Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example - John Ruskin

I honestly don’t know why people bother with websites sometimes. If you announce news and make it hard for people to find you online, then you’re unravelling all the good work you’ve done in the first place to grab their attention.

2 Many DJs happen to be playing in Spirit nightclub this Sunday in Dublin. They’re an act I really want to see, so when I spotted this announcement in the Hot Shots section of the Sunday Tribune last weekend, I got onto the web to see what time they’d be playing at and how much it costs to get in. Simple enough information to get hold of you’d think. Think again!

A direct link to Spirit Nightclub is nowhere to be seen on the first page of Irish Google results. Its American equivalent turns up first on a regular Google search, but this isn’t the case for pages from Ireland. Low and behold, it’s because the Spirit nightclub website is a Flash website.

So they’ve opted for a website that *looks good*, but is hard to find - a bit pointless don’t you think? A lot of these Flash sites seem to be marketing to marketers. There’s a PR firm out there that claims it can help your organisation to break through online, but yet it’s hard to find the site in question because it’s a Flash site and even if you did manage to find it, visiting it would give you an epileptic fit!

Google has effectively become the one stop shop for many internet users. Millions of people use it to find goods and services everyday. So if you can’t be found on it, then there’s not much point in splashing out on a snazzy site that is effectively useless for communicating with your audience.

Websites should form part of an organisation’s overall communications strategy. By that it should supplement everything that you do when you communicate with your audience. So if a great band is playing in your nightclub and you’re issuing a press release to that effect, you should realise that lots of people are going to buy online. If they can’t find the info on your site, it’s like selling delicious cakes but hiding them at the back of the shop. So seriously folks, let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot!

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