DISTANCE LEARNING COURSES
PROVIDERS OF ACCREDITED PRACTICAL SKILLS TRAINING COURSES FOR OVER 25 YEARS
 

New Production Company Launches

Posted in News on March 8th, 2010

A new Irish production company, Jumper Productions, has been officially launched by its founder Fiona Kinsella.
Jumper Productions was established by Fiona Kinsella to address a gap that she saw between traditional advertising production companies and the requirements of the newer online market.
“Many people working in the traditional production or advertising environment are still struggling to come to terms with the world of digital. And at the same time, that world is fostering and creating some incredible filmmaking talent. Jumper aims to be part of bringing those two worlds together in a mutually beneficial way,” says Kinsella.
Prior to setting up Jumper, Kinsella had produced commercials for brands including Carlsberg, AIB, Barrys Tea and Rabodirect amongst many others. From 2004 to 2006, she was the Managing Director of Moonstone International, a training and development programme for European Feature Film writers and Directors.
The company also represents a broad range of directors, including Henry Holtzman, Sophie Merry, Paul Fraser, Luke Franklin, Alan Friel and Jamie Stone.
Although the company began trading in late 2008, it was officially launched last week and has already carried out work for Currys, AIB and Online content for the O2 Be the Difference website. The recent Currys (Ireland) commercials which were directed by Luke Franklin for Rothco, featured naked Curry’ staff and an unwanted Christmas guest. Also with Rothco Paul Fraser directed a commercial for AIB with Marie Hegarty. Jamie Stone has directed Online content for the O2 Be The Difference website for Brando, which featured Paul O’Connell and Brian O’Driscoll.
Source

Quiz Night @ The Odessa Club

Posted in News on March 5th, 2010


When: Tuesday 9th March at, 7.45pm

What: One Family –Ireland’s leading charitable support organisation for one-parent families is holding a Table Quiz at the glamorous Odessa Club, and you are invited!

Where: The Odessa Club, 13 Dame Court, Dublin 2.

Why: Funds raised will go toward our Askonefamily* national helpline 1890 66 22 12

http://onefamily.ie/our-services-for-families/information-services

How Much: €15 a head entry fee. Book four to a table or book & come along in your ones, twos and threes and we’ll fix you up.

You can have food and drink served to you before, during or after the quiz and there will be a raffle with many fabulous prizes.

How: To book your place, call One Family on 01 6629212 or send an email to aokeeffe@onefamily.ie. Booking essential.

TV3 and Toto Productions are scouring the nation in search of Ireland’s next style star.

Posted in News on March 3rd, 2010

Are you obsessed with Fashion?  Do you know your high street from your haute couture?  Have you always dreamed of working in the fashion industry?  Then we want to hear from you.

We’re looking for males and females over 18 years of age to take part in a prime time TV3 television series and compete for the career-start of a lifetime with one of the biggest players in fashion.

The only entry rule is that fashion is your driving ambition in life.

To take part in the most fashionable competition on television email emer@totoproductions.ie ASAP for more information and an application form.

Please Note: The filming of the series will take place between March and July 2010 so you must make yourself available during this period if successful.

www.totoproductions.ie

HMS Belfast to celebrate £250,000 refurb with party

Posted in News on March 3rd, 2010

Sodexo Prestige has announced it will mark the completion of HMS Belfast’s recent refurbishment with a celebratory party later this month (17 March).

 The catering firm have invested a whopping £250,000 restoring the old war ship back to its former glory.

Guests at the event will be greeted by a naval piper and treated to hot rum punch and entertainment from a live party band playing music spanning HMS Belfast’s lifetime.
HMS War Veterans will also be on board to regale partygoers with stories of adventures and intrigue.

The extensive refurbishment project has seen the Admiral’s Quarters transformed into a private dining room and event space, as well as The Gun Room and The Ship’s Company Dining Room being updated with new carpets, AV equipment and broadband.

Permanently moored next to Tower Bridge, the venue currently hosts around 300 events a year.

Source

7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation does not only require a good website design but a lot more to build confidence, to grow sales and ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability.

In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.

Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation:

1. Respond to customers

Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.

2. Answer the negative comments humbly

Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there!

http://media.entireweb.com/images/empty.gif

Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.

3. Create official online profiles

Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.

4. Report stolen material from you

It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.

5. Write blogs

Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website.

If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts, let say you write blog for “basic tips for web design”. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.

http://media.entireweb.com/images/empty.gif

http://media.entireweb.com/images/empty.gif



6. Optimize For Search Engines

Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.

7. Using the social media

Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:

- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks

You might have spend good time and money for your website design and building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.

Source – About the Author: James Parker is a marketing specialist and IT consultant working in diverse domains of IT. He has also worked with some Web design and web development and Web design Firms. He can be approached at jamesparker.cdz@gmail.com.

Avoiding Top SEO Mistakes

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:
Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures” “Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your web site’s success path.

Source: About the Author: Robin Dale is the publisher for www.teeky.org, we offer useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Dedicated Server Hosting, Windows VPS Hosting UK, Linux VPS Hosting UK, e-commerce hosting, cPanel Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting

The eighth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival was launched.

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

Established in 2003, The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF) has fast become Ireland’s premiere feature film festival and takes place in Ireland’s capital city over the course of eleven days and nights each February.Over the years an array of film talent has joined in with the celebration including Daniel Day Lewis, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Sheridan, Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Charlize Theron, Collin Firth and Liam Neeson, among others, all of whom have graced the JDIFF red carpet.

Audiences and industry members have been delighted to meet a widely diverse range of luminaries and gain insights in to every area of the film world including perspectives from directors, producers, screenwriters and critics such as Mike Leigh, Quentin Tarantino and Wim Wenders.

Source

Cybercom Triumphs at Digital Awards

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

Digital agency Cybercom was the big winner at the Digital Media Awards that were held last night, scooping a total of nine awards at ceremony which was held in the Crowne Plaze Hotel. These included two golds, three silvers and four bronze.

Cybercom picked up the prestigious Agency of the Year Award as well as the gold for the Best Social Media campaign.

Now in its eighth year, The Digital Media Awards raise awareness of the digital media sector in Ireland and more importantly act as a showcase for the varied dynamic work being created by companies and third level institutions across the broad spectrum of categories in Digital Media.  Awards were presented in 21 categories, to the companies, people and organisations producing the most stylish, creative and pioneering work in their field.

Speaking after the awards, Cybercom Managing Director Jonathan Forrest said, “We are thrilled to receive these awards and are especially proud to be acknowledged amongst our peers in the industry.  Our agency is dedicated to creating the best digital marketing campaigns that reflect our reputation for outstanding creativity and innovative marketing thinking.  Winning in so many categories at this year’s DMA’s confirms our positioning in this market and demonstrates how we can deliver best in class, for our clients in the future.   Digital advertising and marketing is changing at a fast pace and we are seeing

Source

Pigsback.com Goes Local

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

Pigsback.com, the Irish-owned empathy marketing company is rolling out a localized version of its core product offering.

The decision to roll out the localized offering to brands follows a successful pilot in the Kildare area which allowed local businesses to offer a wide range of coupons, offers and rewards to the Pigsback.com membership base.

The Pigsback Local initiative is headed up by Fintan Ryan who will oversee the roll-out of the business to over 18 different regions around the country.

Commenting on the development Michael Dwyer, CEO said: “For the past 10 years at Pigsback we have successfully brought national brands to our members. Only now are we making the connection between our members and their local restaurants, gyms, hairdressers, tradesmen and the likes. By using a network of 18 regional agents, we can now bring a very effective online service to local brands, while doing a much better job for all of our members.

Source

Ad2One Bags Advertising Rights for LinkedIn

Posted in News on March 2nd, 2010

The Irish arm of the international digital sales agency Ad2onegroup.com has secured the advertising rights for LinkedIn, the world’s largest business social media network for the Irish market.

The new contract will enable Irish companies to advertise on LinkedIn and tap into its 60 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world including Ireland

It also means that Irish brands that need to advertise to business professionals who are members of LinkedIn both in Ireland and internationally can do this through their Irish office according to Roddy Walshe of Ad2One Group Dublin.

Part of the international group of independently owned digital sales and marketing, AD2ONE, is as a leading third party digital ad sales agency. The company which works with media buyers and advertising agencies also provides support services including Web Design and Search Marketing.

Other major websites, represented by Ad2One which can be tapped into by Irish advertisers include Ryanair, Disney, Guardian, MySpace.com, Wall Street Journal, Hello Magazine and Marie Claire magazine in the UK .

Source


 


Stop scrolling
Start scrolling
  • "Very informative with emphasis on practical skills that are useful. Would (and have) recommended this course to friends and colleagues."...
  • "Excellent! Material covered was all new to me. Trainers were very knowledgeable and have practical work and field experience to apply to the subjects being covered which really enhanced my learning throughout the course."...
  • "Extremely thorough, very comprehensive course with instruction by knowledgeable professionals whose experience is evident throughout the course."...
  • "I would highly recommend this course. The trainers understand and have encountered “real world” conditions and are gifted in the manner in which they pass on their experiences."...
  • "Excellent organisation and the trainers were first class. I learned an enormous amount and will recommend Event Management Training to anyone."...