I love reading marketing material.
Sometimes you learn something new.
Sometimes you giggle.
Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair.
According Amas‘ latest report:
Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.
Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in?
Oh wait.. there’s an explanatory footer:
Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more
(my emphasis)
So what does that mean?
Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count?
I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they’re not actually counted.. Or is it simply a “clever” ploy to make people feel that we’re doing so much better online than other countries?
A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses.
A holding page does not a website make.
I don’t know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me.
Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages … Maybe they’ve rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim.
Don’t get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as “description” and “keywords” were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines.
In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their “findings” were “gospel”.
Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely.
A recent example of that being Captivate’s press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN’s blog!
The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches ….
Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases?
Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications’ marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying – obviously!)
Does every business really need a website, though? Margaret’s newsagent probably doesn’t, for instance.
Robert
Maybe not, but if you exclude businesses with fewer than 10 employees your stats are going to be very skewed
Michele
At least they could have spelled ‘WhoisIreland’ in the url correctly. 🙂 I tend to be rather cynical when it comes to the snakeoil of marketing, perhaps moreso when it comes specifically to the methodology of these web “surveys”.
The latest domain count on Irish hosters is 146370 domains including identified .eu domains. That 100 sites represents only 0.068% of Irish domains. (Leaving aside the domains to website correlation).
One of the main reasons for a high percentage of Irish sites not having metadata, or at least elementary metadata is because many of them are holding pages.
I always thought that meta data was prefixed by the “meta” tag and was surprised to learn that titles are meta data too.
The Amas.ie confusion over the description metatag is interesting because most search engines use an exerpt from the body text in the results pages though some use the Dmoz entry for a site. Often these serps will centre on the highlighted search term in the body text.
Perhaps I really should do a proper survey of Irish websites and their metadata and publish it. I am a bit tired of seeing such limited work as the Amas.ie “survey” or the Captivate Digital marketing fluff presented as accurate and meaningful surveys of the Irish webspace when they are merely press releases designed only to sell services.