Running an Irish website

what is the best way to approach it

[2004mark]

Hello, I have a client that has an established .co.uk website. However they hold a good share of the market for their industry in Ireland as well as the UK.

They have asked me to organise for their company name to become live as a domain for .ie

The plan is to host a separate website which will be made up of just the basic information (products, contact info, local regulations, etc), this will mostly be made up from content from there .co.uk site, but will have a few variations (currency, contact details, etc).

When a user enters the newsroom for example, the .co.uk newsroom will open in a blank window. This will avoid updating two websites and keep duplicate content to a minimum.

Do you think that I'm attacking it from the right angle, or should I just 301 the .ie to the .co.uk and also include the Irish content on the .co.uk site.

[kkol]

well - in my opinion, you should try to detect if people are coming from Ireland or UK, (IP country lookups) and give them appropriate treatment - prices in Euros, contact info in Ireland etc. (that is, if you're using some server side scripting) If not, try to give IE it's own "section" as much as possible.

[johnser]

> Host the .ie over here
> Get lots of Ireland-specific content - otherwise you sound like you're headed for duplicate-land...
> Search for digital photos in the UK & Irl & compare the top serps. You'll see what I mean if you look hard enuf.

[RedCardinal]

Yep, I would agree.

Host a separate .ie website with targeted content for the Irish market.

And I wouldn't just do a cut-amend-paste job on the content. Don't underestimate the negative response you could get to content that was obviously created for an English audience.