, you might have to wait a day or two before you get someone to fix the issue for you – or even a whole day just to first look at your support ticket! The hosting service you use is a long-term relationship – it's not much good that you website has alive all of last month when it's been down for the past few hours or a day and you can't contact anyone to fix that. The bottom line is that you lose business and your reputation is damaged. **Navigating Through This Hosting Minefield** It may be tempting to take up a low-rated web hosting company on a “lowest price offer” deal, but consulting with your web design partner before signing on the dotted line will save you many a headache down the line: • Good web design companies have good reputations to protect. They won’t deliberately steer you into a web hosting nightmare. That nightmare for you would be a nightmare for them too as they're a conscientious company who wants the best service for you. • Savvy designing firms have inside industry knowledge that you, as a business owner, may not be privy to. Trusting in their judgement will leave you with a much better “web service & support” experience – the best of both the web design and web hosting worlds. Because of the front-facing relationship they have with you, you may be very aware of everything your web designer does for you, but lurking behind the scenes is another powerful partnership that you can’t afford to ignore – your website hosting service. **If you want both aspects of your website to function in harmony, it is vital that you consult with a professional web design firm before making any web hosting decisions. Not doing so will save you a few quid up front, but it may cost you dearly in the medium term and the long run – in terms of lost business and expensive hosting company changes once you see where the problem lies.** **If you have any questions about your website's hosting feel free to call us for a no obligation chat on 01-6216866 or drop us an email on [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Track Website Visitors # Website Development - Using Google Analytics To Track Website Visitors **Any web designer can build you a “pretty” website. But is your website really achieving its objectives: Increasing traffic? Converting visitors into customers? Reaching** **specific** **target audiences? Only a** **web** **professional can help you** **here** **.** **Here are a few pointers to guide you.** Today, **web designing** is part art and part science. Creating great layouts and content is the artistic part – required in order to give yourself a web presence in the first place. Most good website developers provide these services, at a high quality, to their clients. However, once you have a great website, you then need to apply some science in order to ensure your website continues to stay relevant and continues to deliver on its promises of more sales, greater website visitor traffic and improved search engine rankings when new potential customers go to search for you. And here’s where professional web expertise is required to use tools like Google Analytics - because not every **web designer** can help you here. **Harnessing The Power Of Google Analytics** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics) defines Google Analytics as follows: “ _Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic…”._ In reality though, the tool does much more than that. But to truly unlock its power, you need someone that knows something about Javascript tracking code, web page tags, and perhaps even “stuff” like Python, Ruby and PHP. So what can Google Analytics really do for your website? The answer: If properly integrated into your websites’ design, it can give you a lot of insight about your website visitors, which you can then use to your advantage. 1. **1\. Know Who They Are**: For this, your **web design** must include the appropriate javascript code in each of your web pages to 'inform' your Google Analytics profile account about everything you need to know about who is visiting your website. The tool can then harvest this info' so that you can tailor appropriate strategies – such as offering products or services for that specific type of visitor – to entice visitors to spend money at your site. 2. **2\. Know Where They Come From**: A professionally built website, that supports Google Analytics, can tell you where – which city or country – your visitors come from. Knowing this information can help you leverage region or country specific marketing opportunities to help you convert casual visitors into paying customers. If you website starts to get more and more non-English speaking visitors you should have the pages translated or use Google Translate. 3. **3\. Know What They Do On Your Website**: If your **web designer** knows his/her stuff, they can use Google Analytics to tell you exactly which pages are the most popular on your site, and how long visitors spend there once they land on that page. This can tell you what pages to focus on. 90% of your sales on the website will come from 10% of the products. If you are receiving a lot of traffic on a particular page where you recently announced a new promotion on your site; but you are not getting enough sales, you can use that information to “tweak” or “sweeten” the offer so more people will take you up on that promotion. With analytics, you'll have the information and then you can work with your web design company to take advantage of it. 4. **4\. Know How They Got There**: A really important feature of Google Analytics is its ability to tell website owners how visitors are getting to their site. Some websites will support this feature, and some won't, but you could collect vital analytical information about visitors browsing your site using mobile devices; or you might learn which social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) are generating more hits to your website. This information can then be strategically used to your advantage. For instance, make your website more mobile friendly, or invest more in proximity advertising (where mobile users get automated alerts from your website). You might even choose to spend less on Facebook advertising (because fewer visitors come from there), and increase spending on Twitter or YouTube marketing campaigns. Again, once you have the facts in front of you and can decide what to do about it. **Making Data Count** Your **web designing** strategy will determine whether you can use Google Analytics to your benefit, or whether you simply remain a web presence that lets its data analytics potential go untapped. Your website is a virtual data collection receptacle, but whether or not you use it as such is entirely up to you. Merely getting a web site up and running will certainly give you a web presence – but there is so much more it could be doing for you. Converting your website into a data collection and analysing machine can help you turbo-charge you’re marketing and sales efforts. **Consulting with the right professionals can unleash the power of data that lies hidden within your website. All you need to make that data count is the right web designer, and your website could start generating more sales for you – and you don't have to do any extra work for it. If you have any questions about getting your website to track your website visitors, give us a call or email - we'd be glad to advise you on setting that up.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Twitter Sales Leads # How Do I Use Twitter To Generate Sales Leads? [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MyITwebdesign) is the fastest growing social network site in the world, everyone from Barrack Obama to Miley Cyrus is tweeting daily. However, the big question is, why should people in sales use Twitter? The answer is simple: all your sales prospects are there. Twitter has a huge following; over 500 million active users who generate more than 400 million tweets everyday with more than 1.6 billion search terms entered every single day. This means there are lots of people to reach and some of them are potential clients. **Your Competitors Are Tweeting Too** Your competitors have also noticed the figures above and many of them are on Twitter as well. According to recent studies 60% of businesses have Twitter accounts - B2B firms using this social network achieve twice as many sales leads while some companies have realized a staggering 400% increase in their sales leads volume once they use a social selling platform. If you are using Twitter well you can set yourself apart and grab opportunities when they appear; spot the opportunities first, establish relationships, grow customer trust and at the same time make a name on Twitter for your business. However, just being on Twitter does not guarantee you increased sales, it is how you use it that that makes the world of difference between tweeting yourself into the abyss and actual sales lead generation. Listed below are some easy to follow steps that will turn your tweets into impressive sales lead generators. **Find Prospects** In Twitter, it is all about who follows you and who you follow. There are over 500 million individuals on Twitter, presenting a unique hurdle in the identification of your target audience. Start by identifying keywords and hashtags that your prospects are likely to use. You can easily find prospective customers through Twitter’s search and advanced search. Although they are excellent tools to un-earth prospects, improved and new search tools appear from time to time. It is crucial that you keep an eye out for any references leading to new resources that can help expand your list of targets. Also, follow your competitors and find out who they are following and who is following them. They most probably have put a lot of hard work in the process for you, especially if they got in before you. As the list of people you follow increases, you will find it most helpful to get a 'Twitter client' piece of software that will aid you in organizing everyone into manageable lists that allow easier tracking and searching. Always make sure your searches are saved so as to be able to see any live tweets that are related to your chosen search terms at any given time. Remember to thank everyone who follows you or re-tweets personally, the human touch can make a world of difference. **Watch for Buying Signals** With a 'following' list available, you should now start “listening” through monitoring your feed for people you can help and who are open to your product or service. Use search terms like “any advice on” or “anyone recommend” to close-in on those who require immediate assistance. Buying signals, like the dissatisfaction with a competitor product, should alert you on a need that your own product can fulfill. Always engage at the very beginning of a sales cycle and make sure you get on the shortlist of potential suppliers. When using a listening platform, investigate all the information presented to find any relevant conversations, discover opportunities and capture the sales leads. **Understand Your Target Companies** Using Twitter, you have the perfect platform to carry out some pre-sales research. This means you do not have to cyber-stalk every prospect you come across. You can also get a sense of your prospective client’s company as a whole and get a better idea of the agenda, goals and challenges they are facing. Use Twitter to understand what your customers want and what your competitors are saying about those requirements. This way, you have a clear picture of how and which of your products can help resolve their issues. The information gathered can also prove pivotal in making your next sales pitch more relevant and your face-to-face meetings more meaningful. **Generate Sales With Conversation** One of the best things about Twitter is that you can spark up a conversation with the target audience. You have, however, to show that you are listening first to avoid giving-off the image that you are a spammer. While a tweet can be an invitation for help, it is never a request for a hard sell. If you cannot help someone, find somebody else within your network that can and you will still get credit for the help offered. When a prospect follows you, make use of Direct Messages to move the conversation away from public forums, share emails or phone numbers. Even if the prospect does not convert into a sale, they have had a positive experience with you, meaning they will most probably buy one of your products from you in the future or even recommend someone to you. **Build Your Own Following** While building the list of people or companies for you to follow, it is crucial that you also build your own following. Provide a focused and clear bio that indicates what exactly you do or your company does. A bio that indicates your areas of expertise will make more people want to follow you back. With the above tips, you will be able to increase sales using Twitter. Also, remember to build relationships with influential tweeters and use the data collected to add contacts to your CRM system. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Management # Your Business Needs Web Design And Management Working Together It’s often said, and rightly so, that website designing is a lot of fun. It’s creative work that helps the web designer express him/her self in ways that few other professions can. However, designing and managing a website isn’t easy for no IT people. When your business depends on your web presence to survive and thrive, you don’t want to rely on fly-by-night web designer. And you certainly shouldn’t consider “Do It Yourself” as an option. A full-featured website design and management company is what you need. Read on to find out why. **There’s a lot at stake** In today’s highly-connected business world, entrepreneurs and business owners have a lot on their plates. From arranging financing, to selling and marketing your business, dealing with new and existing customers – it all rests on your shoulders. Do you really need to add website design to that list? Probably not…and here’s why: • Some jobs are best left to specialists. Just like you wouldn’t want to design and build your own office building (unless you’re a certified and licensed architect), you shouldn’t think about DIY website development and design • Even with so-called DIY tools, there’s a lot involved in keeping up a professionally designed website. From Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to site speed optimisation, and from load times to highly responsive sites, a good web designer needs to understand it all. Do you have the skills needed – or the time? • Should your website go down, are you technically equipped to get it back up again – QUICKLY? Remember, customers, business partners and prospective clients all depend on finding and connecting with you via your website. Unless web designing is your core skill, you’ll hardly have time to run your business AND troubleshoot a broken website. When it comes to professionally maintaining your online presence, DIY or lone-wolf operators isn’t an option. There’s a lot at stake for businesses that rely heavily on their websites. And unless you are also a hands-on website designer yourself (in addition to a HR Manager, Accountant, Marketing Manager…and more!), you should look for alternate options. **So, what’s the answer? Full-featured Website Management** As an “active” business manager, you should expect to play a leading role in how your web design evolves, and all of the features and functionality it offers. However, when it comes to the actual designing, development and management of the site, you should consider working with a full-featured website designing agency. Here’s why: • Its not just about the time involved – it’s also about the diverse skill sets that full- featured website management teams bring with them. From graphics designers to coders, and from website architects to web-traffic analysts – you get the benefits of an entire company, not just a single individual! • Good website design isn’t a “build it once and forget it” proposition. You need to continually update your site. And that’s what full-featured web service providers offer • And what about upgrading the site every time technology changes? From Operating System (OS) upgrades, to enhancements to Web browsers – they all impact your website. A full-featured web site design and management team will take care of it all! • Your business will grow, and so will your web presence. When you expand and need to migrate to newer/better platforms, a full-featured website management company will do it all for you • Embracing the latest trends and developments in web design and hosting is a key requirement for keeping your competitors at bay. Professional companies will quickly evaluate latest trends to see if they are worth embracing, and then offer those to clients. You don't need to spend time evaluating all the web technology developments that happen • A full-featured web design agency has multiple servers to ensure your web site is always available – your “up time” is close to 100%! If one server fails, another will take over. If you were to DIY, you’d probably have to spend a fortune on infrastructure such as that! • And of course, you need to stay connected always. But what if your email isn’t working – does your lone-wolf contractor also have Email Administrator skills? Likely not! The full-service company will deal with such issues seamlessly, so you’ll likely never even know that there is an issue at all! As a business owner, one of the biggest concerns you have is about cost: How much will it cost to work with a full service web designing agency? Well, you’ll be surprised at the answer! Usually, working with a full-featured website management company is more cost-effective than hiring a team of Web design specialists, Developers, Server management specialists, Architects, Database Administrators etc. The fee is transparent, and often scalable based on what your needs are. Unlike a regular salary you pay to your IT department - which is usually fixed, no matter how many servers you own, or how many web pages your site has - a full-featured web design agency will often charge based on the services you use and need. When you do the maths, you’ll find using a full-service web design and management service is a more cost effective alternate and better for your business. **If you have any questions regarding your website and site management give us a call on 01-6216866 or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Convert Website to Mobile # How To Convert A Website Into A Mobile Website Smartphones and tablets are taking over from PCs and the vast majority of these users are using these cellular devices for accessing the internet. So you can well understand that a website designed only for the desktop will not suffice in capturing the attention of your entire target audience. Don't forget too that a mobile website does not have a lot of room for bulky 'flash' elements, banner ads or large graphics and no Apple mobile product (iphone, ipod, ipad) can display flash graphics anyhow. **Going the mobile website route - a step-by-step guide** Take the time to do some good website analysis before you start off with the conversion of your regular website to a [mobile website](https://myit.ie/mobile-website-design.html). Find out if your site is using lots of different multimedia files, images, videos, file formats. You should also check if the current website is taking a long time to download … this will matter more on a slower mobile phone internet connection rather than a mobile device connected via wifi. The internet functions in a similar way for mobile devices and regular computers, but you need to make the website easy to navigate and read for each user. Try these steps: **Inspect Your Current Content** Navigate to your current website and make a note of every link, page, video and graphic that your site has, noting whether you want that content to be available in the mobile website. **Find Any Particularly Large Web Content** Take a note of the download speed of each page in case any page is particularly slow. Try the pages on your PC and smartphone. If a page is slow find out what is making it slow. Are there lots of large images? Some feature-rich graphics that are slow to load? A video which is pre-loading before the rest of the page? If something is particularly slow to load on your PC you will need to exclude it from the mobile site for now until you can speed it up or replace it with a mobile version. **Prepare Any Mobile Specific Content** You may need to rework your web page text to make it more precise for the mobile web - it may be fine, but you'll need to think of each piece of content in terms of a mobile phone user. Also, you could use photoshop or fireworks to resize large images so that they are mobile-web friendly. **Prepare A Mobile Layout (Or Get A Web Designer To Do It For You)** Use an image editing software package to create a mockup of a mobile site layout at e.g. 320 pixels wide. This will allow you to rebuild your current homepage and inner page in the new 320 pixel width format so you can see how your logo, menubar, company colours and content will look on a mobile site. It is best to make use of this mobile optimised view as a template for creation of headers as well as content for the mobile website version. **Prepare Your Mobile Content For The Web** Once you are happy with the new mobile website design layout (homepage and inner pages) and you have the content for each of the mobile website pages, save your work and give it to your web developer to turn it into mobile format. You could do this yourself with a software package like Dreamweaver. When each web page is completed upload it, and the associated images, to your website hosting with a free tool like Filezilla. **Upload Your Mobile Website** When your mobile site is finished there are a few ways that a website visitor can see it. You could put the mobile website at www.yourdomain/mobile and let the user select a mobile version, or your could install automatic switching-code which will detect if the user is using a mobile phone and automatically switch to the mobile version. Talk to your web developer about implementing these options. The 'Responsive' [website design](https://myit.ie/website-design.html) model would be a third way of implementing your website where you have one website and the website 'template' is changed to suit the device that is visiting your website. This is the smart way to operate as you have just one website to maintain and for bigger sites it makes a lot of sense. **Think About The Mobile Website User** Converting to a mobile site helps you tap a large section of your target audience which frequently uses a mobile device. During the process, take into consideration the user experience of being on your website on a mobile phone. It will be a different experience to being on a large PC monitor so it's up to you to make it a good user experience so that the customer gets what they want and makes contact with you to purchase your products or services. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Tips # Web Design: Five design considerations for your next site update Unless you are a DIY web designer, a hands-on coder and skilled website developer, chances are that you’ll depend on others to help you with your next website update project. The problem with most of us “non nerd types”, is that we often assume that website design is an exact science – like math or accounting. It is NOT. **Web site design ideas worth considering** The men and women working at your web designing agency are equal part “scientists” and equal part “artists”. That’s why developing websites is as much a science as it is an art. When you speak with your “artist/scientist” web site design professional therefore, it’s often helpful to talk to them in their “lingo”. Here are a few design considerations that you should discuss with them: \- Talk about defaults: Because many of their clients aren’t too sure of what they want, some web design specialists may just stick with “default settings” in their development environments. But that might not necessarily work for you. \- Ask your designer about customising backgrounds to your website \- Talk to them about changing default fonts, headers and footers for the site \- Discuss changes to other standard settings that are applied to the overall site While web designing templates can get your site up and running quickly, they can also make the site look indistinguishable from other similar sites. Customising default settings is one way to differentiate your site from the competition. \- **Contact details:** Typical website designing approaches call for having a dedicated “Contact Us” section on the sites’ navigation panel. That way, if visitors want to reach out to you with a request or comment, they just navigate to that page and send you a message. However, you might wish to speak to your web designing services provider about the possibility of putting your contact details across more than one page within the site. At minimum, consult with them about having links to the “Contact Us” page accessible throughout the site. \- **Design for accessibility**: While it is considered best practice to include elements of accessibility in any website design project, some service providers might not necessarily include them unless the client asks for such features. Having a highly accessible site is great for business. You'll likely have visitors with special needs. Make sure you don't ignore them in your site design. Accessible sites will not only help you draw additional business from a largely underserved visitor base, but they could also improve your brand’s reputation amongst your peer group. \- **Ask about multi-media:** Your website designer will only deliver what you want – and an attractive website that visitors will want to come to will likely be high up on your list. However, while adding bells and whistles is one way to make the site attractive, another is to deliver a great visitor experience. Speak with your web design service about including multi-media content on the site. Don’t just stick with great images and graphics. Talk about videos, 3-dimensional presentations and voice clips. Adding these elements can make a powerful impression on visitors. \- **Discuss what your competitors are doing:** By default, any new web design initiative will involve site designers sitting with the client (you.) to brainstorm your needs. And what better place to start that discussion than by checking out the competition to get inspiration from what they are doing? Having your website designer look at competing websites could yield several benefits to your own website refresh project. Firstly, it may alert your design team to stay away from undesirable design traits that other competitors may have adopted. But more importantly, it will inspire your web designer to incorporate design features that push your site above and beyond the competitors’ in terms of attracting visitor traffic. And while these five elements are a great way to start off your next web design project, don’t forget to talk to your web designer about adding frequent updates and diverse content. Visitors love coming to a site that has a fresh new look and feel – but that can ware off after five or ten visits. The best way to keep your visitors coming back for more, is to have your web design agency provide you with fresh new content often. **It’s time to act** If your website hasn’t had a facelift in more than a year, then it’s high time that you spoke with your website designing agency to discuss your next update. But before you start that conversation, make sure you review the five web design ideas we’ve discussed here so you know exactly what you want to accomplish. However, you must keep one fact in mind – They are the experts, so be open to any new suggestions or recommendations they might put forward. Having an informed dialogue with your web designer about the updates you need will be a win-win: Your team will know exactly what to deliver, and you’ll get exactly what you need. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Increase Website Visitors # How To Get More Website Visitors - The Google Friendly Way So, you have a good website and web design for your website or you have just launched a new website for your business and now you're eager to generate more sales leads. Your web designer has given you all these ideas about putting quality content out there so you can attract viewers to the site. But before you start creating the content, you need to stop a minute and think what that means. While your web designer may be an expert at aesthetics, he/she may not necessarily know your business and your customers as well as you do. Sure, in order to attract customers to your site, you need to provide them with engaging content, but one other point plays an important role in drawing visitors to a site: your site must also be "Google friendly". If either of these essential ingredients are missing, your website will not be as huge a success! **Befriending Google** In some cases, web design that's "Google unfriendly" can be even worse than not having a website at all. That's because when you don't have a site there's no risk of being penalised by Google. That risk is very real when your website runs afoul of Google's "rules". Here are a few tips on how to get more website visitors - the Google friendly way! **1) Give Them What They Want** Ask your website designer to help you create content of the highest quality for each and every page on the site; but more so on the home page and landing pages, because that's the window into your website world. The more engaged visitors feel with your content when they arrive on your website, the more they will continue to visit it, as well as spread the word about it within their circle of friends and family. More visitors will lead to even more visitors. It's the snowball effect. **2) Number of Google Friendly Links** A website targeting Ireland and Irish consumers with uniquely Irish content, is likely to attract other website owners, with similar interests, to link to your site. Give thought to the words that you use to build your content. Ask your web design expert to research whether those words are typically what users will use when searching for your content. If your site achieves a SME (Subject Matter Expert) status, it will attract other website/blog owners attention, and they will link to it. The more quality links you have from other websites, the higher your website will rank as "Google friendly". **3) Quality of Your Google Friendly Links** When another web site owner or web designer links to your site, Google interprets that link as a "vote of confidence" in your site's content, thereby triggering Google to award your website a higher rank. However, in order to be Google-friendly, those links to your site should be of a high quality. Sites of dubious nature, that link to your site, can have an inverse impact on your site's ranking. To maintain your Google-friendly status, ask your web design team to periodically check to ensure that only respectable sites are linking to yours. You can disassociate your self with bad inlinks with the Disavow tool - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main **4) Natural Links** It is quite natural for the website design for cloth suppliers in Ireland to include links to websites of other fashion retailers. However, Google would consider it rather unnatural for clothiers to link to, for example, gambling sites, or sites selling property. Similarly, when a web designer creates links on a web page that provide additional information about the topic on the current page, it would be construed as natural. But linking to content that's totally unrelated, maybe even spam, is considered unnatural. So make sure your links and backlinks are generally natural. If you want your website to be construed as Google-friendly, then your web design should include only natural links. Google considers any links designed to "fool" its page ranking algorithm as unnatural. Websites with unnatural links are penalised heavily. **5) Accessible Content** Your web designer should keep accessibility in mind during the entire web design process. To be Google-friendly, the site must not only be accessible for humans, but also to Google's crawlers, creepers, spiders and BOTs. A good text browser, like Lynx, can help when examining a site's use of Frames, Cookies, DHTML, JavaScript and Flash. If these features aren't easily decipherable or accessible by your text browser, then Google's spiders will find them challenging to crawl through. Any content that's not accessible by the Crawler will not be appropriately ranked to easily draw in visitors. Also think about your mobile device visitors – what kind of web experience do they get? **6) Don't Use Content Hiding/Cloaking Technology** Any web design that uses "hidden" pages or "cloaked" content is bound to be seen as unfriendly by Google. A web designer might think that building "crawler only" content is a great way to get page ranking pushed higher. Not true! Google's algorithms are extremely intelligent, and can quickly sniff through these tactics. If your website design targets Ireland and Irish visitors, then those pages must all be seen by your Irish visitors. Hidden pages have ulterior motives attached to them, and Google will penalise you for using them. **7) Google Friendly Images** If you use images as part of your web design, and you should, then refrain from using them as a means to highlight/display key content (Brand Names, Company Names, Product Names etc.). Google's crawlers are unable to recognise or read text embedded as graphics, and that will cost you page ranking points if you were presuming that Google will be able to ready your words that are displayed using images rather than raw page text. Ask your web design team to use "Alt Tags" or the "Alternate Text" feature of images to define key text messages associated with photos. Those can readily be crawled and contribute to your page rank. **Let Common Sense Prevail** Using these few common sense approaches to website design can go a long way in making your website Google friendly, and when Google is friends with your website, it will reward it through higher SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings. The higher up you appear in the SERPs, the more visitors you are going to attract. If you have any questions about your web content and getting more sales through your website give us a call or email for a chat. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Total Cost of Ownership # Website Design: Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO) Really Does Matter Overly focusing on “Cost” versus “TCO” can often lead you to make decisions you might live to regret for a while to come! When speaking with a web designer about building your company website, the discussion about cost often overshadows all other conversations. Not that cost is an insignificant item in the entire deliberations, but many business owners can sometimes get mislead by how some web developers reference “cost”. If you are about to enter into a website development contract in the short to medium terms, read on to learn everything you need to know about web designing costs, before you sign on the dotted line. **Cheaper Is Not Always Better** We all love a bargain, and are always on the lookout for better deals. That's human nature – every one of us does it. But when it comes to website designing, “cheaper” is often not be the best choice at all. That does not mean that you shouldn’t hold tough negotiations with the web design team; nor does it mean that you shouldn’t bargain for cost reductions for ongoing maintenance and website management. What that does mean though is that you shouldn't just look at the “Initial Cost", but at "Total Cost" of owning your website over, we would suggest, the coming 3 years. As a business person, you may be intimately familiar with the two terms: “Initial Cost" and "Total Cost" . However, in the online world of website ownership, the two terms may hold vastly different meanings, depending on who your web design company is. And that’s where you could end up making the wrong choice and costing your business the price of 2 or 3 websites. A 'fly by night' shop will probably quote you a very low fee - €1,000 – just to get your business, while others may quote you twice as much because they're giving you the actual cost of building a business ready, ready-to-go-live website..You will probably be asking yourself: Should I really be paying €2,000 when there is a cheaper alternate available? The answer may startle you. **You could end up discovering that it is actually the “cheaper” web designer that is likely "ripping you off". Here’s why?** **1.** The cheaper quotes may be just including the bare minimum as part of their quote. Sure, you’ll end up with a functional website – but barely! But once you have paid your non refundable deposit you're in the net and everything there after, even for the basics of a standard website, are extras. **2.** The cheap web designers will probably sub-contract out their work to other sub-contractors who then further sub-contract out...resulting in your website NOT being designed by the people you talked to and paid, but by someone that is overseas and doesn't even understand what you need! And that 3rd party involvement is reflected in the product you are delivered with – it's barely up to standard and is not good value for money. **3.** The cheap web design firm may not be including website management or web hosting for the coming year in the price – you’ll need to pay extra for that – and in most cases you don't want to be setting that up yourself. It's much better for your website, your business and for your peace of mind of have that looked after by a professional website team who are experienced in Website Management. A lot goes on behind the scenes in keeping a website live, secure and up to date. It will pay you back a hundred times over to have a professional crew managing that for you. The cheap web designers offering means that the TOTAL cost of owning your website will likely be MUCH higher than what they’ve quoted – it's just that they have left out lots of essential website elements and services and they didn't consult you – they just hoped you wouldn't notice until the deposit was paid. The best way to avoid this is to sit down face to face with your prospective web design service providers and talk to them about everything, be prepared for the meeting, get all your questions answered and then go with your gut feeling. **4.** The cheapest quote companies are just “selling" you a website - NOT offering you a SOLUTION, like the other providers are. For example, they could charge you extra for standard tools, like Google Analytics, which the other developers will include as part of their TOTAL overall solution cost. Or, they charge extra for contact forms, google maps, site-maps, content management system, content management system training...and the list goes on. You need to get prepared to find out a bit about what each of your quotations actually contains. What is included in each and what is not? The cheapest quote is not the cheapest if it contains half of the essential website features of the other quotes – which you will end up needing in a few weeks or months and will have to pay more for then. **5.** The cheap quote websites in most cases not allow you to manage and maintain your own content with an easy to use content management system, resulting in you needing to pay the website developer additional fees each time you want anything changed on the site – and these quotes are frequently significantly higher than the original quote. Ask your website developer to do a demo for you of the content management system they will use on your site – ask them if they can show you how to add pages, add photos, move page sot different sections etc. Now you will know if a content management system comes in your website package and if it's usable. **6.** The web designer for a cheap-quote company often uses rigid “hard code” design techniques, compared to the flexibility offered by the other., more professional developers. As a result, alterations in the layout of pages or new functionality is akin to starting the website again in that it's not a clever , 'reusable', 'modifiable' system – but a badly built, badly coded system and significant costs will be incurred if your new new layouts, features in the future. To deal with this, ask your website designer to confirm in the contract that that is to the case and ask them to explain how to can guarantee that for you. **It All Adds Up!** Very often, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of your web design efforts can be significantly downplayed by less professional web developers, in the hope that they can secure your business with a deposit at all costs – and let you find out about all the extras later. However, by the time you go live and realise that you didn’t get what you had hoped (or paid!) for its often too late. You are less likely to switch to another designer – and that’s exactly what they are counting on. You’ll likely end up paying 3 to 4 times, over the coming 3 years, what the other web design companies were quoting you up-front for. To ensure that you receive best value for your money, have a detailed face to face meeting and discuss the TOTAL cost of ownership with them. Come to the meeting with your questions ready and your notes prepared. Ask questions until you have no more to ask. Ask them to show you an example of whatever they are saying. You want them to show you how they are really delivering a complete solution that will support your business for the coming years, and not just another starter website for a budget price – initially. **If you'd like to discuss your website plans and discuss Total Cost of Ownership to manage your website costs, give us a call on 01 6216866 or [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Smart Logo Design # A Really Smart Logo Would Be Great For Your Business **An inspired logo can work wonders for your business. In this article we discuss the huge potential of a great logo and ways to achieve that strong brand recognition.** Every business in the world wants to become a recognised brand and their logo is a vital ingredient in creating that brand identity. Since the logo can make or break your business, you should take the time to consider your logo and branding. There are many small businesses and start-ups that have flourished and a lot of that growth can be attributed to an inspired logo idea which became their brand and identity. It isn’t only about stunning graphic design but a logo concept that communicates your ideas to the target audience. A well-designed logo can act as the face of your business and create an aura around it. Your customers then 'prefer' trading with you as you are the only company with that corporate image that they like. **Earn Brand Recognition** What is the core objective behind designing a logo? It is to earn brand recognition and to create a strong impression in the minds of the customers. When you have a great logo, all of your products and services are then identified with your brand and logo. Brands are often built around great logo symbols and people start associating the symbol with the brand. The moment we think of a brand like Nike the Swoosh logo comes to our mind, or with Coca Cola we think of that cool font that they use. We then tend to associate all of those companies products with the icon. If you saw 'Coca Cola' and 'Mouse' written in that famous Cola Cola font you would probably recognise that font. Or if you saw that Nike 'swoosh' symbol on it's own you'd recognise that too. This is the perfect example of ‘brand recognition’. **Simple Logo Concepts Work Wonders** Think about the most recognizable logos in the world such as BMW, IBM, Apple or even Facebook. What is it that these brands have in common? Their simplicity. A child would be able to sketch out these logos if you show him/her the original logo for a few seconds. Simple logo designs can work wonders for your business as they are memorable, and quick and easy to recognise. Logo designers would always tell you, designing a simple logo is the biggest challenge! A lot of new website owners initially want a logo with a host of details in it, and they logo ends up more like a letter heading. The 2 should be kept separate. The logo is attractive, appropriate, sends a strong message and is simple – the letter heading has all the other things that you want to add with your logo to make up a letter heading. **Emphasises Brand Affirmation** Creating brand identity is challenging but sustaining brand loyalty is an even bigger challenge. This is where businesses try every trick in the book to dominate the mind space of their target audience. An inspiring logo is one of the best ways in which to do this. Get your simple and strong logo identity into the memory/mind of your target audience. If it's a clever and simple logo then it will stick in there and now you need to reaffirm it a one of more times per month by keeping contact with your sales prospects and clients. Whenever the logo comes in front of the target customer though print adverts, social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns etc. it will reaffirm the branding message and rekindle the customer loyalty factor. **The Path to a Successful Logo** Keep Communicating – Logos represent your company brand, they represent the business philosophy and most importantly they cast a lasting impression in the minds of your clients and target audience. So never rush into a logo design process and spend quality time thinking about your company and brand. What makes your company different? How would you like to be remembered by your clients? Does your logo cover all aspects of your business? From the graphics to the design and color scheme, consider every aspect of your logo brand before you get the design process started. **Focus on Being Exclusive** It is good to draw inspiration from things you see but bad to copy them. The reason you are creating a logo is to generate a niche identity for your company. Your target audience should be able to distinguish your logo from that of a competitor and so we should make no compromises with the logo and aim to be different. You need a logo that is appropriate within your business sector but with that sector let you be the brand that stands out. Be exclusive and memorable. **Text That Is Easy To Read** While graphics may dominate your logo, you shouldn’t ignore the power of text that will be in your logo. If you are mentioning your brand name, trading name or company name, make sure it is easy to read the text. Nothing as bad as falling in love with a logo and the first week your hear a few comments that the logo is 'cool' but they didn’t know it was your company. The logo needs to be a lot of things and readable is definitely on of them. The essential idea of promoting your company brand gets truly defeated if you use text that is difficult to comprehend. You could generate a test set of clients, friends and family that will be your sounding board for the new logo. Do not say anything to them other than, here is the new logo what do you honestly think? What does it say to you? Is the message clear? **Remember: Print & Digital** There are some company logos that look superb in digital media format on a PC screen but look terrible when they are printed on paper flyers, shop signage, banners etc. Similarly some logos appear as an eyesore in the digital medium and look great on paper. When you are designing a logo you should think about both mediums: digital and print. As soon as you start to focus in on a logo you like and you have had your feedback from clients, friends and family – get the logo printed on A4 sheet, small sign and flyer to see how it looks. It will cost a lot less to test this out now rather than changing the logo again in a few months time. **Think Of The Future** You may be starting out small now but you may have big growth ideas for your business in the future. Will your logo be able to work for you if the company was 4 times the size it is now? Is the new brand too rigid to communicate ideas other than your present ones? What about if your product range or service range changes – will you still be able to stand behind the logo then? Always think about the future of your company when designing your brand and logo and make sure it is as 'future-proofed' as you can make it. **Change Isn’t A Bad Word** It is perfectly understandable that you hold your company logo close to your heart – a lot of businesses do. But if your logo has outlived its usefulness, it looks dated, doesn't represent your company correctly or fails to strike a chord with your present company ideas and brand then you shouldn’t hesitate in modifying it or going for a complete new look. Discuss this in-house and get organised. Weigh up all the pros and cons and think about the company in 1 years time and 5 years time – will this logo be able to serve you best? **Should You Do The Logo 'Designing' Yourself?** Since the new logo represents so much about your company, you may be oozing with enthusiasm, ideas and energy to do it yourself. It is one thing to be passionate about your brand and it is quite another to translate that passion into an inspiring logo design. It would be much better use of your time, resources and money to hire the services of a professional logo design company as they will bring to the table a professional approach and a huge skill-set in this area. They can come up with graphic/visual ideas and concepts that you couldn't dream of because this is what they do. They would of course listen to your ideas and requirements, and create a novel graphic concept that drives your brand for the foreseeable future. Just make sure you are choosy when hiring a new logo designer and communicate your ideas clearly from the start. If you have some logo ideas and need a brand that will propel your company, give us a call for an informal chat and let us get the ideas flowing. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Design Insights # What Your Competitor's Website Is Doing And Yours Is Not As you surf or browse online, do you ever ask yourself why some websites look so appealing, while others look positively mediocre? And while you are at it, have you considered the impact that the content on such low-quality sites may be having on the company’s clients? It’s highly likely that the web design agency behind those websites isn’t doing such a stellar job. So, what can you do to ensure your own website doesn’t fall prey to poor design? The answer is quite simple – and you’ll be surprised - read on to find out. **The 6-step Guide To Web Content Planning** Website design is part science and part art…but both components have one thing in common : Planning. With proper foresight and planning, you’ll create the building blocks of the most compelling website design. And in order to create that robust foundation, you need content – well thought-out and high-quality content. Some of your competitors are already secretly adopting these tactics. Here’s how you too can make sure your web designer has everything that he/she needs to build you a website that visitors won’t be able to resist: **Step#1 – The End Game:** Don’t start planning your website layout and content from the top down, one page at a time. Instead, think of what the end product will generally look like, and then work backward until you reach that point. It's much easier to work like that and you know you'll get the right end result. You need to me meticulous with the intra step details here so that you do 'join the dots' correctly to get you from the starting point to the end result. **Step#2 – The More the Merrier:** Give your web design agency as much content as you can find. That’s the raw materials out of which great sites are built. It doesn’t mean your designers will cram it all into the website – but they will have immediate access to everything they need. You can work with them to pick the best-of-the-best once you have lots of it to choose from. **Step#3 – The Big Picture:** Now start high-level web designing with what sections you need to add to the site. Do you need a “Testimonials” section? Do you plan to sell online in a web shop? If so, a “Web Store” and “Shopping Cart” are a must-have. **Step#4 – Branding:** Does your web site design need to include a brand or logo? Now is the time to think about branding and imaging your company. If you don’t do it at the planning stage, think of what could happen in a few years – once you’ve built a loyal following. Asking your web designer to add a brand or logo a few years after clients have embraced your products could be disastrous. The “retrofit” will not only look suspicious, but it could also cost you many loyal clients and cause confusion which could have been avoided if that work was planned and executed at the start. **Step#5 – Customer Outreach:** One of the best brand “selling” opportunities is when you interact with clients, suppliers, business partners and other outsiders. And often your email address is what helps you enable that outreach. Using a Gmail or Hotmail account to conduct such outreach just won’t cut it!. They’re not credible enough for effective outreach. Ensure your website designing team creates emails, that are sent from your PC or Smart phone, with addresses that have your own personalised domain – e.g.: info@YourCompany.ie , Sales@YourCompany.ie or Mary@YourCompany.com. Using email addresses like “YourCompany@Gmail.com” or “YourCompanySales@Hotmail.com“, projects a rather unprofessional impression on would-be clients. **Step#6 – Great Website Management:** It doesn’t matter how carefully you plan your website design, and how effectively you create your content. If you don’t manage your overall web presence, you just won’t make it in today’s highly competitive world!. Insist that your web designing agency help you manage your website using specialised tools, like Content Management Systems (CMSs), high-performance hosting, nightly virus scans and 24x7 website monitoring. That way your website will be safe and secure, and with the CMS you can update or add fresh content more often – without too much effort. Great website design is only as good as the reliable and robust hosting it sits on. If visitors (some of those could be potential clients!) find your website too slow to navigate, or if they find it its more often “down” than “up”, chances are they’ll take their business to your competitor. And of course, good website management practices require frequent backups, strong anti-virus policies, and efficient recovery procedures. If your web design is based on ongoing website management best practices, you’ll find it a reliable web tool to market your products and services, and also to project your brand favourably. **Website Planning Essentials** Your competitors know that good website design starts with good planning. Are you willing to let that “secret” stay with them, without doing anything to take back their competitive advantage? Of course not – start your planning today. From content and layout, to brand management and ongoing maintenance – it must all be part of a well-thought-out plan. However, great planning cannot start unless you have a professional team working with you. That’s why it is essential to find a website design agency with the necessary skills and experience to implement this 6-step guide to website excellence. **Give us a call or email if you have any website, email, management or marketing questions that we can help you with.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## SEO Risks of Copying # What Happens If I Copy Some Text From Another Website? For SEO, this is not good for your website. Google will have an excellent record of who originally prepared that text for their own website and they will then do quick analysis on the new text on your site and see that you copied it. The optimisation that you're trying to do for that page and that keyword is then in vain as google will not give you a good SERP ranking for copied text. Equally, it is a bad mark against your domain and google will log that in case you try that text-copying again or any other seo technique prohibited by Google. If you already have some 'bad marks' against your domain e.g. for buying backlinks, hiding seo-optimised text, showing different text to google and web visitors ... then you could get removed from the Google index system and not appear for any searches. **Google Can See All Web Content** In general, prepare your own text and use some piece of text as inspiration and direction but don't copy any text - google will see it. On the same topic, google can also see if you are grabbing images off the net and reusing them .... so it is also a good idea to slightly resize images if you have bought stock photos or maybe take your own images. All these images have a digital signature and to reuse an image is not what google wants - google wants original content and images. If you are concerned about a piece of text ... whether you wrote it or whether you copied it ... put it in quotes e.g. "this text better be original or google won't like it " and put it and the quotes into google and you'll see if that piece of text is attributed to some other web site. You can experiment with this but you will need to use a good few words because if your search is for just a few words then of course you will see results coming back from google. ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Web Design Choices # Website design and hosting: Should you “go Pro” or “go Low”? When business owners are planning a web development project, the usual conundrum they face is: Should I go with a professional firm and pay a little bit more; or should I partner with the lowest bidder? Both sides of the “go low” versus “go pro” debate have supporters and detractors. However, as the ultimate “consumer” of the results from this decision, you need to understand what the costs of each side of the argument are. Let’s explore this in more detail. **The “Real” Cost Of Doing Business On The Web** When you hire a web designer to design and develop your website, the expense is generally attributed as a cost of doing business – you have to have a website. Before you incur these costs however, it behoves you to know what your options are. Generally speaking, there are four choices that are available to you: **“No Frills” Website Service** There are a number of web service providers that come under this category. The hallmarks of such firms are: - • They usually offer a select, and sometimes minimal, set of services to their customers - • Being minimalistic in their approach, they don’t leave you room for personalisation – most of their services are template-based, which may or may not fully meet your needs - • Such shops do not usually offer consultation or advice – they simply get some photos, get to work and give you what they usually offer for the agreed price - • While working with cookie-cutter “no frills” website design shops may suit some, most businesses end up needing some form of customisation to their websites – or, you end up doing a website redesign in 6 months time. Their lack of customisation is a real challenge for your business! No frills shops will charge a significant premium to personalise their websites for you – something you need to factor into your costs of doing business with them. **Using Web Freelancers** Alternately, you may choose to engage a web freelancer to design your website for you. To be successful with this approach: - • You need to spend lots of time finding a freelancer you can trust – there are hundreds of them out there but no one knows which ones are good - • They’ll expect you to do most of the heavy lifting, in terms of defining your exact requirements - • A freelance web designer will charge you additional for even slight deviations from the agreed specifications. You really need to be organised and project managing the project yourself. - • The biggest challenge is trying to figure our whether your freelance website contractor will be around next month, in the event that you have a problem with the website. That’s another element to include in the “real” cost of working with web design freelancers! **Using Free Web Builder Tools** Not for the faint of heart, but if you are feeling bold enough and you have time on your hands, you could invest the yours efforts and patience to use “free” web builder tools and build a website yourself. The question is: Does that really make the effort “free”. No, is the answer. If it was that easy then none of your competitors would have spent thousands on their websites – they would have just built it themselves. How about your time? Don’t you have a business to run? You need to include your personal time and effort in the cost of this supposedly 'free' website too. What will actually happen is that the website will take 3-6 months to build, it will look quite amateur and your fr3inds won't be honest enough with you to say that too you, and then you'll get a real website built after a few months when you can't stand the site of it any longer or you notice that the website is not getting any new customers sales calls any more. **Going Pro – The 'No Brainer' Choice** When all’s said and done therefore, none of the above three options end up costing you what you thought they would – and in most cases you will not end up with the website you wanted, even after putting in lots of work and time yourself. You’ll eventually end up paying a lot more than you had bargained for. The fourth option would therefore be to engage a professional firm to design, build and perhaps manage the website for you. Going with a professional web hosting and web development company is the best choice when it comes to business-critical, high-availability web sites: - • You deal with a company, not individuals or fly-by-night operators only contactable on certain days on a disposable mobile phone number - • They are customer focused, which means they won’t split hairs with you over an extra feature or page here or there – because they want to create a long-term client-supplier relationship - • With a professional web design company you will get a customised design, created specifically for you and your clients, resulting in a website that truly represents your businesses’ personality and business sector - • You know EXACTLY what you’ll get, and exactly how much it will cost you BEFORE you enter into a contract with them Most importantly though a professional web design form will invest a lot of time to get to know you, your products/services, your clients and your business, before they start the design or development process. They understand that you are not “technical”, so they will take the project management lead on the project and will find out everything they need so as to deliver a great design and website to you. You won’t need to create specifications or technical documentation for them – they’ll do it all for you! While using professionals for your website design and hosting may seem a little bit costlier than, say, using a freelance contractor or a web builder tool, when the invoices are all in and all tallied up correctly, they end up being the cheapest of all four options available to you. Hard to believe perhaps, but it's true. **If its quality, cost and peace of mind that you are looking from your web developer, then going 'pro' is a no brainer.** **If you would like to discuss your new website plans with an experienced team, call us on 01-65216866 or email info@myit.ie** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Enhance Your Business Website # Get Your Business Website Working Harder: It Will Pay Considerable Dividends If you do not as yet have an online presence for your business, chances are that, like many entrepreneurs in the same boat, you will spend a good deal of time trying to get the **website design** just right. And once the site is up and running, it will work hard for you; bringing in new visitors and converting new sales leads every week. For most small to medium sized businesses though, that might not be enough. By following these simple **web development** tips below, you can make your website work even harder and actually deliver the sales generation expectations that you have for it. You’ll reap big dividends over the long-term if you do! **Getting It Right** Creating a successful business footprint online is all about creating a good overall web/website strategy for the business. Your website is the best tool you have to portray your company’s image and to establish brand credibility. Here’s how you can ensure your website continues to work smartly for you every day: 1. **1\. Setting Expectations -** Before you even start thinking about colour schemes, content or graphics, you need to set expectations around what it is you wish your website to accomplish – what will your website do?: - • Generate maximum traffic for your site? - • Convert casual visitors into paying customers? - • Informing your audience about your products and services? - • Presenting a strong, professional and corporate image of your business online - •An authoritative website online for your business where visitors return for answers, downloadable manuals etc Based on your expectations, you can then start visualising what your website will need and what it will look like once completed. 2. **2\. Check-out Your Competition -** Once you know what it is you want out of your website, start arming yourself with information about what your competition is doing to achieve those objectives. Your **web designer** will also benefit from having a “point of reference” to aim for, if you are able to provide him/her with concrete examples (of competitor websites) to draw inspiration and/or direction from. 3. **3\. Collect Relevant Information -** Next, it’s time to assimilate all the necessary information about your business: - • Product information – text, pdf documents, excel files, photos etc - • Sales offers – prices, run times etc - • Videos – try to have them on Youtube too so as to get more exposure - • Product manuals - • How-to-guides etc. - • Case studies and testimonials - • Information on the company and your company ethos - • Partner companies & suppliers – if you are comfortable in divulging some of that detail It is essential to have all of this material available for review by the web development company when you start discussing details about web design and layout. 4. **4\. Visualise Your Brand -** As a result of your information gathering exercise, you need to start visualising how you wish to position your company’s brand online. Regardless of whether you are a multi-national company, a small-to-medium enterprise (SME), or a sole trader – branding is important. Your **website design** company will use your vision to create an image for your company in the minds of your customers and let them get more connected with you, develop familiarity with your brand and trust in your company. 5. **5\. Professional Consultations -** Consult with a professional web designer and finalise your website. Make sure you not only provide all of the information gathered in Step#3, but also discuss (in great detail!) your branding and image expectations from Step#4. Such consultations shouldn’t just be limited to initial design, but must be a regular occurrence – every 3 or 4 months. Business environments aren’t static, and neither should the design of your website. 6. **6\. Review Proposed Designs -** Ideally, your **web designer** should offer more than one option for how your company website will look and feel. Review all the proposals to ensure they meet your business objectives. This review process should be part of your frequent (quarterly or semi-annually) website review strategy to ensure you are keeping up with the competition, and that your website is constantly refreshed with up to date content. 7. **7\. Testing**\- The best advice anyone can give about website testing is: Test…and then test some more! Business shouldn’t underestimate the damage a poorly-designed or malfunctioning website can do to their brand, image and reputation. Test the finished product across all main browsers (Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, MS Internet Explorer, Firefox) and all devices: Tablet PCs, Super widescreen Macs, small smart phones, Blackberrys, HTCs, Samsung etc. As indicated several times throughout this article, getting websites designed “right” isn’t a one-time effort. If you want your web presence to continually work hard for you, it is essential that you have a formal website review, enhancement and refresh strategy in place. If you wish to succeed in business, you not only need to keep up with your competition, you also need to out-do them! Doing this right would mean meeting with your **web hosting** and development company several times during the year (more frequently if your business environment changes frequently) to review upgrades and enhancements to the site. **You'll then arrive at a point where your competitors, and your competitor’s customers, are regularly checking out your website – that's when your website starts to take off and become the best salesperson you have. If you would like to discuss the above with a professional Dublin web services team, call us on 01 6216866 or email info@myit.ie** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Effective Web Design Strategies # Effective web design: Forget about tech and re-focus on talk There’s a lot to be said about being on the cutting edge of technology. And that’s what many a website designer has been enamoured with over the past half a decade or so. However, most website owners hate “tech” simply for the sake of using it. They are craving for more than tech. If given a choice, they’d rather choose a “low tech” website that gets them more business, looks after their customers and fosters communication. To build effective websites, web designing services should focus more on talk and less on tech. The idea is simple: Get back to the basics of communicating. We’ll tell you how you can do just that. **The makings of an effective website designer** What exactly is it that you are trying to do when you are selling something online, keeping an audience of website visitors informed or promoting your product or service? The central focus here is on communication. Be it with existing or future customers, casual visitors, business partners or other stakeholders, what you are attempting to do is communicate. A truly effective web designer can help you do exactly that through meaningful engagement. And they do so by Connecting, Convincing and Converting with your target audience. Designing a successful website means the web designer must be highly effective at performing all three aspects of the job. And that, in essence, is what makes for effective communication. Getting your message across (communicating) is what an effective web designer does well. The website is just a medium for them to do the job successfully. If, however, the medium is used ineffectively, the message will also be lost. **Less “tech” … more “talk”** The secret, to designing websites that make communication more effective, is to briefly forget about "tech" and re-focus on "talk". With so many tech tools available at their disposal, and more being introduced every day, it’s easy to see how a web design agency can get carried away on a wave of tech. And that’s where websites lose their ability to “talk”. Let’s think about it for a second: Why do a billion viewers, with 1.5 million of them being daily viewers, gravitate to TedTalks? It’s because the site is able to communicate through short, succinct, clear talk. Plain talk accomplishes much more than long speeches and complex thoughts. The same principles must be incorporated into website design, including: **Lighter websites:** One of the golden rules of communication, that “Less is more”, was coined for a reason. When a web designer creates too many web pages, stuffs too much content in each page, introduces multiple links to multiple pages (or external sites), it doesn’t help with your mission of communication. In fact, content overload might even serve to distort communication and disengage visitors. You need your website to talk less, but say more. **Fewer bells and whistles:** Too many icons, excessive amounts of widgets, heavy use of images, and flashing messages can distract visitors instead of fostering focused communication with them. A web design based on minimal bells and whistles will help you talk more and enable your visitors to “hear” clearly by reducing website “noise” **Well laid out content:** Think of a crowded marketplace with cramped elbow room, little walking space and no discernible signage. That’s how visitors feel when they come to an overly busy website. Work with your web designing agency to produce content with lots of spacing, legible print, plenty of section headers, short sentences and paragraphs, and simple words (instead of overly technical terms). This approach to web site designing will aid online communication and help deliver your message more effectively **Accessible and available:** Make accessibility and mobility a cornerstone of your website design strategy. Both these elements will aid better and more effective communication by ensuring your website message reach broader audiences While these simple web design best practices might seem straightforward and obvious, it may surprise you to learn how many businesses have online presences that don’t take these principles to heart. This brings lower return on investment (ROI) and a complete lack of communication between businesses and their stakeholders. The result: Fewer website visitors and an even lower conversion rate. **Cutting to the chase** Highly effective website designing is never about clamouring for as many bells and whistles as a website designing agency can provide you with. And neither is it a good idea to have a large website footprint by creating hundreds of pages to support your product or service. In fact, the golden rule is: Small is beautiful and effective. At the end of the day, good web designing is all about working with a professional designer who is highly effective in communication. Let’s forget about dazzling audiences with tech for a moment, and refocus our energies on talking with them instead. **If you would like to talk about your website and how MYIT can help you make it perform better for your business, call us on 01-6216866 or email [info@myit.ie](mailto:info@myit.ie) .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Website Move Guide # How to Move Your Website - Without Incurring Downtime! **Once your website has been running satisfactorily with your web hosting company, it’s often difficult (and stressful) to make a decision to switch to another provider. However, some business owners do have to face up to that eventuality so here are some pointers on how to get it done without it impacting on your business.** Hosting service providers going bankrupt, slow page load speeds, poor support, frequent server downtime, unsatisfactory after sales service, or the inability to upgrade or maintain their web servers to your satisfaction might compel you to move your website to another hosting service provider. However many website owners hesitate about making a decision to move hosting as they fear the potential impact it may have on their website and business. Here’s how you can affect an almost flawless website move – without associated downtime or too much stress: **Follow The Process:** A website move is similar to moving house, changing your company branding or changing your business address. It’s all about following a well defined process and a long todo list. Here’s how to avoid potential website downtime when embarking on the “big hosting move”: **1) Find a New Host:** While cost is important, before signing up look for other ‘must haves’ such as amount of hosting space, technical support, data bandwidth and CPU usage limits etc. Speak to 5+ comparable hosting providers and schedule a meeting to discuss your website and what you need. Ask them how they are going to guarantee you a premium service. You don't want to move hosting now and then move again in a few months. Choose your new hosting company wisely. **2) Migrate Your Files:** Download your files from the OLD host, using FTP (or appropriate tools/services); then upload them to the web servers at the NEW host. You may have settings, cron jobs, permissions, SSL certs etc that need to be updated and installed by hand, but gather all this information at the start from your current hoster. Check your old emails for an install guide from the web design company that built your website. Alternatively, ask a web design company to oversee your website move and step in for those few technical areas that you can't do on your own. **3) Move Your Databases:** Use FTP (or appropriate tools/services) to backup any databases that you may have on the OLD host, and then (using services/tools such as SSH and/or PHPMyAdmin) restore them to the NEW host. Make sure you 'connect' the new code to the new database. Again, this can be a tricky area for website owners so speak to your hosters and to a web developer that can help for these database connection parts of the website move. **4) Deal With Old Emails:** Often, old emails do not get ported. You should therefore archive all your old emails from the OLD host, and store them locally on your computer/or local external storage device. To ensure all new emails use your NEW host, you'll need to make POP3/IMAP connections for each email address directing them to the NEW host. All new emails will now directly come to the NEW host. Inside in Cpanel you can access your emails for the first day or so until you get your PC and smart phone connected to the new email server settings. **5) Test Your NEW Site:** Make sure you test all intra-site features as well as external links. Use various devices (smart phones, tablets, desk top computers, laptops), different operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows etc.), as well as different browsers (Chrome, FireFox, IE, Microsoft Edge etc.) for the test. If your site is a shop, create a '1 cent' product and use your credit card to buy it and make sure the transaction went through as normal. You need to test all parts of the site to make sure that everything is still working. Initially you will have to 'test' the site on a temporary web address as you may still have your website name pointing at the old hosting. **6) Change Domains:** It’s now time to actually ‘pull the plug’ on the old hosting. Do this by changing your DNS Nameserver settings from the OLD web hosting service to the NEW one. The site admin for the NEW site should provide you with these details. You then need to contact your domain name provider with these details, and they will change the DNS settings for the new web servers or you can do this yourself in the control panel associated with your website name. **7) Wait:** Your new host is now ready to go live, but it’ll take anything from a few hour to 48 hours (sometimes a bit more) for the new site to be fully functional across the entire internet. Until then, both old and new hosts will be intermittently used. It is a good idea to switch hosting on a Saturday night so as to have your website in front of as few customers as possible. Your hosting company or website design team often schedule work like this over weekends so discuss the switch over with them. A word of advice: Even after you’ve thoroughly tested the site on your new host – check it out again on multiple browsers, different operating systems and various devices - to your complete satisfaction. DO NOT SEVER TIES with the OLD hosting provider until you are 100% confident that is working perfectly on the new hosting – or you delete your option of switching back if there was a problem on the new hosting server. Do that approx 2 weeks after you’ve gone live with the new host, and are confident that all ‘issues’ with the move have been ironed out. Additionally, if your OLD web hosting service is also the provider through whom you acquired your domain name, you may need to maintain an ongoing relationship with them. It’s best therefore that you initiate and conclude this entire process professionally. **It’s Your Move Now** When you decide to undertake a website move, just think of it as though you are about to move into a new home: - • You find and buy the perfect home at a new location (new web host) – speak to as many hosters as you can. You want to hear from their customers and read real testimonials. - • You move all your 'belongings' to the new address (files and databases) - • You collect any piled up mail from your old mail box (archived your old emails) - • You notify your local post office to divert your mail to your new address (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) - • You notify all your friends and neighbours of your new address (aka hosting) **There can be issues that stump you when moving a website so it's not for the novices. If you have done some website work in the past then can can do a 'test move' by getting your entire website to work perfectly at a new temporary web address.** **However, working with an experienced web design company could help you with all potential issues you may encounter along the way; and will prevent you from having any website downtime. It's a price well worth paying. Let us know if you are having any website issues and are contemplating a website hosting move – we'd be happy to advise.** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Importance of a CMS # Web Design: The Importance Of A Great Website Content Management System (CMS) **Seamless and Effective Content Deployment & Management** Many small and medium-sized business owners contact a website design firm to get them started with an online presence. A great deal of time is spent in discussing and reviewing the structure of the website, the content, the message and the layout of each page – which is extremely important! However, when it comes to managing the actual content to be hosted on those pages, not much thought is put into it at the outset. A good web designer will not only advise you on the look, usability, image and feel of your website, but will also provide invaluable inputs into your website content management, and how you might benefit from using an easy to use yet powerful Content Management System (CMS). **A CMS – What Exactly Is it?** If anyone has used, or knows about, document processing systems of yore, then you’ll probably appreciate the role of Content Management Systems (CMSs) even more. While today’s word processors, like Microsoft Word, Google Docs or Adobe), make creating content a breeze, the old document processors were a nightmare. Simple tasks, like setting margins, inserting tabs and paragraph indenting, which are done with just a mouse-click or tap today, took a lot of time to accomplish back then. In today’s digital age, where web content rules supreme, a web development team, website owners and webmasters spend inordinate amounts of time “fussing” with content, for example: colouring, highlighting, adjusting font-size, making paragraphs, general formatting etc. CMS’s are tools that have moved website content management from the dark ages of document processing, into modern day online word processing. They have empowered web content managers by simplifying and automating all of the tasks highlighted above, and many more besides. However, you need to have the right CMS so that you can leverage the benefits these CMS tools offer for managing and maintaining your online content. This is something a professional website design team will be able to advise you on as there are literally thousands of different CMS systems. **Reaping The Benefits Of A Premium CMS** So, how will a CMS assist you in “taming” the wild website content beast that many small businesses have to contend with? Here are a few ways that web content producers and website content publishers can benefit from having the right CMS: **1) Collaboration:** Truly effective content is the product of collaboration between web designers and content creators. By separating the physical design of the site from the content, CMS’s lay the foundation of effective cooperation between multiple teams. May staff can work on the one CMS at the same time and a good CMS will have a document locking system in place so only one set of web page content changes can be submitted at a time. **2) Streamlined Workflow:** A good CMS will enforce a discipline when it comes to creating content, reviewing and editing it, testing how it will look once updated, staging it for upload to your website and refreshing it periodically. This rationalised work process can end up saving you countless hours of work/re-work and prevent many an erroneous content piece from going live. **3) Standardisation:** Nothing sends a more negative image about you and your company to your customers and business partners than a highly “varied” website look'n'feel – one that is un-homogeneous and filled with nonconformity. Through the use of one or more website templates and forms, a CMS enforces a standardised look and feel across your website, blogs and social media forums. No longer will your web presences look like the product of a web designer with the help from “too many cooks”, but one that is the result of a well thought-out online strategy. This makes adding new web pages easy as the website editor just has to choose what layout they want for the page and the corresponding website template layout is used for that new page and with it comes the standardised fonts, colours, header, footer etc of the other website pages. **4) SEO Enablement:** If you speak with your web design team you could even be introduced to some CMSs that will help you with optimising your content for search engines. Platforms MODX, for instance, have built-in features that can help you create and manage Search Engine Optimised (SEO) rich content so that you can more effectively reach your specific target audience and be able to add and mange this website content in a time efficient manner.. Ultimately, investing in a CMS is about enabling you and your team to produce, present and manage web content more effectively and time efficiently than you do today. With the right CMS tools in place, your business will spend less time worrying about how to organise and manage your web content, and more on running and managing your business. Your website content management is vitally important but it should not be taking too much time away from looking after customers and replying to new sales enquiries. Of course, like all good tools, you need the right one in your corner to help you produce the results you are looking for. That’s also true about a CMS. That’s why it is important to have an open conversation with your web design, hosting and content development team about the best CMS for your business and your colleagues. They are trained and experienced across many different CMS systems to provide you the right advice and support. **If you would like to discuss your CMS options feel free to call us on 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .** ### Contact Details MyIT Web Design, G8 Riverview Business Park, New Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 12, Ireland, D12DH05 [+353 (0)1 6216 866](tel:0035316216866) [info@myit.ie](mail:info@myit.ie) [ Chat on WhatsApp: https://shorturl.at/zO8Vy ] ## Technical Stack Specializing in the LAMP Framework (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB). Expertise in WordPress, OpenCart, MODX, EVO and custom PHP development with Javascript.