Weekly Round-Up
Contents
A Weekly Round-Up of Stories from the WWW
This weeks Xava blog is a collection of the 4 stories that made me think the most. I found that these stories engaged me at different levels and desrved to be shared for different reasons. The stories range from the scary yet exciting to ranting to philosophising. These are purely my thoughts on 4 topics that are out there for you to read. I would encourage a discussion on any of the topics as writing a long blog is not the answer but engagement with my readers is.
Irelands Digital Economy is still largely ignored by Irish businesses
Image taken from a snap shot of the Dana Strong Video at Irish Digital Economy uptake
Perhaps one of the most scary things I read this week has to be this article on Silicon Republic regarding the state of the Irish Digital Economy uptake.The total size of the digital prize is just under €12bn which is enormous for this economy.
Dana Strong of UPC states that transacting online is not just about selling to the customer online but that it includes buying online or keeping an eye on the supply chain online.
If the current trend continues and the Irish consumer continues to buy online but from site from outside Ireland, the Irish economy is set to lose out on a potential bounty worth €12B!If you could have a small slice of that figure, wouldnt that make your life extremely comfortable? So take the first step and bePresent on the internet with a website. But dont stop there, work on getting a proper digital marketing strategy into your business plan from Day 0. If you are a small business just starting out, talk to Xava to see how we can partner together and work on a digital strategy for your business.
WordPress Tricks
Have you ever wanted to setup wordpress theme templates or child theme templates and thought about writing smaller parts of a template so you can reuse them everywhere? Have you figured out how to do it? If not, take a look at this article on get_template_part.
This article is an excellent summary of how to use get_template_part() to modularise your WordPress template and how you can exploit it to make your template truly personalised.
Internet Explorer 8 – WHY?
I have been working with a lot of clients for their website design. Halfway through the design phase, the client will complain that the website is not looking the way they thought it would on thier computer. Inevitably, I find that they are using the dreaded Internet Explorer 8 web browser. And guess what, the website CSS has to be rewritten to fit the archaic limits of IE8.
While I accept that Microsoft is not dropping support for IE8, companies like Google will not support it across their platforms. So why do people still use IE8 – I have no idea why as it does not support CSS3 or HTML5 (partial support only). To truly get modern and effective websites, people have to stop using IE8 and make our lives, as webdesigners, a little bit simpler.