The IEDR, the people who run .ie, have just launched this year’s Optimise “fund”. (Calling it a “fund” is a bit misleading, as they’re not actually awarding money to anyone, but are instead giving a number of small Irish businesses assistance to develop and improve their online presence). If you think you might qualify you can apply online here. Several of our clients have received assistance in previous years and the cost of entry is zero, so if you are an Irish small business that is interested in revamping your online presence then it can’t hurt..
Here’s the launch video featuring Francis Brennan:
So what about those scary stats?
While I still haven’t been able to find the actual study or full report, the IEDR’s press release includes some rather interesting, though quite negative numbers about Irish businesses.
On the plus side apparently 63% of Irish SMEs have a website.
But the rest of the numbers are far from positive:
- 91% cannot process sales online
- 62% cannot (in the first instance) take sales orders online
- 68% cannot process payments online
- 51% don’t have the ability to interact directly with customers through social media or web chat
- 54% don’t have responsive website designs for tablet or smartphone
- 66% don’t have video content on their website
- only 4% have the capacity to run analytics on their website performance.
I’d really love to see the actual report and know more about the methodology, as some of the figures strike me as rather odd. Considering, for example, that most hosting providers offer some form of web stats as standard and considering how popular Google Analytics is then I’d find it very surprising that only 4% of Irish SMEs have access to analytics about their site’s performance.
They’ve also created a visualisation of these numbers:
About the Author: Michele Neylon
