• Monday, June 29th, 2009
Following our new marketing plan by Una (and I would suggest her to anyone planning marketing), I have been doing research on incubation spaces in Ireland. Apparently I knew about 6 of them beforehand, but I wanted to make complete list before planning how to approach them.
I do believe that doing research through Google is waste of time. It’s not that I can’t find things – there is just too much of them and takes time to filter out information you need. Also – problem with searching incubation spaces is that each university has one and most of them don’t advertise it.
That’s why I went to twitter and I’m really grateful to all who replied to me. @UKBI gave me list of UK & Ireland incubation spaces which wasn’t really big, but there were main Irish incubation spaces mentioned. My list grew to 18 incubation spaces at that point.
Researching more in Google about incubation spaces brought me to new page I haven’t seen before for start-up businesses. Sorry – design for that page is crap (I like business-startup.ie much better), but it has a lot of valuable information. And there were over 50 incubation spaces in Ireland. I’m gonna work forward from this list.
Update July 1st:
Another list provided by twitter friend @NiaLLLarkin from startup-ireland.org.
• Thursday, October 09th, 2008
Would you want to note your business for award and get some publicity? Do you know what awards are available there and which ones you can apply for?
As a year comes to the end there is more and more awards coming around the corner. Even this week there is to of them – Inspired IT Awards and Irish Web Awards.
If you didn’t had time to apply for those there is still few left and you can try others next year.
So here is small list for me and you just to note down awards in IT and business in Ireland. If you know some more – that’s great, add it as comment! I would love to extend my list to keep track of them!
IT Awards
Business Awards
• Friday, October 03rd, 2008
I just read a post in IBW forum and thought a bit about crappy websites around. What would be the website I would like to return to? I have been testing, developing and managing websites for over 8 years now. I would love to share my ideas with you.
So let’s imagine ideal website. What are the pages and information I would love to see there?
- First page should contain companies mission statement, slogan or some kind of information about what they are doing. If I don’t see that, I don’t even continue to look at the website.
- About page. This is second page I search for. Why this website was created? Who is company behind it? How big it is? Who are the partners? Is it be reliable?
- Clients / Products / Case Study pages. These are the most important pages after the first page. What this company had done before? How much clients they have already? Who are those clients? What products they have developed? What are the success stories?
- Contact page. You wouldn’t believe it, but a lot of websites forget it. I have seen wonderful websites in design but there is no information at all how I can contact company. It often makes me mad and I can’t even complain.
Basically Attention Interest Desire and Action (AIDA) principle should be in every website.
What would make me close the site and don’t visit again?
- Broken links (pages that leads to “Not Found” or errors)
- More than 5 colors on website. Don’t believe person who says the more colorful website is, the more interesting it will be for clients. If my eyes hurts from looking at your site I will close it.
- Too much text. Keep it simple. Very few people will read a whole page of text. Usually they will just quit after the second sentence even if it will be written in the most beautiful lyrics. Highlight the important things, add diagrams, pictures and tables.
- Bad Spelling. I’m not native English so I know what I’m talking about. When I developed my first website and asked person to look at the idea of it, he kept highlighting my spelling errors and didn’t look at the idea at all. Would you want your users to look at your grammar instead of your products?
- A lot of pictures. Thought pictures should be there, a lot of them will make site to load forever.
- Inconsistent design. Would you get annoyed if “Home” button is placed in different place in every page? What if links are in different color in every page? Keep the template same over all the pages.
- No cross-browser testing. Everybody uses latest Internet Explorer. Why should I test it on other browsers? Only 26% of the browsers used IE7 in August 2008 – check Browser Statistics table to see other browsers
- Music in background. Thought there are few sites that gives nice atmosphere feeling with music, after a while it gets annoying. There should be button to switch it off and think twice about music before you put it in website.
Myths:
- If I send person away from my site when he click on links, he/she won’t return to my site. A lot of people would return to your site if it leads to interesting content. I keep returning to Dublin Blog because it keeps update events and news in Dublin. I return to IrishDev because it shows events I’m interested in. Well.. you get the point.
Tips:
- Buy design online. There is a lot of designers selling already ready design. You can shop around and pick the one you like. Think twice before going with the design that you imagined. Are you a designer? Do you know everything about good designs?
- Even if you build nice website, it won’t be found unless it has some keywords and some promotion. Keywords is easy to do. However Internet Promotion could take over 6 months (depending on what you want to do) and might be quite expensive. But I know few people who keep posting in forums, other blogs and everywhere around web just to get their website Google rank to go up.
- Think about your target audience before developing website. Is it Ireland you are targeting? Is it IT companies or biology students? What they will be searching for in your website?
- Communication. It might be forums, blogs or surveys. People love to communicate with others and they will return to your site just because of that.
Developing website is just another IT project. And believe me or not the time spend on the IT project planning is at least 50% of all development time. Plan, shop around, ask people and see examples. If you know what you want development itself will be fast, easy and cheap.
• Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
So I’m happy to announce my project NextAction.ie is released to it’s second 1.1 version. I worked quite late yesterday to get that ready. Thanks to my really amazing team!
What’s new:
- Calendar. Which means you can review tasks in past and in future.
- Closed tasks. You can review tasks that has been already done.
- Someday Maybelist. My favorite. I can put task in Someday Maybe and don’t worry about it any more
- Specify Date. I can put task for some date in future
- There is even more contexts (before there were only 4 of them and I always put everything in “errands”)
- Design is improved for IE, Safari and FF
- Timezone in Preferences. Doesn’t need much of explanation
- UserName implemented (previous use of only e-mails didn’t make people happy)
- Added Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at last
- Tasks can be Deleted (in case it is not important any more)
And best of all – you can try it for FREE! Please try it and give me your comments.
Cheers! Have to go and buy some red wine and get drunk.
• Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Today I reviewed my product before release and my designer accidentally noticed few issues with IE. So now I’m wandering – can I install IE on my computer (and different versions of it) without installing Windows VM (yes, I’m using MacBook)? And I actually have to upgrade to FF3. Been lazy doing that for a while.
Jamie on Twitter gave me link to nice site http://browsershots.org/ however it gives only like 2 screen shots and then expects you to pay for it.
Anyone knows any cross-browser testing sites or strategies?
Actually it’s so strange that some buttons don’t work on IE. Works fine on Safari and Firefox. I’m confused. Should do some more monkey testing on it… 
• Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
Here is list of sites I review regularly :
Girl Geek Dinners site as I’m geek and I’m proud of it
TechLudd event doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it rulz
Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Enterprise Board event calendar is good if you want to keep track of new cheap training courses and networking events
Yahoo events – all events in Dublin (if you search for them)
Dun Laoghaire events which are not related to business or tech, but at least they are good for going out on weekends
Digital Hub – sometimes there is some goods events
Enterprise Ireland – different enterprise events, some of them might be interesting
Open Coffee meeting for web and business people like me 
I haven’t been to them though (I always send my husband)
Irish Business Women Forum – this is the best forum in Ireland so far. I think it’s much more better than boards.ie
Zircol network – some events like First Tuesday comes from this site. Thought it is really hard to navigate and I never made it through registration… Maybe my mind is different from other people using it?
LinkedIn – in case you need to find person and know more about it or maybe somebody can introduce person to you… Very great site and a lot of useful groups too.
IrishDev – it’s not working at the moment, but it will start working soon (I know owner). Before it went down, there was the best calendar of all events!
Tester Tested Blog – did I told you that software testing is one of my hobbies? I break stuff with my bad aura, I don’t even need to touch it
Dublin blog. It is rather nice blog of all the events and nice pictures. It really keeps you informed about things around Dublin
NextAction – this is my project, that’s why I access it so often. And actually it helps me organise tasks. I can’t wait for new release of it this week or next, because a lot of things still annoys me..
