Below are some of the conditions:

• 1st three businesses
• Open to small to medium sized businesses
• No web design, web development, or marketing companies
• Offer limited to businesses in Greater Belfast
• Offer limited to businesses that aren’t actively working with a web agency or individual
• Genuine, no timewasters

The free consultation is limited to 2 hours, as I’ve a heap of other client work to get on with.

Please use the contact form and send your website address.

With companies collapsing and daily redundancies, it looks like nothing will be spared an ever deepening recession, and many web designers and agencies will suffer.

In the last couple of months I’ve personally seen a significant downturn in the number of software products that I would sell to the US market and the amount of customisation requests has dried up.

I’ve had customers bail out and seek the services of the local diy web designer who can do it all for free or next to nothing.

Redundancies within businesses and points of contact losing their jobs have lead to disruption with long-term SEO campaigns.

Businesses that would post content on their site or have it updated once a fortnight now only want to have it updated once every month.

New projects have been put on the back burner with the old website lingering on and new investment and funds being shelved.

Businesses have cut back on their advertising spend, and new clients want more bang for their buck.

Enquirers are looking for smaller more affordable solutions and are naturally risk adverse.

Interesting I’ve also noticed a significant increase in calls and leads from more web savvy people that wanted their website SEO’d rather than a design.

Don’t get me wrong there’s still an awful lot of web development work and opportunities out there though and the sector might not get the worse of things but it’ll be interesting to see how things continue into 2009.

Have you noticed or felt the effects either in web design/development, SEO or PPC?

Looking back on my plan and goals for 2008 it was rather ambitious and with the amount of client work that I had I wasn’t able to cover everything in great depth though I was able to touch on most things. Most of my efforts this year were concentrated on SEO and PPC and luckily enough this brought with it a few new clients and work on some exciting projects in challenging competitive markets.

For 2009 I still intend to concentrate on Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click and web development work. Rather than have an exhaustive list, below are some of the things that I definitely hope to cover this year including:

• Spending more time on web development with ASP.NET VB.NET and C# and PHP
• Creating a new ASP.NET software product
• Learning as much as I can about URL rewriting particularly in IIS 5+
• Looking at the effects of Duplicate Content Issues
• Working more with CMS such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress
• Re-developing and redesigning Codefixer (one of my goals of last year that I wasn’t able to complete)

That’s it in a nutshell, less objectives than the year before but still enough to keep me busy.

2008 also saw me move I into new offices on the Malone Road, which definitely helps separate home life and work life and makes client meetings alot easier. Anybody looking to take the plunge I’d definitely recommend it.

One last thing if there’s anyone reading this whatever your skillset and wants to get intouch and partner up in some shape or form then drop me a line. I’m always willing to make new contacts.

Lastly, happy new year to everyone!

Potential customers in Belfast or further a field are searching for your product or service every day and if they don’t find you they’ll find your competitor.

So if you’re a lawyer, an accountant, a chiropodist or whatever then there’s a huge opportunity. If you don’t have an online strategy, not just a website parked on the internet where no one gets to see it, then you’re missing out big time. Phone Books, News Papers or TV ads won’t suffice these days. It’s the internet that people are searching on for your product or service.

It’s pretty obvious for searching Google that companies in Belfast haven’t cottoned on to this or grabbed the bull by the horns. There’s also no doubt that many have tried in the past and got a poorly performing website.

A quality website, a good service or product and online marketing done well can bring a great return. It’s time local businesses got started and don’t miss the boat.

HouseBuyers365 was a particular project that I enjoyed working on this year, and with another push the project can become even more successful. There’s still plenty of petrol left in this project and it was nice to work with a slightly fatter budget.

Over the course of the year I got the opportunity to work on a few developments and network with some of the best local designers in Northern Ireland (IMHO) including Daryl Campbell. Thanks Daryl for your help! Much appreciated and I look forward to working with you in the future.

I’m always on the lookout to hear from other Irish companies, designers, developers and marketing people who’d be interested in saying hello.

Although reluctant as I’ve enough things to get on with and am not the most prolific when it comes to writing I also started this blog. Truth is I haven’t had much time to develop it and plan out much of a strategy for it as I’m usually too busy, but at some stage I’ll get round to it.

In terms of my company site Codefixer Software, the targeted traffic has increased significantly and the percentage increases since this time last year for the targeted keywords has been impressive. The lead generation has been unbelievable and some of the approaches have been flattering. Hopefully this year this will continue and I’ll be able to scale up and cope with the every growing demands of running both a local web design company as well as selling software online and coping with the product support that goes with it.

2007 also saw my renewed interest in Google Adwords and Pay Per Click, after years of spilling money left, right and centre and not getting a return I decided to invest some time into this despite my concerns regarding click fraud. I took and passed the Google Adwords Exam and meet the criteria and became a Google Adwords Professional (albeit temporarily). This year I have some new exciting plans to test with PPC, sorry can’t say more as I don’t want to give my strategy away, though it does include multi-variate testing. It was definitely a success and hopefully this year will be even better.

In terms of SEO I invested time and money in a link building campaign and again it has paid off both in Google and the number of referrals. Codefixer Software currently ranks no1 for it’s main keyword terms and I’m also looking for more long detail specific terms to increase traffic and sales leads. I also intend to carry on improving my goal tracking and keyword conversion techniques.

As well as this blog I hope to give Codefixer a bit of a makeover and convert it from tables to CSS and use more semantic HTML. I’ll try and promote it a bit more and use Google Analytics to test and drive sales figures as well as using PPC. Takes time but it’s a definite for 2008 area for growth.

2007 also saw the release of the new LinksPro directory script that since it’s release in October has been selling really well. Plans are already under way for improvements. Big thanks to James Farrow for his collaboration on this, and having to deal with my nitpicking.

MembersPro PayPal continues to sell well, though hasn’t hit the sale peaks that it did back in 2004. A new Newsletter product is in the pipeline and I hope to get it out in the next couple of months.

One other project that I’m working on is creating a custom shopping cart with URL rewriting capabilities and admin area. I had a look at some of the ASP.NET carts on the market and most of them didn’t have the functionality that I desperately wanted so I decided to enhance and extend a custom cart that I’ve already built and that works well. Big thanks for Dan Field for the bit of work he helped on.

So for 2008, I’m hoping for more leads, more sales and more customers.

I think it’s the best ASP directory script on the market, and we hope you do to.

Is there any other Northern Ireland directories out there that can compete with 4NI?

I’ll have to put a timeframe on this (end of October) to see how it goes.

The new design is finished and I’m fairly happy with it, apart from the sun-burnt photo of me. Don’t worry that’ll be going shortly.

I’ve settled on 3 logo drafts

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Anyone want to give some feedback on which they prefer? I quite like draft 3.

I’d hoped to do slightly better than that but in mitigation I was absolutely shattered when I took the exam, and I took the exam on the spur of the moment a couple of weeks earlier than I had planned as I wanted to get it out of the way and move onto important client work.

I spent quite a bit of time reading all the material at the Learning Center and reading through posts of forums as well as managing my own account and one or two client campaigns.

Like every exam it’s pretty obvious that if you know your stuff then it should be a fairly straightforward though I did find it a big effort in terms of reading and studying the material on top of all the projects I have going on.

It cost $50 to take and lasted for 11/2 hours. One thing that disappointed me was that I didn’t get any feedback on the answers that I got wrong, though I did find out the areas that I was weakest in.

Hopefully in September I’ll become a Google Adwords Professional and it’ll all have been worth the effort.