Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Well folks I just got back from the sunny Algarve in Portugal yesterday afternoon. The touchdown of flight FR7067 from Faro at around 3 yesterday (Sunday 28th) brought an end to a very enjoying couple of days in the family place in Albuferia with some College friends. The trip consisted of some boozy nights out with the local portuguese people and other tourists on the ‘Strip’ but also involved some pretty heavy ’socialising’ with the good auld Irish tourists and ex-pats in the main Irish bars such as Erins Isle and Father Eds. When not sipping on €.27 cent bottles of beer by the pool or downing €2.50 pints in one of the aforementioned bars we were stuffing our bellys with amazing T-Bone steak, which in one place in particular was practically the size of a keyboard. One thing is for sure, the portuguese do a mean steak.

Anyhow while I was walking through Dublin Airport it reminded that their website was to be relaunched recently so after wading through 154 emails since Wednesday for the AKA Marketing.com website (please don’t tell me to get a Blackberry because I won’t listen) I decided to check the Dublin Airport website to see if the new site (located at DublinAirport.com) was live, it was and here’s a couple of paragraphs about it.

The new site was launched a couple of weeks ago, April the 7th to be precise. The web design house who took on the responsibilty of the redesign was Red Sky. Red Sky are well known and have worked with AIB, VHI and Fianna Fail to name just a few of their clients, their focus is on creating websites with strong accessibility and usability without comprising on asthetics.

The new DublinAirport.com site homepage is well constructed and contains information which visitors will most likely want when visiting an airport’s website such as live flight information, local weather information and the latest airport news which at the moment includes items about Ryanair’s new European routes, departure floor improvements and the relocation of Bank Of Ireland’s Bureau de Change desk. This news more than likely runs off a content management system so non-technical people would easily be able to update it, therefore it is very likely to be kept up to date.

The layout & navigation is an integral part of any website design, thus I will continue to talk about it for a couple of lines. The layout of the new site seems to follow generally accepted web standards which everyone is familiar with such as navigation along the top, navigation along the left, main content in the middle and then a right sidebar for advertisments or other bits and bobs. The navigation along the left often breaks into different sub-sections depending on the current page/section being browsed, this is done in such as way as to make it easy to figure out where in the site hierarchy you are. The homepage of the dublinairport.com site is available via a link on every single page, this is a big plus as often visitors will arrive at one of a site’s inner pages via search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN and will be looking for a handy way to find the homepage. Standard issue stuff really as far a layout and navigation is concerned then.

In terms of accessibility, the new design is quite good (the accessibility statement page mentions that an audit is currently going on so it might improve further when feedback comes in) and avoids many pitfalls which make a site less usable to those with disabilities such as the use of exact pixel or point measurements when specifying font sizes in CSS which means pressing ‘Ctrl’ and the ‘+’ buttons together does not increase the size of the text on the page in Internet Explorer; it still works in Firefox though for some reason. Other ‘features of accessibility’ include access keys for quick access to important pages and structured H1, H2, etc. tags which allow screenreaders to read through a page in correct sequence. Standard accessibility features such as alt and title tags are of course seen throughout the site too. Accessibility is very important to the web in general and dublinairport.com certainly does not cut any corners in this respect.

The web design company, the homepage, the layout & navigation and accessibility of the site have been covered so far. Lets talk then in terms of the actual content of the site. There are (from what I can see) five distinct areas of content on the site targeted towards the actual ‘user’ of the airport. I’ll first list them as links (which all open in a new window) and then go into a little bit more detail on each one, they are ‘Flight Information‘, ‘Plan Your Trip‘, ‘To & From The Airport‘, ‘At The Airport‘ and ’Shops & Restaurants‘.

The flight information section contains live arrival and departure information, flight timetables but also an interactive ‘Destination and Airlines‘ page where you can find out which airlines fly to which destinations, the times for these flights and whether or not they are direct or stop-over flights. The plan your trip section is full of useful information and also includes an ebookers.com interface to make booking a holiday easier. The section contains pages which cover topics such as Airport Security, Check-in, Passports & Visas, Imports & Customs, Foreign Currency & Banking, Car Rentals, Packing, Travelling With Pets and content regarding people with Reduced Mobility. 

The to & from the airport section contains information which is helpful for those visiting Dublin for the first time and contains information about travelling to and from the airport via taxi, coach, bus etc. The designers have even put in a ‘By Rail’ page which clarifies the fact that Dublin airport actually has no rail links just in case tourists are wondering if they can travel to the city by rail and I’m sure there will be plenty of those as nearly every major airport has some sort of rail links… expect Dublin airport of course, everyone can thank the ‘Department of Transport‘ for that.

The next section is the at the airport section. This section will allow any interested party to find out more about the facilities and services available at the airport, one of the content rich areas in this section is an excellent interactive maps page featuring all the different areas of the airport. Below the maps various shops, toilets, kiosks, etc. are listed and when one of the items in the list is clicked upon then that shop, toilet or whatever is highlighted on the map, very useful indeed. Other pages and sub-sections in the at the airport section include (among plenty of others of course) lost property, Internet access, baby changing facilities, postal facilities, religious facilities, customer services and aiport security.

The final section which is targeted towards the ‘user’ of the airport then is the shops & restaurants section, as the name suggests it covers all the shops and restaurants in Dublin airport, the information it gives includes the names of the individual shop or restaurant, its location and its opening hours. 

As mentioned above these five sections are aimed at the ‘user’ of the airport, but the site also contains a B2B section which focuses on the business aspect of the Dublin Airport Authority such as Doing Business with Us, Airport Developments, Health and Safety, Career Notices, Media Centre and the Environment amongst many others. For those of you that don’t know who the Dublin Airport Authority are they are basically the management company which manages all issues of the airport. They are a state owned company.

After going through an overview of the main sections above let takes an overhead look then at the good points and bad points about the newly designed site. The major attraction of the new site is the overwhelming amount of useful information covering just about everything and anything regarding the airport. The site is only new and thus many pages might not be indexed in Google yet but a ’site:www.dublinairport.com’ query already returns over 200 pages and considering the nature and aims of the site this is pretty darn good. This information is ‘packaged’ in a very user friendly and clean design which should be appealing to everyone (well almost everyone) including those with disabilities and difficulties using the Internet. In my opinion another clap on the back must be given to the design company for their use and reference of external resources (I believe in not reinventing the wheel) which are very useful to tourists and holidaymakers such as ebookers.com for easier booking of hotels/holidays and the AA Ireland route planner to help people find their way around the city and country a lot easier than they otherwise could have.

When I said ‘well almost everyone’ above this was in relation to in my opinion one of the major downfalls of the site, which is the lack of any non-english versions. An airport website for an airport that claims to be ‘international’ which is without support for German, Italian, French etc. speaking people is a big flaw. Even in the actual airport itself many signs are written in many different languages to facilitate non-english speaking people, not everyone is a Paddy or a Yank (no offence intended to my fellow Irish or indeed American people of course). A minor issue with the site is the lack of a sitemap which would enable people to get a quick overview of all the different sections and pages on the site, of course this is just my opinion but considering the emphasis Red Sky’s design team have paid to accessibility and usability I’m sure others will agree with me.

In closing then the Dublin airport site is now very very impressive. It is a site that looks good, is easy to use and is filled with excellent content, this in most people’s view is what makes a great site.

Just spotted there that Benchmark Capital, the financial backer of everyones favourite Irish sports channel Setanta has agreed to invest $15M / £8M in Ireland’s favourite social networking website Bebo.com. The investment is to allow San Fran based Bebo (pronounced bee-bo) to challenge MySpace for Global market share in the social networking industry but particularly in the UK, where MySpace is the more dominant of the two sites, but not by far. 

If your from Ireland and have not heard of Bebo where have you been? I thought I was bad for only seeing the first ever episode of Lost two weeks ago. Anyhow as mentioned above it is a social networking site which basically allows everyone to keep in touch with their friends, family and enemies (if they want to) regardless of where in the world they are located. The idea is that everyone who signs up gets a personal webpage which has interactive features such as a blog, a whiteboard (drawing), a flashbox (swf movie) as well as an area for comments to be added. Another very important feature of Bebo and one of the main reasons for its growth is the ability to build up your own network of friends and have them listed on your personal webpage. It is these features that have allowed Bebo achieve over 500,000 Irish members with an estimated 5,000 new signups a day from Irish IP addresses. With this latest investment of $15M / £8M it can only get bigger and better so watch this space.

Well as you can see the new version of akamarketing.com has finally been launched after months and months of hard and tedious labour by our team, one thing which wasn’t hard though was switching hosts. Before I continue let me mention why I decided to switch hosts.

The reasons were twofold, firstly I was getting sick to death of receiving all them ‘Vbulletin database error’ messages vbulletin was forced to send out when my dreamhost.com hosted database systems went down time after time and refused connections to willing forum visitors. As well as the database issues which vbulletin let me know about the guys at dreamhost constantly let me know about this server crashing, this service down etc. The thing that annoyed me most about this was how they always sign off their emails as ‘The Happy Dreamhost Server fixing team’ or the ‘The Happy Dreamhost broken system repair team’, blah blah blah. I think they are trying to come across as funny or hip. Well I say if they want to be funny, hit the New York stand up scene, but if you want to be in the hosting business, then provide at least some degree of reliability to your clients (yes that includes clients who use databases).

The second reason was that I wanted akamarketing.com to appear in the ‘pages from Ireland’ search on Google.ie (which Google.com redirects to for every Irish IP) to reach more of the people that are likely to become search engine optimisation clients of mine. In order to appear in Google’s results for a specific country a website must either be physically hosted in that country or have the domain name extension of that country. Since akamarketing.com is a very well established domain I did not want to change to akamarketing.ie and since dreamhost was located in the United States this meant that changing to an Irish host was the only viable option.

I don’t know how I did it but somehow I stumbled across the myhost.ie website (I’m sure Google had something to do with it though) when looking for a suitable webhost based in Ireland. After looking through the different hosting packages they had to offer and checking everything was up to stratch pricewise and feature wise, I decided to drop them a mail to ‘look under the hood’ of their services and find out about the little but important things that hosts generally don’t mention on their pages such as PHP version, MySQL version, curl version, whether or not ssh access was allowed or not as well as one or two other things.

I got my reply within an hour or two I’d say, which impressed me a lot as good support (sales or technical) is important to me, but I kind of thought that this might just have been a once off quick response time and not the norm. Anyhow over the next few days I was in touch over email with their main support guy, Martin Saunders in relation to my specific requirements in terms of functionality, storage space and bandwidth and the response time for this series of emails was under an hour, sometimes replies came through within minutes. Anybody used to dealing with webhosts should know that achieving regular response times like these to emails is pretty darn good. As far as what I needed (specification wise) on any hosting plan which I may sign up for, most things I needed where already installed/configured and Martin let me know that others could be setup as needed with little hassle. This coupled with the speed of the responses made my mind up to host with myhost.ie, a relatively unknown host trying to compete with the ‘big guns’ of the Irish hosting industry such as hosting365.ie and host.ie.

After a couple of weeks finishing off the various sections and designs of the new akamarketing.com site I signed up for a myhost.ie package. It just so happended that the current special offer package was closest to what I predicted I would need in terms of space and bandwidth so I saved myself a few euro in the process too. I would however have paid the extra if there was not a special package deal at the time, as I honestly believe that no serious webmaster should get hung up over a few euro, dollars, pounds or whatever when quality hosting is at stake.

After uploading the new site, I of course did have the usual teething problems associated with moving hosts, so I contacted myhost.ie with my first (and second, third etc..) technical support issues as a paying customer and the same pattern of quick responses brought me solutions to 95% of my issues which is great and much better than what a massive company such as dreamhost.com did for me during my almost three year stay with them.

As far as reliability and speed of servers is concerned so far so good, but of course I’ve only recently moved so could not make full judgement on these issues until some time has passed and some of my new server intensive SEO tools get a good runabout. For those that are interested myhost.ie runs plesk 7.5 hosting control panel software which makes managing your domain a snap. The really experienced webmasters among us could do most things they needed to with a text editor and an FTP program, but for everyone else plesk is a godsend.

So the bottom line for this post (well actually bottom paragraph) is to show my appreciation for myhost.ie (and particularly Martin Saunders who was great and very knowledgeable about all my issues) even at this early stage in our relationship. Without doubt they are a small time player in the Irish hosting industry and in the eyes of many have not ‘proved’ themselves but with excellent support, excellent features and moderate pricing they are certainly doing the right things to merit considerable growth and recognition in the hosting industry in Ireland. All at akamarketing.com appreciate their help and wish them the best of luck.