The Online Trading Voucher Scheme, recently launched by the DCENR, provides small companies with a chance to develop their eCommerce website or digital marketing strategy by offering them grants of up to €2,500 or FIFTY % of eligible expenditure.
Recent statistics reveal, that although Irish people spend over €4 billion Euro per year online, only a small fraction of this spending goes to Irish businesses. This is because only approx 23 % of Irish small businesses have online presence and actively engage in eCommerce.
The Online Trading Voucher System aims to change this statistic. Recognising the growing importance of the digital economy, Minister Rabbitte announced that he was setting aside €5m in 2014 to assist in the roll-out of a national trading-online voucher scheme, aimed at getting 2,000 small Irish businesses trading online.
It has become almost a norm among graphic designers, web designers, creative professionals as well as hotels and restaurants to design their websites in Flash. Flash is a programming language that creates stunning visual effects, but is really bad for SEO. Google hates it. Bing is a bit more sympathetic towards it, but still gives it thumbs down.
Flash is also not supported by Apple and therefore does not display on iPhones iPads and Apple Mac computers.
Flash sites may look visually impressive but they get almost no organic traffic. They are impossible to index and therefore seldom make it to the top of the search engines.