Web Design Adelaide

Bing is the latest search offering from Microsoft. The Bing search engine has taken over from Live Search and seems to have taken a leaf out of Google’s book and gone for simplicity rather than overwhelming searchers with features they rarely use.

Although I’m not sure on the background image behind the search box and menu items, it seems to take me back to the gradient fadeouts from the late 90’s, all we need is some over bevelled buttons and giant shadows to complete the effect. Perhaps Bing are aiming for the retro audience re-living the old days and if so – good on them!

One very cool feature of Bing is the video search. When you hover over each video thumbnail in the results the video thumbnail begins to play. This can take you by surprise though if the speakers are up loud!

Like Google Maps, Bing also has the uniquely named BingMaps with integrated yellow pages business listings. So if you’re in the yellow pages online directory try out BingMaps in your area and see if you can find yourself!

Over all the search engine is fast and efficient and gives some very good results and its worth giving it a shot, ultimately it’s going to come down to personal preference and ease of access for most users.

To try Bing visit: www.bing.com

On Thursday 28th May, we attended Autism SA’s Insights and Innovations Networking Night as part of the Autism SA Insights and Innovation Conference being held in Adelaide.

We were greeted with some friendly faces and a jigsaw piece with a bit missing to help get us acquainted with other event attendees! Fair to say Dan got lucky, finding his matching “piece” in a number of seconds where as I was stuck asking everyone in the room if they had the “Z shape”.

The food at the Lyrics Lounge at the Adelaide Festival Centre was amazing, and I was lucky to be provided with several serves of a delicious butter chicken and plenty of Coopers Pale Ale which helped get the networking underway!

Special guest Tom Gleisner, host of Thank God You’re Here and Founder of Learning for Life gave his brief but motivational talk on the work he is doing in Victoria to help families living with Autism.

We also heard from the very witty Amanda Tulloch Hoskins who spoke about how she has become trained at how to “schmooze” at networking events in order to be taken seriously and to raise funds and awareness for her organisation PAKA (Parents Assisting Kids with Autism) .

The ball committee announced the theme and location for this year’s black tie fundraiser to be held at the Town Hall on October 31st the theme being “Masquerade Ball at the Adelaide Town Hall”.

We’ll be attending the ball again this year as last year the Winter Wonderland event held at the National Wine Centre went fantastically well with great food, wine and entertainment. The event ended up raising around $30,000 for Autism SA.

Thanks to Jess for the invitation to this great night and for more information on Autism SA you can visit their website: www.autismsa.org.au.

If you’ve ever wondered how to tell how many people click on a link you’ve posted on Twitter, well here’s the answer - you can use Tweetburner! Tweetburner is a third party website, not affiliated with Twitter in anyway but provides a neat little service that both shortens the URL’s (website address) of the site you want to link to, saving you valuable characters in your “Tweet” as you only have 140 to use as well as counting how many people click your link.

You will need to create a Tweetburner account – it’s easy if you use the same username as your Twitter account. You can then start sharing links right away!

To check how many people have clicked on a link you’ve posted, all you need to do is simply log in to Tweetburner, click on the “Archive” menu item on the main menu which will display alist of shared URLs and the number of clicks for each one. There is also a little graph icon that allows you to see a line graph of clicks over a selected time period.

The only thing Tweetburner doesn’t do, is track “Unique” individual clicks, so if someone clicks your link twice they will be counted twice, so keep that in mind when checking how many clicks you’ve received.

We hope this helps you in your social sharing, marketing and measuring endeavors. Happy link sharing!

Having a business or organisation facebook page is one thing, actually getting people to use it and view the content you’re putting gout there is another! The most powerful part of a facebook page for your business is the ability to contact the masses quickly and easily but to do that you first need the masses!

“Find us on facebook”

Add a “Find us on facebook” link or button to your website, email signature or anywhere else you think prospective fans that may find your content useful will be looking. You want to make it as easy as possible for an interested party to “become a fan” of your business or organisation!

Add Your Logo

Make sure your main picture or photo is a high quality image of your logo, this is great for brand recognition and getting your logo seen.

Add Pictures / Photos

Adding pictures of current promotions, marketing materials or photos of a recent conference, event or achievement creates interest. People are very visual creatures and adding pictures is a good way to get people coming back to your page where they will find other useful information and links.

How to add administrators (people who can update your page)

Sometimes you may want more than one staff member to be able to update the page to keep the fresh content coming. To add an extra admin - click on “Edit Page” just under your main page picture (logo).

On your setting page you can find “Admins” at the bottom of the right hand side column.

Click “Add” to ad a new admin from either your friends list or via an email address. Note if you invite someone via email who doesn’t have a facebook page they’ll need to sign up before being able to edit the page.

Add upcoming events so people know what you’re doing!

On the menu for your page you will see Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes etc and a plus (+) sign. If you don’t see events on the menu, click the plus sign and then click events on the pull down menu that is displayed.

You will see a grey button called “+ Create Event” click this to create an upcoming event.

Enter all the details for your upcoming event and click “Create Event”.

Enter in the name and details of your event.

In the next step you can add photos to the event and if you want to hide the event from the general public so that only the people you have invited can see the date, time location etc. You can also set the permissions of what people can do with the even, like post comments, photos, videos etc, if you want total control its best to set each of these to “Only allow admins to post links” / upload videos / photos etc.

Click save when you’re done setting up the event.

How to delete events:

Click on the “Events” tab the menu toward the top of your page.

You can “Cancel” a created event by clicking “Cancel Event” in the right hand side options.

You will be asked to confirm this action before the event will be cancelled, click “Yes, I’m sure”.

Adding information on past events and news to a facebook page

You can either do this by using your status updates or notes. If you can’t see the notes tab on the menu click the plus (+) icon and select “Notes” from the pull down

Click “+ Write a new note” to add a note.

Put the title of the news article (and date if you wish) into the “Title” field. And paste the news item / article into the “Body” field its up to your if you want to include the date of the article in the title or the body.

If you’d like to include a link to the article on another website or your own site you can add “To read this article on our website, please click the following link:” and then paster the URL (website address) of the page you want them to visit.

You can also use this technique if you just want to display a snippet of the article and want “fans” of you page to end up on your site to read the whole article.

If you have any related images to go with the news article you can add these by clicking “Choose File” under the body field.

Once you’re done, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Preview” You will see a preview of what your note will look like and if you are happy with it, click “Publish”

And you’re done!

This is just a starter guide to get you up and running, the best way to learn is try get in there and have a go!

We hope you’ve found this article interesting and for a more in-depth look at maximising the effectiveness of your Facebook page – feel free to have a look at this article from allfacebook.com

The full version of Internet Explorer 8 was released to the public today. At DBG we’ve been trialling and testing the beta versions of IE8 for quite some time so we knew what we’d be up against when the browser was released to the masses!

It appears that there is once again going to be fun times ahead for web developers with yet another browser to test sites on. At least this latest release from Microsoft seems to be more web standards compatible than some previous versions (IE6 anyone?) which should hopefully make testing a much less frustration process for developers.

Some new features include added security against phishing and malware and a tab-crash handler that allows individual website tabs to crash without losing the whole browser. A neat feature of the new IE8 browser is its browser compatibility tool allowing sites that have been optimized for previous version of IE to be viewed by switching to IE6 or IE7 mode creating a more pleasant viewing experience.

Similar to Google Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” feature, IE8 also has private browsing option allowing web surfers to browse without any personal usage information, caching or history being stored on the computer which is great for public or multiple-user computers.

If you are currently using a version of internet explorer you’ll probably want to upgrade to the latest version. If you’re using Firefox, Chrome, Flock or Safari then there’s probably no real benefit. We’ll leave the decision making up to you!

After many late nights and loads of design revisions - the new DBG website is finally online! Like all websites it’s constantly changing, being updated and tweaked to make sure that we can present to our customers all the information they require to make an informed decision about what they need for their website. This is an exciting time for us and we hope you like our new website!

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that is great to use for business, great for expanding your professional network and learning and receiving updates from influential people in your industry.

To keep up to date with whats happening at DBG, you can follow us on Twitter by clicking the following link: http://twitter.com/dbgtechnologies. Thanks and we look forward to meeting you on Twitter!

We’re please to announce that we have moved! Space restrictions at our old premises has meant that we have had to find a new home and now that we’ve moved in, business is finally back to normal! Our new, bigger office will allow us to continue to grow, and provide even better services to our customers.

Our new business address is Unit 5 / 241 Pirie Street, Adelaide. The DBG staff have never been more excited or enthusiatic about creating great websites so if you’ve been thinking about a website upgrade or some extra functionality for your website, feel free to come in and see us! Call us on 1300 723 618 to arrange a meeting and we’ll see how our team can help improve your website!

All the best!

The new DBG Technologies Web Design Adelaide blog is here! We will be filling it with loads of wonderful goodies to help businesses in Adelaide, South Australia improve their websites! Stay tuned! DBG Technologies, Websites, Done Right.