As the number one kids party entertainer in Tipperary, I was looking for a top-class local web design company to set up my new website http://www.olivercorbettmagic.com. Within days of initial contact, Derek and his team had my site up and running with wonderful graphics, no hastle and within budget. I’m delighted with the results. Thanks again, Oliver

” you guys rock ” James quick move

“The team at Pixel Splash listened to what we wanted to achieve with our site and gave us invaluable advice throughout the design, implementation and launch phase” Regards, Michael ,M.D. Irish Golf  

” Great feed back from our users on the new design. .” Marco – date for free.

” I was so happy with the end product i have recommended their company to every one i know. Great Job Guys.”
Pat Hickey M.D. Ace Security.

“Extremely happy with end result and the speed in which Pixel Splash were able to finish the project. The ongoing support, help and advice is amazing. Thanks.” John, Copymoore.com

“I was really very pleased with Pixel Splash design for my web site, it was delivered quickly and backed up with excellent support. Thanks again” Regards, Martin Campion

“Big thumbs up for Pixel Splash from us, love the design” Kevin CCR

Thanks to all who got involved, you can read our winners reviews of Pixel Splash below. We picked what we thought were the most honest, forthright and well written reviews and have awarded a  500 Euro design voucher to each.

Review 1 Dylan Dee.

The first time visiting the website gave me a distinct  impression that the site is out to impress.  All the graphics seemed to be very professional and not the same standardized stock images you get sick of seeing on allot of other web design websites. Thumbs up to the web designer, nice to see someone who knows what they are doing. I love the fact the the site showcases different design techniques, i want a website…. its nice to see that someone  has the skill to deliver what i want.  Navigation was easy and I had no problems finding my way around the site. The English was perfect and the type was nice and easy on the eye and very readable, i find on some websites the type to be barely legible. All in all i could not find fault. I would maybe like to see some staff images on the website but other than that its a big thumbs up from me. Nice to see something unique for a change. Talk soon Dylan.

Review 2 Chic Model Agency

Upon landing on the home page, I was greeted with some very powerful imagery which let me know i had come to the right place. As a newly established model agency image and style is what we are about, The imagery on the site is undeniably fabulous. I love the underlining elements of the site which give an added element of professionalism.  Navigation was straight forward and standard .  Spacing, layout and fonts were also very consistent. The colors used throughout the website was consistent with the logo colours. It looked like the site  designers and developers must have put in a lot of effort to create the graphics and making the site very usable. I look forward to developing our new project with Pixel-splash.com. Rgds Maria Nolan.

Review 3 Dhillan { dance music producer}

Ok let me just say one thing, thank god for companies like Pixel Splash. I am so sick of  looking at what is basically the same corporate template on 80% of web sites. It is great to see a company daring to be different. My favorite page is the web design page which says more with imagery in a couple of seconds about the designers skills than any overloaded 10 pages of content explaining one term you see on some sites.  A quick look in your portfolio suggests a great capacity to deliver various styles to differing industries. To finish the site is backed up by great easy to read and understand content which a none tech user like myself can understand. Cant wait to get started Derek.  Dhillan

Review 4 Marco { date for free}

Having worked with Derek and the guys for a number of years already i was more than happy to offer some feedback. OK to begin with i had a little side scroll issue when viewing the site on my net book which i see has since been sorted. That was the only issue i could find. Love the new look, having worked with you guys on a number of projects i know first hand Derek’s photoshop skills  and Micks development and marketing acumen :}. The typography is one of  the best features onsite for me, so soft on the eyes. I think one of the best comments i can give is; we are an online dating agency based in Canada and we came a long way to Tipperary for our web application, Why?, because you guys rock plain and simple. All the best Marco.

Review 5  John Murhpy { quick move }

Every page is a bit special, something different to feast your eyes on with each page. I would imagine your site design gets up the noses of your competitors, its borderline showing off :}. What i like best about your site is the useful content which for me is in plain English, easy to understand and allowed me to wring that little be extra from my own site, when doing a little diy seo and adwords.  If my review is a winning one i would like you to give the voucher or the value of same  to the Right for peace foundation in Clonmel as i know this is something with which yourselves are very involved in.  Best regards  John.

Thanks to everone who participated in our feedback program, some
reported an issue when viewing the site on a small monitor, we have
tweaked the site and this is no longer an issue. we will post the 5
winners on the blog on Friday, again thanks all.

WordPress 3.0.1 out already, they dont wait around do they, got to admit it wordpress is my number one cms.

Its here, our new web site design and as promised we have a very nice give away, 5 x  500 Euro vouchers to use against any design, development and marketing project.

So how do you get your hands on one of these bad boys. Well quite easy, we think our new look rocks and we would like to know if you feel the same, so all you need to do is write a 150 word minimum review of our new look web site, be honest and forthright, { don’t just copy and paste a review from somewhere} we want to know your favourite page, how you find the user interface, how about navigation through the site and or what ever else you would like to include.

Just email us the review or post it here.

We will pick the top five most thought out and well written reviews and each will receive one 500 Euro voucher.

any questions in relation to this offer ? etc please feel free to post here.

Derek

PS feel free to pass this offer on to friends or anyone whom you think would benefit.

Why your Business needs a web site.

There are quite a large number of businesses here in Clonmel,  Tipperary and around Ireland that still have not got around to building  a company web site. Which,  while its understandable in the current economic climate that companies are reluctant to part with hard earned cash,  for something that they may not fully understand, see on a par with a phone book listing, don’t see any reason to bother and or all of the above.  Similar i might baulk at my mechanic telling me i need a part for my car, which seems to run fine at the moment, to offset a more costly repair down the road, pun intended of course.

To begin with we will do a hypothetical experiment, this experiment while hypothetical, will be based on complete factual information as of time of writing. This experiment will focus on two companies offering the same product on a national level. We will use kitchen cabinet design  as the product and service of both companies. We will call these companies,

• “Online Kitchens” and “Offline Kitchens”  their respective names show where they come in this experiment, i.e ”Online Kitchens” has  a web site ”Offline Kitchens” does not have a web site.

Okay now we will give each company a profile, and target audience,

•  selling and installing kitchen cabinets throughout Ireland, their prime target audience is obviously people interested in having  a kitchen supplied and or installed. OK they will have a traditional ad spend budget, we will look in to  this type of advertising when we come to offline kitchens, for online kitchens we will focus on customer generation via the web and its effectiveness. First its important to see some hard facts;

• There are over 2.4 million Internet users here in Ireland and growing daily.

• Irish shoppers spent an estimated EUR2.1 billion last year on credit card purchases over the Internet.

• Many shoppers believe they get better value for money by buying online,

• The UK e-retail sector grew at its highest rate in two years during May, with sales up 22 percent compared to the same month last year.

• Search is on of the most widely used functions online.

• 54% of Irish consumers research offline purchases online first.

OK now back to our new company online kitchens, Lets mine some online data related to that niche, in Ireland in June 2010, this was the Google search volume for some search terms related to their niche. “custom kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search vloume in Ireland for June, “discount kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June, “buy kitchen cabinets”= 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June,  ”modular kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June. Think about that for a minute 4 keyword searches here in Ireland that accounted for 4000 people online looking for sites related to these keywords, note there would be alot more  keyword generated searches by people looking for kitchens but for the purpose of this example we will keep it to four phrases. That’s four thousand potential customers already looking  for online kitchens  in June around Ireland.

So how can online kitchens tap that market?.

Honest answer, very quickly  and easily, A simple pay per click ad campaign would have your kitchen ad display to searchers within 15 minutes, and as the name pay per click suggests, you only pay when some actually clicks your ad and visits your web site.  Think about that in terms of lead generation. Your cost per click  {cpc} will depend on a number of factors see http://www.pixel-splash.com/blog/pay-per-click/, however i would imagine your cpc to be anywhere form 10 cent to a euro. That’s quite cheap for a  very hot  customer sales lead. Now i could write a whole blogs wrote of information on generating qualified customer’s online but you may of aged a year by the time you finish reading :}, but i think you can see that even by scratching the surface,  what benefits there are  to having a web site online, here in Clonmel,  Tipperary or indeed anywhere in Ireland.You can also look at http://www.pixel-splash.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/ for methods on improving your organic search visibility.

So what about offline kitchens?

Don’t worry i haven’t forgotten despite the length of the post :}.  So whats available to to offline kitchens other than the obvious store front, local yellow pages etc that online kitchens is sure to have, We have the traditional advertising mediums to access. OK lets have a look at three well used mediums,

1. National newspaper,
2. Local news paper,
3. Local Radio,

• National newspaper ad. Upside good brand awareness possible high exposure to customers, downside costs, unknown as to how much of your target demographic is being reached by the ad and unknown return on investment.
• Local newspaper ad.  Good branding in your locality, downside , snippet of conversation which a i had with a local newspaper ad executive, ” leaving for pastures greener, sick and tired of clients ripping me a new one over the amount of new customers in store versus the amount spent on the ad campaign, which where hard sold to these clients on fresh air promises.” For obvious reasons i wont be naming names, also as above unknown as to how much of your target demographic is being reached by the ad and unknown return on investment.
• Local radio, you will typically be charged per 1000 listeners and will vary from station to station. Upside good local branding, can be cost effective,  Downside limited target demographic information and without sounding repetitive, unknown return on investment.

Conclusion, while I’m not saying there are not effective offline advertising media, and it can ad to your business, think about it online kitchens already use offline media effectively but also has access to the online market, where your roi is completely trackable and costs are very low, versus offline kitchens who rely on the traditional offline ad mediums, i just have one question for you, which kitchen company do you think has the edge?.

C,mon Holland, dont see Brazil beating them, sorry Derek :}, although i have to agree on Ghana winning tonight. Early finish today me thinks :}.

To celebrate the launch of our new web site Pixel Splash which offers a complete suite of web site design solutions here in Clonmel Tipperary, We have 500 Pixel splash t-shirts to give away.

The Pixel Splash web design t-shirts are completely free, no catches what so ever. The t-shirts are available in three colors, white, red and black, the black is my fave.

There are three sizes available small, medium and large. We will give the t-shirts to the first 500 People to post on this blog. Please note only available to people living in Ireland.

To get your free t-shirt simple write a post in any category, be sure to include your email in the email field provided in the comment box, { your email will never be displayed, used by us or sold to any third party we hate spam as much as you do}, we will then email you from which you can advise on size color and send address.

All colors and sizes will be given on a first come first served basis.

Enjoy Derek.

Google at war with Facebook?,  a tweet from Digg founder Kevin Rose  ” Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon “Google Me”, very credible source” has set the blogsphere alight with chatter. The tweet has since been removed.

So even if Goolge where to forge ahead with a facebook competitor, could they really make a dent in facebook user volume?. I very much doubt it. I dont see google even bothering to be honest. Google is already something akin to a vast social network, with google buzz, igoogle,  google account features and profile to name a few. Alot of google users would stem from the business community {not sure of the exact figures so please feel free to correct me} and would already use Facebook as a marketing platform. Would they  change  over to  a Google version? i don’t see it happening, least not any time soon. Facebook is so well established and growing so quick it would be a bit like shutting the stable door years after the horse had disappeared to the Algarve to set up its own social networking site.

I think there are to many social networking sites as there is, so i could be wrong but why jump into a saturated market when you don’t need to.

Derek

Is Branded Entertainment here to stay?, on the web people are always looking for the latest gadget, the newest platform etc. There is a good deal of chatter online about Orbit Gum’s new campaign called “Dirty Shorts” its first branded entertainment effort.

Basically a branded video  from Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, two actors with enough belief in the medium to start up DumbDumb a branded video production company.

So is type of advertising going to stick ?. Ok it goes against the grain of what we think about when attempting to engage our users and deliver maximum information as quickly as possible. User attention span would be to the fore. Also i would imagine the costs to be considerable if i was to hire DumbDumb.

On the other hand youtube is quite a good advertising  medium where we already see a type of branded entertainment, which can be quite successful. The viral element for good video can result in huge traffic spikes.

Conclusion i would have to yes, i dont see it dominating the online marketing landscape but it will have its place, and may very well develop in to an integral part of your marketing campaign in the future.