You’ll also love the free web technology conference – the dot conf - being hosted by the National College of Ireland on July 22nd. It’s a fantastic opportunity to go and listen to some industry experts and a great way for NCI to promote their new MSc in Web Technologies course.

There is a diverse list of speakers, from journalists, educators, web professionals and technology advocates – all experts in their fields. As well as some “deep dive” sessions (hands-on workshops).

Personally I’m really looking forward to checking out the National E-learning Laboratory, who recently published some pretty interesting data on what Irish people pay attention to when using Facebook.

Conferences like these are a great networking opportunity (especially if you are self employed or “between projects” at the moment). Bring you business cards and wear your hottest geek tshirt, you just never know who you might bump into.

NCI is based in the IFSC – possibly one of the easiest places to get to in Dublin, so there’s no excuse not to attend.

There’s nothing more powerful than asking your users what they think.

With that in mind the Kilkenny Pembroke Hotel are running an iPad competition – for every person that gives them suggestions for their upcoming website redesign they get their name entered into a draw for an iPad and a stay at the hotel. Pretty clever, right?

You’re supposed to come up with 2 suggestions, but seeing as website optimisation and landing pages are of particular interest to me I accidentally ran away with my entry, so much so that Facebook refused to let me post it due to it’s length. Hence it now has a home here.

Some of the suggestions I’ve outlined below can be summarised into the following tips for commercial websites.

6 Basic Tips For Good Website Design

1. Make every call to action as obvious as possible.
2. Don’t give the user too many choices.
3. Never ask for too much information.
4. Don’t have too much text.
5. Remove any visual distractions from the calls to action.
6. Build trust by adding credibility logos.

Pembroke Hotel Website Redesign Suggestions

Everyone else seems to have covered most of the internal issues/suggestions for the site (based on the entries on the hotel’s Facebook page), so here are some that are based on the homepage only (the main landing page for most of your visitors, and possibly the most important).

1. The check availability section should be moved to the lower right hand corner of the page (swap with the email newsletter), you could test this change using Google Website Optimizer, and see where on the page it would fit best. Also, there should be more contrast between this section and the rest of the page, less grey and more colour. The “check now” button should be much bigger and with a clearer call to action such as “Check Dates”, this button should also be a striking colour such as red, so it stands out far more.

2. The email newsletter “Sign Up” button, it needs to be bigger, bolder and more colour contrast between it’s box and the rest of the site design. The sign-up section here asks for a full name and for you to pick an “Area of Interest”, these are unnecessary pieces of information – change this so all you need to do is enter your email address and click sign-up. This should increase newsletter subscriptions.

3. The image/link (on the right hand side of the page) to the specials you offer does not stand out enough. The “Book Now” button is not a clear call to action when it follows the text. The text description needs to be more obvious, far more literal. “Midweek Shopping Treat” as an example would be better described as “Special Offer: Midweek Shopping Treat”. Or “Girls Getways” could be expanded to “Take The Girls Away For a Pampering Weekend”.

4. There is too much text on the page. The section “Luxury and comfort re-invented in Kilkenny” has too much text and is difficult to read on the colour scheme chosen. Splitting up the text would be better, or even highlighting in bold the most important information so it is scanable. Or making the background of this text box white, and the text black.

5. Add any trust/credibility logos to this page (credit card security logos etc). Also include other badges of trust – you could mention your excellent review status on Trip Advisor (No 2 hotel in Killkenny) and Booking.com (9.2 out of 10, after 221 reviews), and link to these pages. Trip Advisor even has a badge you can put on your site that links to it’s review page.

Even if I don’t win the much lusted after iPad, hopefully these suggestions will help, and I look forward to seeing the future redesign of the site.

The last few years I’ve really taken to going on city breaks, especially to London. The problem is it’s really expensive to stay there. I’ve had some pretty bad experiences of staying in hostels and 2 or 3 star hotels in the suburbs, and spent an absolute fortune on these awful little places and then transport costs to get into central London and back.

Lucky for me I discovered the websites Hotwire and Priceline (who will accept your Irish credit card, but their listings are in dollars), and also realised how wonderful the Last Minute dot com secret hotel deals were. These sites offer extremely reduced prices on hotel rooms, except they don’t tell you the name of the hotel you’re booking into, until you have confirmed and paid for your booking. These sites take full payment for your stay at the time of booking – so you can’t change your mind, which is great for the hotel because they are then guaranteed you won’t go cancelling your reservation.

What’s The Catch?

What, you thought there weren’t going to be any catches? They’re minor at best (unless you’re prone to cancelling your trips).

For example,  a few years back we stayed at the Le Meridien Piccadilly, an extremely centrally located 5 star London hotel . The reason they were offering a low price was because their hotel rooms were slowly being renovated, and the rooms that hadn’t been renovated yet were being offered at an extremely reduced price. Our room was immaculate, one of the nicest I’ve ever stayed in. Obviously they couldn’t offer these older style rooms at the same price as the modern rooms.

Like most hotels that use Hotwire etc. they didn’t want a low nightly rate associated with their luxurious hotel reputation and name. It’s one of the ways they can try to beat the search engines.

Recently we stayed at a brand new 4 star hotel, the Grange St Paul, very close to Tate Modern, right beside the Millennium bridge and across from the gorgeous St. Paul’s Cathedral. Another amazing location and a cheap deal, this time because the hotel was not 100% completed. It had only just opened but our room was perfect, no problems at all. Although their spa and pool area wasn’t operational – something a fully paying guest may have had a gripe with.

Sites like Hotwire and Last Minute offer hotels the ability to offer cheap rooms, without these cheap online listings being associated with their names. A 5 star hotel that’s having difficulty filling rooms, has just opened its doors or is having some renovations is able to offer a reduced price without tarnishing its reputation as being expensive and elite.

For me the most important thing about a city break is the location, I’ve learned this from all those bad experiences. As long as the room is clean I’m happy.  I’ve been very lucky with all the wonderful hotels I’ve actually ended up in. Obviously I’ve taken many risks booking into theses hotels and not knowing the names, but the location and amenities list (which is given on all of the sites mentioned) is enough for me to make a decision.

I’ve even happily booked into New York hotels using one of these sites.

I’ve heard some people gripe that they were given a small room after booking through these sites, but the staff do still treat you like a 100% paying customer and I personally have never had a bad experience.  I’ve always acted like a 100% paying customer and received equivalent customer service from the hotel staff.

I’ve had worse experiences in hotels where I was paying full price.

How to Figure Out the Hotel Names

If you’re going to use any of these sites listed you can of course try to figure out the exact hotels that are on offer. For Hotwire and Priceline there is a great user forum called Better Bidding where people swap the names of hotels that are currently listed on the site – allowing you to figure out the name based on the location, star rating and amenities listed.  If you’re uncertain about booking you can even try posting on this forum to see if anyone can help you identify the hotel.

With regards to Last Minute dot com, they use descriptions usually taken from either the hotel website or older offers, so you can try googling the descriptions and then match up the hotel info with the amenities list.

For further confirmation, you can check the Trip Advisor hotel listing. If the hotel is indeed on offer on one of these discount sites usually the recent Trip Advisor reviewers will have mentioned this fact. Reviewers will often say “got this as a secret hotel deal…” which is helpful.

Obviously this is a bit risky and I’m sure there are people out there that have had bad experiences. So, if you yourself have ever had a good or bad experience with a secret hotel deal – I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.

This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.

Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.

Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?

In the past year my blog has transitioned from being considered a personal blog to a technology blog, but honestly I don’t think I could ever really separate the two. Since a really young age technology has been an integral part of my daily life and this blog has been my outlet for my passion for all things technology related, especially in the last year what with the publication of my blogging research,  subsequent end of my college course on Cyberpsychology and search for related employment.

I’m completely unable to express my passion for technology during my current full time job and if it wasn’t for blogging I imagine that passion might have wavered. I’m extremely thankful for blogging because of this and also because it has brought me to incredible events like the Irish Blog Awards and allowed me meet so many wonderful people, like the gorgeous ladies in the photo below.

This award is going to provide a massive amount of motivation for me to continue writing well researched content and expressing my thoughts and experiences of technology. It’s been a real priority of mine this last year or so to produce all my own content and turn away from lazy blogging, and it looks like it’s paid off.

Winning wasn’t the only thing to make my weekend especially perfect though. I was really proud to see the Blog Awards videos received really well by the crowd, especially “The Death of Irish Blogging” and “The Blogger’s Apprentice” which were shot/edited by my girlfriend Jen. I was also over the moon to see Culch.ie, Sabrina Dent, Eolai and Tommy win in their categories. A big thank you to Damien for organising the event, all the brilliant unpaid volunteers and of course to the sponsors, especially Bitbuzz the Best Technology sponsors and providers of much needed WiFi on the night.

Instead perhaps consider eBay as a gigantic 24hour outlet mall that’s filled with stores like Schuh, that are just desperate to get rid of last season’s Converse. It’s also populated with independent retailers, that can’t afford the online high street rents but compete with the larger stores like Amazon by offering you brilliant price reductions on new products. Then there are the niche stores/individuals that sell really rare or unique items like the HP battery I got for my 5 year old laptop (€36.99 with free P&P from Hong Kong) or my new Vans with the black soles and purple/black checkered pattern (€45 including P&P from Germany, the same price as the high street but very rare so totally worth it).

However, shopping online isn’t easy. It can be time consuming and frustrating. There are just too many choices, and far too many links to click to get to what you’re really looking for. There are just too many variables involved. So I thought I’d write up a few suggestions on how, as an Irish consumer, you can really utilise eBay.

How To Get The Best Out Of

The first step toward getting the best out of eBay is to know what you’re searching for. eBay is not for browsing, there are too many of the same item and you’ll give yourself a headache clicking through page after page of products.  Unless of course you’re just after a last minute bargain, which is purely opportunistic. I recently picked up a Wii Nunchuck Controller for 1c from China (€3.99 P&P but still a bargain). Often when I’m not too sure what I’m looking for I’ll use Amazon to browse instead, as the experience is better with regards to navigation and being able to see similar items is nifty too, but I’ll always price check against eBay if I find something I like. However, even if you just know that you’re looking for Wii accessories or a pair of shoes, that’s a good start.

The second step is to make sure you’re searching the entire European Union by clicking on the option in the left hand sidebar. This broadens your search to include all European countries and also removes non-European countries. This is good, because otherwise you’ll have to pay customs duty on anything over €22 (including the cost of the P&P) to ship  to Ireland from outside of the EU. Forget those international sellers, unless you’re willing to factor in the 21% Vat that will be added later (21% of the total cost, so again that includes the P&P) and the €6 post office handling fee into the overall price of the item. In the past I would have had no problem buying products from outside of the EU and then just requested for the seller to “mark the item as a gift” to dodge the customs duty, but from my experience that rarely works anymore.

The third step is to vary your search terms. Even if you know the *exact* name (or colour and size, etc.) of what you’re trying to track down, it might not be listed that way on eBay. Don’t forget that all eBay listings are written by different individuals and unlike places like Amazon there are no strict rules governing how to describe an item. Imagine you’re searching for a pair of shoes, in some instances the size of the shoe may not be apparent from the one line of text describing the item, but will be mentioned in the full description of the item once you’ve clicked on its page. In some instances the seller may not have even put their item in the right category or have even spelt the name of the item incorrectly. Though this can sometimes make tracking down a rare item difficult, it can work in your benefit too. By varying your search terms you might find a bargain that has gone unnoticed, has had no bids or had no page views. I recently “made an offer”, a haggle, on an item with only 20 page views and got a 25% further discount because the buyer could see only 19 other people had even looked at the item.

The forth step is to make sure you use European sizes. If you’re only searching the UK & Ireland it’s fine to think in size 5 shoes, but in Europe that’s a size 38. Check a European size guide to help with your search for the right size (obviously this only applies to buying clothes, shoes etc).

The most important thing about any online shopping is of course safety. The best advice I can give is to always use Paypal, not only does it stop your credit card information being shared with a seller on eBay but PayPal buyer protection and their buyer complaint policy protect you if something goes wrong. Also, you should always make sure that before clicking on the “buy it now” or “place a bid” buttons that you have checked the feedback on the person/company you are purchasing from. Though eBay makes it pretty easy these days to really quickly see who is a legitimate and experienced seller, with their stars and power sellers icons, so familiarise yourself with these.

For me, finding a bargain on eBay is really rewarding but it also offers up far more options to me as a consumer. Yes I’ve had to get refunds or replacements, just like in real life, but I can’t say that I’ve ever had a bad experience on eBay, despite having purchased countless goods there over the last 5 years. Though I have come across some truly bizarre items, such as sex aids listed as adult Halloween costumes.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen on eBay? What tips would you add to this guide?

I would argue that if you’re tweeting, you’re certainly not trying to sleep or doing what’s good for your body in preparation for shutting down for a few hours. I myself have suffered some restless nights and made a real effort to combat the problem, rather than accepting it and suffering through more zombie like days in the office.

Turn Off Your Computer 30 Minutes Before Sleep

If you’re suffering from occasional difficulty getting to sleep at night you should consider the effects of using a computer late at night. Studies have shown that the brain remains stimulated after using a computer (or watching television), which in turn makes your sleep restless. The simple act of shutting down the computer 30 minutes before you’re planning on going to sleep can help relax you.

Research has also shown that the bright light of your computer monitor (let’s also not forget that mobile phone screens also produce a bright light) suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. If you are suffering from an especially bad case of insomnia then try shutting down the computer at least two hours before planning on going to bed.

Though you may enjoy the calming effects of using the computer, your brain on the other hand is thinking “light = daytime”. Staring at your computer screen means keeping yourself alert and wide-awake and returning online to complain about your inability to sleep is simply aggravating the problem.

If you are used to the routine of using the computer right up until bedtime, try to create a new routine for yourself. Use the last 30 minutes of your day to read a chapter out of that book you’ve been meaning to finish, to relax in the shower, to tidy up your apartment. Stick to the new routine and see if it helps improve your sleep.

Is checking if anyone has replied to your latest tweet or commented on your blog really worth loosing sleep over?

Avoid Caffeine Within 6 Hours of Bedtime

Coffee. Internet users are it’s biggest fan, but it does more harm than good to you in the evenings.

Caffeine is a short term solution if you are low on sleep and need to remain active, it blocks adenosine reception so you feel alert, and injects adrenaline into your system to give you a boost. The trouble is, that the half-life of caffeine in your body is around six hours. Consider a cup of coffee at 6pm, half the caffeine in that cup will still be floating around in your body at midnight. By avoiding caffeine within at least 6 hours of your bedtime you’re giving yourself a better chance at being able to fall asleep and the less caffeine in your body the better your sleep will be.

Also, excessive caffeine consumption has a negative effect on your digestive system, so you may suffer from heartburn when you try to sleep at night. Coffee (even decaf!) reduces the pressure on the valve between the esophagus and the stomach so that the acidic contents of the stomach pass up to the esophagus leading to heartburn, which is far harder to cure when you’re lying down as it’s even easier for that acid to travel to your esophagus.

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If the above two tips don’t work for you, I would recommend talking to your doctor as persistent insomnia can have detrimental effects on your physical and mental well being.

You can also try the following guidelines:

• Get up at the same time every day, even at weekends. Irregular sleep patterns undermines your ability to sleep.
• Avoid daytime activities in bed (like eating or watching TV) but reading before bed may be helpful.
• Do not smoke before bedtime, nicotine is a stimulant and just like caffeine it can disturb your sleep.
• Avoid alcohol within four hours of bedtime, though it may induce sleep it makes sleep more fragile and broken throughout the night.
• If you are unable to sleep, leave your bed and engage in a quiet activity elsewhere (not TV or using the computer) and return to bed when you feel sleepy again.
• Go to bed only when you are sleepy. Do not extend your bedtime hours in the hope of sleeping longer, in most cases you may be awake for longer.
• Exercise. People who take regular exercise sleep better than those of us sitting in-front of our computer screen 12 hours a day.

Wanting to push the application to it’s limits (a.k.a break it) I started experimenting with taking photos of people, to see how much everyone was “worth” – thus turning the search into a game of Top Trumps for Faces using Amazon Remembers. Some of the search results were pretty interesting. For example, my lovely girlfriend in her dressing gown was listed as a “Dark Grey Wool Womens Winter Coat” retailing at £49.99, whereas I was listed as a “Wooden Nose shaped Spectacles holder” retailing at £9.99 which meant she was worth far more than me, so I totally lost the game! However, it was a win all round because that made us both LOL ourselves silly.

Hopefully one of these days I’ll find someone with a lower Amazon Remembers face value than myself, I tried it on my Dad and it found a “Russell Collection Long Sleeve Easycare Fitted Shirt” retailing at £17.99, doh!

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.