I was absolutely delighted to pick up a Best Ebusiness gong at the Golden Spiders on behalf of LouderVoice for Business. This project didn’t go into my portfolio straight away because it wasn’t really a design job; with very, very little time available, we used a commercial WordPress template, customised it where needed, and lorried the rest of the time into tackling the positioning and communication issues that needed sorting.

In an inspired moment, the site got a new strapline (”Fuel Your Sales with Trust”), followed by a clearly demarcated product line up, new copy for everything, and a widget and API sign-up process. LouderVoice was called a “a strong winner in this year’s ebusiness category” and I’m delighted for them.

Katherine Nolan and I are delighted to announce that WordCamp Ireland, Ireland’s first conference for WordPress,  is officially launched. We’ve spent a mad few days talking to venues, sponsors and speakers and all systems are go: we’ll be taking over Langton’s Hotel in Kilkenny on March 6th and 7th, 2010 along with 35 speakers, 200 attendees and a metric tonne of swag.

It is going to be a great conference with both excellent speakers and loads of social activities so you don’t sort of get stranded in a corner (we hate that) and is specifically family-friendly so you can bring the whole gang. The venue is also handicap accessible and utterly amazing - we are so excited it’s all come together like this.

This site was a snap to do because Katherine and I work pretty much flawlessly together. I did the pretty, she did the clever, and we’re in total agreement about everything to do with conference organising. It’s like marriage, only perfect :)

PS: Follow @WordCampIRL on Twitter for updates, or see the blog.

While I am the first to admit I’m a little on the cranky side, it actually takes quite a lot to trip my moral outrage switch.

But GoDaddy has tripped it in spectacular style.

The well-known blogger Hoder is a dual Canadian/Iranian citizen who is generally considered to be the daddy of Iranian blogging. He has written passionately about politics and censorship, been published in mainstream publications including the Guardian, and visited Israel in 2007 as a citizen journalist and peace activist.

On November 1, 2008 (almost exactly a year ago), Hoder was arrested while visiting his family in Tehran, probably because of that visit to Israel. He has since spent at least ten months in solitary confinement, and has been repeatedly beaten and tortured. He may still be facing the death penalty.

His domain is registered at GoDaddy. Hoder.com, and thus the site housing the online archive of his writing, expires in 21 days. Many, many  members of MetaFilter, where Hoder is also a member, are more than willing to fork over the renewal fee to preserve his domain while he’s imprisoned. GoDaddy’s response to this request has been thus:

They refused citing security issues. However, if any of Hoder’s family can provide his password or the last 6 digits of the credit card used to register, the company will allow renewal, even with a different CC.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Would GoDaddy like the Iranian police to beat that Visa number out of Hoder? Perhaps his family should stop their efforts to get their son released and instead expend energy requesting he be “interviewed” to get his GoDaddy password?

This attitude is frankly beyond indifferent and appalling and into territory previously uncharted by my vocabulary. I am literally at a loss to find the adjectives to describe how stunning this is.

This is a problem that is very easily solved by simply crediting Hoder’s hosting and domain account, and would already be solved by any company that hadn’t had its last ounce of human decency sucked out of its mindless, bureaucratic soul. This requires nothing more than a little ordinary customer service in an extraordinary situation.

There appear to be actual people behind the @GoDaddyGuy account on Twitter. Let us hope that Twitter requests to renew #hoder’s domain registration will be treated with vastly more compassion than GoDaddy has shown to date.

They could hardly show less.

Barcamp Cork is on, baby, and it’s the 14th of November. I’ll be there giving a talk on Five Things Every Startup Should Know. I also highly recommend Paul Sweeney’s Connection 2.0: Communicating with Customers After the Web, mostly because I made him do it. (If you run an app or deliver a product or service, it’s essential.) Sign up here.

The night before Barcamp, Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork! It’s a great, casual night for women involved in tech - from bloggers to programmers - to get to meet each other. We’ll be at Gourmet Burger Bistro on Bridge Street, and dinner is €18 per person for starters, dinner with vegetarian options and dessert with tea or coffee. Sign up here.

I’ll be trekking up to Dublin for Business Camp Dublin and presenting a variation on Five Things. John will also be coming and will be presenting on (I think) commercial revenue streams for non-profits. It should be a fun event and Eimear the Wonder Dog will be in tow. (No autographs, please.)

We’ve been working away on HomelessChild.ie for quite a while, squeezing it in between paying jobs and a leaking roof, and I’m delighted it’s finally launched. This Irish charity works with homeless street children in Rio who face dire poverty, constant hunger, horrific conditions and an epidemic of childhood crack addiction that would break your heart.

This site represents donated time and effort from a group of great folks. Many, many thanks to Chris Mehigan who put his ace copywriting skills to work, to Guillermo Moreno and John Handelaar who customised endless PHP, and to Blacknight who very generously donated transfer fees and hosting for this project and for the Portuguese version launching shortly.

I’m not going to ask you to donate, but there are loads of simple ways you can help. Please make a (no cost) Travel Pledge - we’re hoping this campaign will help raise awareness and generate press for Homeless Child. Pledge, and share your pledge on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks a lot!

This was a slightly unusual project for Niall Harbison, Ireland’s favourite online chef, in that the site was up and running and just needed a visual overhaul. It was grey and blue and had a cool but unclear tab thing in the homepage, and while it was functionally fantastic, it was hard to figure out what exactly VidVend does.

I worked with David Kelly at Ambient Age to make the five day deadline. We re-styled every page with simple but very different CSS changes, and while David sorted out implementing the updates, I re-wrote the copy. Niall mostly got out of the way, made with the money, and wrote me a lovely recommendation on LinkedIn, which was honestly a pretty ace way to work.

I don’t do a lot of brochureware sites, and the ones I do I rarely put in my portfolio because I’m not particularly gagging to do more of them. Radisens.com, however, is going in for two reasons:

One, I like it a lot. No idea why; I just do. It might be because I did the voice-over for their video,  which was fun. I’ve never done a web one before but suddenly ever client wants voiced video, so there are more coming in future projects.

Two,  if you happen to have a spare hundred thousand or two, I am telling you right now: give it to Jerry O’Brien and you will die a billionaire. This is world-class, game-changing technology for the (highly lucrative) medical diagnostics marketplace. Jerry has his head on straight, knows where he’s going, and this Irish company is one to watch on an international level.

Dear Radisson SAS Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin:

Enclosed, please find a bill for €52.50.

On October 10th, 2009, I arrived to check into the Radisson, where I had reserved a room to attend the Irish Web Awards. Upon entering your hotel, I stood in a queue for no less than 23 minutes before I was afforded the privilege of giving you €160 in exchange for a room key.

The following morning, I stood again in a queue of at least 10 people, this time for 16 minutes, to be able to return said room key to you and pay €3 for a bottle of water to a desk clerk who could not make change for me. Finally, I queued a third time - this time for 27 minutes - to have my parking stub validated at a cost of €10.

It is beyond my comprehension how a hotel that is booked to capacity, as  yours was for this event, can be taken by surprise at the notion guests may actually want to check in and then later, at the designated check-out time, check out. Given the completely inadequate levels at which you staffed your front desk on this weekend, however, I can only assume you were indeed surprised by this extraordinary display of guest behaviour.

Should your math skills be as compromised as the desk clerk’s, I will simply point out that on a trip where I passed only 18 hours in Dublin, I spent more than one hour of it standing in a queue at your front desk. As you might imagine if you too had been treated this way for these unacceptable amounts of time, by the third go round this experience was nothing short of enraging. Matters were very much not helped by the numerous members of staff who exited the offices to the rear of the front desk, literally walked through the lengthy queue, and then departed to do anything but assist with extending basic customer service to a lobby full of paying guests.

Please note that I am not asking you to compensate me for the irritation of your moronic lifts, the awkward lack of cloakroom facilities for event guests, the atrocity that is closing the residents’ bar at 2 AM, or the swill that passes for your coffee. I merely wish to be compensated for the actual, entirely wasted hour of my life I spent waiting for you to fail to extend the “personalized, professional guest service and genuine hospitality” for which you apparently strive.

Thanking you in advance for your prompt remittance,

Sabrina Dent
Etc.

My mother will, at the drop of a hat, tell you the story of how as a child, I very nearly didn’t get into my competitive fee-paying primary school because I stubbornly refused to put the blue peg in the red hole during what passes as an interview for three year olds. While my mother likes to see this as a testimony to my non-conformance and independent spirit, the fact is that I simply could not do it then and would very likely struggle to do it today at 37. My particular instances of Dyslexia and  Dyscalculia are pretty mild, although a lot of this Wikipedia entry applies to me, particularly:

• An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated, such as turning 56 into 65.
• Problems with differentiating between left and right.
• Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analogue clocks.

I was 13 before I knew that calm and clam were two different words. Sixteen was an interesting year in that for the first time I was excelling in a math class (geometry) but was still struggling to read the clock on the wall. And I still remember London’s The Big Number Change in vivid gory detail because at 22, it very nearly drove me over the edge.

Despite the fact that up until last year, I thought Tommy Collison was one of the Collision brothers, this is all generally a less cumbersome problem as an adult then it was when I was in school. Spell check, spreadsheets, calculators and a husband who doesn’t mind saying “Your other left” 27 times a day make life vastly easier. There are really only two things that regularly frustrate me in the real world: dialling long telephone numbers and sending even short text messages, both of which are a slow and arduous processes.

The internet, however, drives me insane on a near daily basis. Here are three things I commonly encounter that are often rendered badly on websites.

Exhibit 1: Logins

The fact these boxes are presented out of order makes it three times as hard for me to log into my bank, because I have to count off the numbers in my PIN on my fingers three times - quite often out loud, which rather defeats the security reason for re-arranging them in the first place. Bank of America, on the other hand, has a login system that entirely avoids this issue, with a pictographic site key that works well.

Exhibit 2: Telephone Numbers

There are worse offenders out there but still, there is no chance - zero - that I could dial that Swedish Swiss number. While Europe does not have the standard (212) 555-1212 format that the US and Canada have, some breakdown of the number is always possible, even if the decision on where to split it is entirely arbitrary. The German number is much more useful, except I don’t speak German (or Swedish, for that matter.)

Exhibit 3: Booking Calendars

This calendar system BREAKS MY BRAIN. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now departing Prague three days before I arrive. Trying to book tickets on Aer Lingus literally made me shriek with rage last week. Things that are presented side by side should match up. (I don’t know why; they just should.) Otherwise, vertically arranging calendars that have offset dates is vastly clearer, every time.

I’m a firm believer that good design makes a better experience for everyone. If your login directions are so complex that a low-literacy user can’t use your system, it sucks for everyone. If your calendar is so confusing that a mildly dyslexic person can’t book anything, it sucks for everyone. If your navigation is so convoluted that a blind person using a screen reader can’t browse your website, it sucks for everyone. In other words, solving 90% of the web’s user interface problems are not about “special” design, they’re just about good design.

And Christ knows, Aer Lingus could use some of that.

Here’s a free tip: if you are on a low-carb diet, do not not not drink alcohol at the Irish Web Awards. You will get three times as drunk twice as fast, especially if this is the first booze you’ve had since June. After one drink, your feet will disconnect from your body, and after two drinks, you won’t be able to feel your face. Arguably, however, these are signs of a great night out, which this year’s IWAs definitely was.

Highlights of the evening for me:

• My incredible genius of a husband winning Best New Web Application or Service for KildareStreet.com. This site represents well over 400 hours of entirely unpaid volunteer coding and development to make Irish government more accessible to voters, and was done for no reason other than that it is desperately needed. It means the absolute world to me, because I love him, to have this work and dedication recognised, and I am so grateful to the judges. Thank you for making me cry.
• My favourite client Michael Kane winning Best Ecommerce Site for Curious Wines. He gave a lovely speech that very nearly got him divorced, and then bought us all a bottle of champagne - trust me, you really, really want a wine merchant for a client. He was over the moon, and I was utterly delighted for him. (And me!)
• My client Aidan O’Callahan at Amit.ie making the short list for Best Technology Site. To be honest, I built him his website awhile back and he asked for a blog, so I added one and never read it because I suck. Well, bloody hell if he hasn’t turned out to be a first class tech blogger - I am so impressed and proud of him.

The low point is that I again failed to thank Katherine Nolan for her hard work on Curious Wines. (Did I mention I suck?) We work together on all of the ecommerce sites I take on, and she is a GODDESS. If you get a chance to send her a congrats on twitter, it would be nice because these awards are genuinely more her foo than my foo at work.

Also, it broke my heart to find out that Marcus MacInnes, whom I love from the bottom of my cynical little soul, is leaving Ireland for London. I demand he return regularly to stay connected to the Irish web community, and if he doesn’t, we need to take away his passport and pelt him with potatoes.

On the plus side,  I did get see a ton of my favourite people, meet a ton of new @twitter folk, listen to the Greater Dublin Gay Men’s Glee Club sing my requests in the smoking lounge, and eat a mighty fine cupcake or two.

My sincere thanks once again to all of the judges, all of the sponsors, to Fran at Made In Hollywood for the fun swag, to Colm Lyon at RealEx for not swinging for me, to Rick O’Shea for doing his usual first-class job, to Mrs Pat Phelan for babysitting, and to Mulley for making it all happen year after year in enormous style. Thanks lads.

I am very, very happy and really, really need a nap now.