info [ AT ] redcardinal [ DOT ] ie
OK
This website cost €2.5m to develop. They spent another €0.5m on the domain (actually not too bad a deal given that Panama.com is for sale at $1.6m currently). Now tell me that the homepage is in any way user friendly? Fancy one of the offers that appears in a carousel? Too late it's moved on now…
Embedded Link
Ireland : Holidays in Ireland – Official Holiday Website of Tourism Ireland
Official Website of Tourism Ireland for visitors to Ireland. Information on accommodation in Ireland, activities in Ireland, events in Ireland and much more
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This post was first made on the Richard Hearne Google+ profile.
Yikes, thats a hefty price tag for that… from what I can see they are not even serving higher res images for retina…
Comment by Andy Wigglesworth — January 24, 2013 @ 10:15 am
I'm only disappointed they didn't do the whole thing in Flash
Comment by Conor O'Neill — January 24, 2013 @ 10:27 am
The design is not worth anywhere close to €2.5m. However, when I heard they only paid only €500k for the domain I was impressed. IMO it is *the* category killer domain for this niche (Irish Tourism)
Add to that, it already had hundreds of thousands of genuine inbound links from the previous owner (Irish Times) meaning 2 things: 1. Free non search engine-dependent traffic and 2. Massive domain authority meaning easy ranking for pretty much any medium competition keyword for which they decide to create a subpage.
Comment by DomainA — February 19, 2013 @ 10:21 pm