December 23, 2008
With the arrival of the global recession it makes more sense to sell online. Customers are particularly price sensitive, and using the net for more and more purchases. When you sell online you reduce your overheads and gain access to a larger audience in one fell swoop. The only costs involved are the initial development and hosting of your site, which are even reduced if you use SwiftStore.
It seems that more and more of the ‘traditional’ shop based purchases are going online. Clothes were thought to be *relatively* safe from online sales, but that has been proved to be wrong. Most clothes sellers just offer free return if they do not fit.
Even beyond retail, other services are now migrating online - conveyancing, bookkeeping and other main street services are migrating from your local offices, to cheaper online versions.
Posted in Opinion | 1 comment
November 28, 2008
We missed out on a golden spider last Thursday night - the winner in our category was Litriocht. Big congrats to them, the site looks great and its certainly something new. Commiserations to the other submissions in our category:
www.blueface.ie
www.emissionzero.ie
www.manna.ie
www.mattress.ie
www.solocheck.ie
www.styleplus.ie
Some great sites.
We had a good time and met some great people, the Trocraire gang and Look West were at our table too - unfortunatley they missed out aswell, I think having table number 76 was a subtle hint 
We had a few glasses of wine, spilled a glass or two, lost a jacket and made a few new friends.
All in all the awards were really well organised. Having over 700 people in attendance is no mean feat. Well done to Aodhan Cullen for winning the Internet hero award with StatCounter great to see Irish people at the heart of the internet.
P.S. The jacket turned up
Posted in Awards’ Events’ News | No comments
November 20, 2008
When getting a web site designed for you it is important to ask the developer about search engine optimzation (SEO) and how they will implement it in your site. You can have the most beautiful site, with great prices but no one will be buying from you unless you appear in search engine’s search result. Not only is appearing on results lists important, where you appear on the listing is very important.
This is especially true these days with the emergence of Google as a market leader. People now trust Google so much that they are not bothering to look beyond the first page. Think about it - how often do you go beyond the first page when using Google?
So how do you get your get your site up the list of search results? Fortunately the nice people at Google have produced a pdf guide listing what they see as important when ranking a site. A lot of these things are not that difficult or complicated but they make a huge difference to how your site gets ranked. When getting someone to develop your site demand that they design your site with SEO in mind from the start, otherwise it could be a costly exercise down the road.
With SwiftStore we have implemented these practices and have found that are client’s sites are going up the page ranks. We see this as a continual process, one which we are working on all the time to the benefit of our clients.
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November 11, 2008
We have now released a couple of new features. The first is the ability to create your own pages, including images & formatting. The other feature is the ability to use google analytics to analyse the traffic on your site.
If you haven’t heard about Google Analytics, then you should really go to their site and check it out. There is a wealth of information available about visitors to your web site. To use this on your SwiftStore site all you need is to input your web property id (from Google Analytics) into the SwiftStore admin area under Site Management - Configuration. This property id is available to you when you register your site with Google Analytics. It will take the a format similar to UA-4857878-8.
You can find details on how many hits your site gets, the location of people viewing your site , bounce rates etc. Here’s what your dashboard will look like:
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November 7, 2008
We attended an event in Dublin last night organised by Microsoft. They were launching a new program called BizSpark to support start-up tech companies. Basically you get the Visual Studio tools, SQL, MSDN free for three years if you are approved. You also get good reductions from their business partners on the program - Dell, BT, Blacknight, C Infinity to name a few and access to a support network. Not too sure what avenue the support network takes but some great savings to be made on the software side alone.
It was an interesting evening, with a mixture of talks, forums, networking and a few free drinks There was a panel debate about starting new businesses and the associated problems. The panel were taking questions from the audience on a number of areas relating to the issues start-ups face today. There were some interesting questions - the lack of political will to foster entrepreneurial activity was heating up but unfortunately it came to a bit of a premature end. Also it was great to see representation from Norn Iron, Invest NI also offer some great programs and financial incentives for direct investment.
It was followed by Digital Media Island meet-up which included presentations from locle and JustRoutes , first time we’ve been to one of their events - good to do some networking and meet up with like minded people.
All in all this was an excellent event, and fair play to Microsoft for helping small businesses get going!
Posted in Events | 1 comment
November 3, 2008
As part the ongoing improvement of service to our customers, we will be launching our editor in the next week or so. This will allow customers to create pages and content themselves, while maintaining the styling of the pages.
This is a new feature that will cost nothing extra, just one of the benefits of using SwiftStore to host your web stores. Imagine asking a development company to give you that kind of functionality to your existing site … you would have to get the cheque book out!
We have a number of other improvements we are looking at, which will be released early next year. Keep checking back to see whats going on.
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November 1, 2008
Yes, we are very excited as we have been short-listed for an award in the best e-business web site category of the Golden Spiders awards. There are some excellent web sites entered into the awards, so it will be tough to win it, but it’s excellent to have been short-listed. It is a credit to our hard working development staff - we might even give them the christmas off!
Seriously, it is a testament to the effort we put into our work. When you sell your products using the SwiftStore engine, you are getting a website of a very high standard.
Anyway, fingers crossed!
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October 23, 2008
Welcome to the SwiftStore blog! Over the next months (and years!) we will be keeping you posted on what’s going on with SwiftStore.
We will be updating this blog with regularly with news including what new shops have been launched, industry news and new features which are in the pipeline.
The SwiftStore Team
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