Bayside Real Estate | www.realbayside.com.au

When building a new or re-developing an existing website, there is one question we at 101 Web Technology always ask our client.

How much time do you have available to keep this website updated?

As I have written about in other articles “Keeping your site fresh” and “Whats your site up to?” we know that keeping a website regularly maintained is like servicing your car. Yes it will run with old oil and half worn tyres. The old faithful will still get you to the shops and home, drop the kids at school. However would you trust the car to take you around Australia? Some would, though we wouldn’t.

The fact is if you want your website to go the extra miles and really give you a return on investment, then you need to invest into the site yourself. The biggest investment as business owners is time. Time is the one factor that is not tax deductible, time is one factor that you can’t make back. As business owners we do tend to like to save costs and think, yes we can do it ourselves, but are we going to do the same job as a professional? Are we going to remember to dot the i’s and cross the t’s?

When updating a website it is often not only a matter of making the small content changes, but having a holistic view and understanding of your web presence? Updating your content is only a very small part of keeping your website finely tuned. I liken it to changing your cars oil and not using a new filter. Yes you have new oil, but is it effective as it could be?

Keeping a website finely tuned does take time and effort. A Content Management System (CMS) is a great tool to get you off and running updating your own website content with little to no web programming skills and yes its true, if you want simple updates to your site, making them yourself makes sense. However what we find is our clients don’t have time to update the website themselves, we find their websites haven’t been touched sometimes over 24months since we launched the site. Would you not have serviced your car at least once in that same amount of time? In comparison clients making use of our website maintenance packages are more proactive with site updates, usually an email is sent with images, Word or PDF attachments with instructions on what they want the new/updated page to look like. Updates are made within 24hours of the request and the client has saved themselves the time and effort by having the professional look after their website. The client knows that their search engine ranking is being considered by a professional after each change, the site will be 100% error free. Simply it just works the best it can and your site has been tuned.

101 Fact: 9 out of 10 CMS we have deployed (good mix of both Joomla, WordPress and Adobe Contribute), due to time constraints we end up making the changes on behalf of the client.

While these CMS products are great at what they do there are limitations on them and a good web development company will be able to let you know what those limitations are and provide you a range of options that best suit your requirements, budget and availability of time.

.CO is the new domain extension that offers you a truly global, recognisable and credible option in branding your online presence.

Global Sunrise Applications opened on 26 April.
This is the first time that this domain extension will be available on a global scale. If you have a registered trademark that you would like to register a .co Domain for, please contact 101 Web Technology and we will arrange the process for you and faciliate payment of the application fee and payment for the domain. After the sunrise period the domain extension will be available in our domain shop, where you will be able to purchase your new .co domain.

Why .CO?

• A .co domain reveals many opportunities for a wide range of businesses and individuals.
• Global, recogniseable & credible
• Opportunity to create a worldwide footprint
• Meaningful and memorable to the end-user
• Appeals to today’s socially networked individuals and entrepreneurs

Key Dates
As this is the first time this new global domain has become available, the industry is anticipating a high demand. To allow for priority applications, there are 3 stages of availability:

1. Global Sunrise: 26 April – 10 June
2. Landrush: 21 June – 13 July
3. General Availability: 20 July

Global Sunrise applications opened 26th April. To register your trademark for a .co domain during the Global Sunrise stage, please contact 101 Web Technology.

Application & Registration Fees

Global Sunrise:
Application Fee: $333
Registration fee: $61 /yr

Landrush
Application Fee: $8
Registration Fee: $400 / yr

General Availability
Application Fee: $0
Registration Fee: $61 /yr

Due to the Global Sunrise and Landrush stages, there is an Application Fee which is payable irrespective of the outcome of your application. However, the registration fee will be refunded should your application not be granted. For more information on applications, please contact 101 Web Technology.

Find Out More
To find more information about .co Domains and how to secure yours, click here.
To apply online during the Global Sunrise Stage, click here.

If you have any questions about this process, please call us on 1300 665 491.

The auDA’s New 2LDs Advisory Panel has released a Discussion Paper inviting comments on:

• new 2LDs in general; and
• proposals for new 2LDs, conf.au and info.au.

The closing date for submissions is Sunday 23 May 2010.

For more information please see http://www.auda.org.au/new2ldsap/new2ldsap-index/

There are two ways in which you can comment on the issues raised in the paper.

1. Send a written submission to:

Jo Lim
Chief Policy Officer, auDA
email: jo.lim@auda.org.au
fax: 03 8341 4112

Electronic submissions are preferred. All submissions will be posted on the auDA website within 2 working days of receipt, unless clearly marked confidential.

The closing date for submissions is Sunday 23 May 2010.

2. Complete the online survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3GWKKM9 .

the auDA (Australian Domain Administration) will be releasing their new domain name drop process as of 18 April 2010.

The following changes are made to the Domain Renewal, Expiry and Deletion Policy

• expired and deleted .au domain names will be published on the Official Domain Drop List at the time when they become “eligible for purge”

• eligible expired and deleted domain names will be purged from the registry at 1.00pm AEST (2.00pm AEDT) every day, including weekends and public holidays.

The changes will be implemented during a scheduled registry outage on 18 April 2010. The Official Domain Drop List will be published on the auDA website (linked from the homepage) at the end of the registry outage on 18 April 2010. The new purge time will commence the next day on 19 April 2010.

Essentially this change to the policy will have no impact to clients that renew domain names prior to the expiry date. Clients transferring to 101 Web Technology Domain Registration service should start the transfer process well before the domain expiry date. This takes into account the time it takes to go through a regular transfer of registrant which can take at least 48hours.

This is also a timely reminder to ensure that your associated registrant details are up to date for your domain. If contact details are incorrect especially email, then the domain may not be easily renewed and may lapse the reminder and expiry periods and you may lose your domain. You can check your details are up to date at http://domains.101webtech.com if you have a domain registered with us you can login to administer your domains, clients that have domains with other registrants can use our Whois lookup under Domain tools on http://domains.101webtech.com

If you have any questions or want to know specifics about the new policy and how it may affect you, get in touch or leave a comment below and we will get back to you.

What is RSS?
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution and is a quick and easy way to see updates to your favourite sites without having to check the site every day for the updates. Letting the content come to you, not you search for content. By subscribing to your favourites websites RSS feed you are alerted as soon as the site is updated.

A majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are really limited to your imagination.

How to subscribe to RSS Feeds?
Most of the time the publisher of your favourite website will actively promote that there is RSS feeds available to follow the content.  Our site look for the blue icon at the top right of the page, or take the ABC website, that has multiple RSS feeds to follow covering a wide range of subjects.  See here: http://www.abc.net.au/services/rss/

To subscribe you can either use an online or offline RSS reader and you simply click on the link or copy the address to your RSS reader. I use FireFox which has a built in RSS reader, so when I click on the RSS link I’m taken to the feed and given the option to add it to my “live bookmarks”.

Another RSS reader I use is my iGoogle page, if you have a Google account you can set up your iGoogle page to access your favourite feeds and many different useful and not so useful widgets.
Resources:

• To subscribe to 101 Web Technology please follow this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/101WebTechnologyNews
• If you want a iGoogle page and you don’t have a Google Account you can get one here: http://www.google.com.au/accounts
• To get FireFox go here: http://www.getfirefox.com.

If you have any questions or are getting stuck please post a comment or feel free to contact us.

As a business owner you may not be supervising your staff the whole time, though you will have an understanding of how the business is traveling, the staff morale and the bottom line.

Have you have even had the experience of a team member not performing? How often is it that you simply just let it be and see if things improve with no intervention? As a business owner/manager this is costing you money and the best way to resolve the issue is to engage with the team member and discuss the concerns and address any issues that may have arisen. Sometimes this is enough and usually with the right coaching and support the team member becomes a valuable member of the team with improved efficiency and workflow and the end result is you see productivity again going up.

Just the same as you the proactive business owner keeps track of your physical staff, what about your virtual team? They are often the forgotten ones, they work 24/7, take no holidays, never allowed to get sick (99.9% uptime guarantee, if they live with 101 Web Technology), have very little interaction with the other staff members, except for being told that they don’t work, a waste of money, out of date and not in touch with the business any more and often told they are ugly. Without the necessary time-out and understanding this team is often left to be dressed in outdated fashions, using out-dated tools, not up to speed with the latest trends and pretty soon you have a team member that is potentially costing you business.

So what exactly is your website doing all that time? By understanding what your website does with its time and how it treats your customers when it is working we can start to fine tune the process and make it work more efficiently and that’s where the reports from Google Analytics come into play.

Top Entry Pages

These are the pages that are first inline for traffic to the site. Depending on your marketing campaign this could be your company’s homepage, blog, online shop. Your top entry pages tell you if your marketing strategy is working.

For instance if you are doing a letterbox drop and on the flyer is your companies website address, during that campaign you would expect to see a spike in direct traffic coming  to your homepage.

If however are getting mostly referral traffic and you are in the middle of a search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and your top entry page is the page you have been targeting you can safely assume that you are heading in the right direction.

Top entry pages tell a good story on there own however combine them with an understanding of how the traffic is getting to your site and you start to have some good insights into where your energy is best focused.

Top Exit Pages

This is the report that tells you where people are leaving your site from. Most people view this as a bad thing. This one has many different variables and can tell a different story depending on the context of which people are coming to your site.

For instance:
A client of 101 has a free DVD on offer and a lot of SEM work goes on promoting the DVD, they run Google Ads, Yahoo Ads and other Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Instead of leading the person through to the homepage of the site to again do the sales work that is performed in the copy of the ad the user is pointed to an alternate page commonly referred to as a Landing page. This page is the call to action and is where the ordering takes place and the process finalised. Users coming to this page know what they are after and will fill in the details hit submit and then most leave the site. This is not a bad thing as the intended transaction has been completed.

By reviewing the Top Entry and Exit Pages lists, they are able to keep a track of how the PPC ads are converting, by the number of visitors who are entering and leaving on specific landing pages.

Above is an example of how by having a good understanding of your website combined with some good stats analysis, you can shape the business direction of your website and create an informed user experience.

If you have a website and you are not getting the user stats, then how do you know that your virtual team is working towards your business success?

As part of my role as Senior User Centered Design Analyst I find myself working more with Word typing up reports and analysing designs and user interaction patterns as apposed to coding and design these days. Yesterday I found out a great trick in Word, and I use the word trick very loosely here as it is a standard feature of Word that I just hadn’t tapped into before now. Using the Numbering icon I can auto number rows in my tables, and if I change the order of the information in the rows the numbers automatically update for me. Magic? no, handy? YES…

For instance I was writing up an evaluation report which had over 50 findings (1 per row), as I was working in draft I would type up the findings in no particular order. During the time between draft and final stage I wanted to move the rows around so there was some logical flow to my findings.  This quickly become a time issue when I moved the rows as I would then need to re-number my rows, this was all before I knew about auto-number.

By setting auto number in the first column of each row, every time I tab to create a new row, the new row is given the next number.

Heres how you can Autonumber your Word Table too.

1. Create your table in Word
2. Place your cursor in the column you want to be the number column.  (Most common for my documents is the first). Now press the Numbering icon.  Looks like this
3. Note that a number 1. will now be displayed in the column. Insert another row and number 2. will be displayed and so on.
4. Thats it, start typing and forget worrying about numbering your rows.

Easy…. Now for some format and output options.

What if you want to restart your numbers? right click on the list and choose restart numbering. This will end the number sequence from the point your cursor is placed and start again at 1. You and contine the sequence by choosing continue numbering from the right-click menu also.

What if you want letters not numbers? right click and choose bullets and numbering. From this window you can choose the customise button and even change the format of your numbers from 1. to 001. if you preferred that output. That is a handy one for me as I prefer a more structured and a uniform look.

Hope this tech tip helps you out. Until the next one…

Spring is now upon us and we should be well and truely into spring cleaning, clearing out the junk around the office, backing up the PC, applying the patches, upgrading the machines and software. But do you think about looking at your website and updating the content? Most likely not, our experience has shown that site owners are not always the most proactive when it comes to updating their site, but while it may not be the most glamorous job, think of it this way, do you walk into Ford and want them telling you about the AU XR6 released in 1998 or do you want to talk about the new 09 FPV GTP? The same can be likened to your website, if you website is your 24/7 sales person, then arm them with the most up-to-date information you can.

Here are a few simple tips to updating and fine tuning your website.

Content stocktake
Starting from your homepage, go through all pages on the site checking that links are working along the way. On each page take note of the content and read the page from the perspective of a first time visitor to your site or someone who has not even heard of your business before. You will soon start to see that the content needs a refresh and while it made sence when you first wrote it, two years later you will have a different view and most likely want to make some minor adjustments.

Run a broken link report.
A broken link report will tell you if any of your links to pages within your site are broken. On the web there are not many things more annoying to your clients then to have them on your site looking for information and when they try to access the information you give them a big 404 error message. It is about offering good customer service and creating a strong and positive image to your clients that you take pride in how you present your business.

To run a report you can make use of many of the free tools online that will check through your site, or alternatively you can contact us to perform the task as part of the routine maintenance and updates on your site.

Check your stats
Check your access stats to see how people are finding your site, what are your most popular pages and what sites are linking to you. With this information you can start to make adjustments to your sites navigation, the way that pages link to each other and you easily see which pages are working for you and why.

So how do you get these stats? All sites hosted by 101 Web Technology have access to these stats via there sites, control panel. Contact us if you do not know how to access your control and we will be more then happy to assist and point you in the right direction.

101 Web Technology also recommends using Google Analytics for site tracking analysis. All sites built by 101 now come with the tracking scripts installed and reports are emailed at scheduled intervals. The reports are intuitive and 101 Web Technology is able to explain in an easy to understand way how you can extract the information out of the reports to ensure you get the most of the information.

So there you see a few ways to go through and fine tune your website this spring. To make it even easier for our clients 101 Web Technology offers cost effective maintenance packages to take the headaches out of your routine site maintenance.  To find out more please contact us or visit the maintenance package section of our website.

101 Web Technology has launched a new client centre! The new client centre is available by selecting the “Support/Accounts” tab in the client login section (top left of page under 101 logo.) If you have not been sent your welcome email with your login information please contact us and we will arrange to have that information sent out to you. Alternatively there is a forgot password link to retrieve the password for the account.

So we can efficiently work on your requests the client centre allows you to easily lodge a support ticket for any issues you may run into with your hosting or for those clients on a maintainence package you can use the client centre to request updates to your website.

You may also use the support system to upload large files to our server, save the potential issues sending via email and much faster then snail mail.