Web Design Adelaide

Have you heard of social commerce? If you haven’t you should read on - its changing the way the ecommerce game is played!

DBG spots ‘social commerce’ web trend for 2010
Thursday, 07 January 2010 00:00

Australian website specialist DBG Technologies expects businesses this year will equip their websites with “social commerce” technologies to boost sales through greater customer involvement.

DBG managing director Daniel Wilson said more businesses were ordering websites that could include product reviews, ratings and customer feedback. “These websites encourage consumer interaction,” he said. “When used well, these initiatives have the ability to build trust, credibility and loyalty among consumers, making them more likely to purchase from the site.

“Focussing on feedback and other metrics such as page layout, click patterns and sales conversion ratios, businesses can monitor the online behaviour of their customers and make adjustments to their sites accordingly. The net effect is more sales and greater profitability for the business.

“This social commerce functionality also works for the consumer who is able to find information more easily as well as read reviews, testimonials, product ratings and other security measures that give them peace of mind when purchasing.”

Founded in 2001, DBG Technologies is an Adelaide company that specialises in designing and developing e-commerce websites. DBG recently launched WebSync, an eCommerce engine to support the national network of resellers for Australian IT distributor Leader Computers. WebSync provides resellers with a customer self service-equipped website that draws live data about products, prices and stock availability from Leader’s core business system.

Mr. Wilson said the economic turbulence of 2009 had shown companies the shortcomings of a “brochureware” website. “Businesses will focus more on converting sales with their websites rather than having basic, brochure-style websites with little or no interactivity,” he said.

“Already we’ve seen more businesses wanting websites that are a tool for sales by first ensuring the conversions as customers request websites with fewer bells and whistles, such as Flash animation.

“This trend is evident in the increasing demand for websites that integrate with back-end business systems, so visitors to the website see live data from the store, product catalogues or point-of-sale software. We’re also finding businesses are now seeking iPhone applications, mobile-friendly websites and online services to give visitors more choices about how they seek information.”

Press Release thanks to Impress Media

We’re excited to announce the recent appointment of our new Business Development Manager, Tamara. Feel free to read the press release from the Impress Media website below outlining her appointment.

DBG recruits top jobs performer for fast growth 2010
Thursday, 14 January 2010 00:00

Fast-growing SA-based web specialist DBG Technologies has recruited a dedicated sales executive with skills honed in the tough disability employment sector during the Global Financial Crisis.

As Business Development Manager, Tamara Caire’s role is to build recognition of DBG among businesses that can benefit from its website development and search engine optimisation services. After recording a strong performance last year, DBG expects even faster growth in 2010 as businesses increasingly invest in websites to strengthen their online sales capability.

Tamara brings extensive sales experience to DBG after two-and-a-half years with employment placement agency Interwork, where she found jobs for people with disabilities, a challenge that became much more difficult after the collapse of the global economy in late 2008.

Despite the tough economic and employment environment of the past year, during her tenure at Interwork, Tamara was acknowledged as the top performer in a State-wide “Job Placement” initiative.

Tamara said the business development role with DBG was a challenge. “After two and a half years in the disability employment sector, I was looking for something new that offered me a bit of growth,” she said.

“That role was about selling the benefits of employing people with disabilities. Disability can range from depression and bipolar syndrome to physical and mental disabilities. It is often perceived as a big risk by employers. My job was to break down these barriers to encourage them to test one of our jobseekers. Once a person was placed, we would continue to review their performance for 26 weeks.

“We had some really good outcomes in terms of social confidence and working skills. It was very rewarding to watch our people come out of their shells.”

Tamara said DBG represented a complete change of pace. “Online is a constantly growing and evolving area of activity, so it involves a lot of growth and change,” she said. “For me, it is a new industry, a set of innovative services and a chance to really extend the sales and marketing skills I have developed at Interwork and previous roles. DBG is a great opportunity.”

DBG managing director Daniel Wilson said Tamara’s greatest strength was as a “people person”. “Customers don’t buy a product, they buy confidence in a person,” he said. “Tamara is very mature and well-organised. She will do a great job. She is very thorough and her enthusiasm is infectious.”

Google has always been a company pushing the limits of development and innovation and recently a new project codenamed “Caffeine”, has been getting a bit of attention.

Caffeine isn’t a new search engine but instead, is the next evolvement of the current Google search engine. Caffeine has been best described as making some modifications “under the hood”.

Google’s Matt Cutts mentions in a video interview with Web Pro News that engineers were working hard to ensure that the user experience would remain largely the same, but as with any upgrades and modifications there were bound to be some instances where rankings appear a little differently.  It’s expected that the interface will remain the same but that some power users would probably notice some differences in search results where regular users would remain largely unaffected.

As for whether this is a response to the release of Bing, Matt mentions that Google have had a team of engineers working on Caffeine for months and that this update was in the works long before Bing was announced.

Google “Caffeine” is technically a re-writing of the indexing system that creates the large database of web pages from around the globe. Basically it means Google will find, index and rank data much faster and allow real time and semantic indexing to be a lot more powerful. To make sure that everyone is happy with the updates Google have released a version of Caffeine in the Google sandbox and are asking searchers to provide feedback on their observations, you can test it out here.

As Google is accepting feedback on the changes, they expect a slow, incremental deployment of Google “Caffeine” over the coming months to make sure it’s a win / win for everyone involved.

We guess only time will tell how the updates are received and will be interesting to keep an eye on searcher activity on Bing as these two internet giants battle to be the King of Search. However for now that crown remains firmly placed upon Google’s head!

It was that time of year again and DBG made the journey over to Sydney for the annual Search Marketing Expo Conference trip, our third year in a row and I’m now starting to feel like I know Milson’s Point better than my own back yard!

This year’s international speakers included:

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay Inc), Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Jane Copland & Rob Kerry (Ayima) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Rate Experts)

Day One:

Day one started with coffee and eggs Benedict at Ripples Café by Sydney Harbour, nice view of the harbour and that big bridge. After registration and collecting my whiz bang, limited edition, SMX Sydney laptop bag I made my way to the crystal ballroom for the first day of search marketing goodness.

Things that were spoken about:

Blended Search (Video, News, Books, Images etc all in the Google results together) and Mobile search (optimising for portable hand held devices and mobile phones).

After a delicious lunch I sat down for the second half of day 1 and listen to presentations on:

How to get the best out of your page rank by structuring your internal page links correctly and setting up the correct 301 re-directs to preserve back links.

After some quick coffee and cake and a chat to the gang from Advantate I moved on to session 2:

CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0, the ranking issues and what to consider when designing a site with these technologies. Then bruches up on Ad Group Management for your Adwords account and International SEO – Optimisation your site for different audiences around the world. Finished the day off with some drinks at The Deck and made my way back to the hotel.

Day two…

Day two included sessions on what you should be measuring in your Analytics but aren’t, followed by probably the most interesting session I have ever attended on Conversion Rate Optimisation presented by Stephen Pavlovich. If you are ever wondering why your site is not converting , get in touch with this man.

After lunch we looked at Quality Score with Google and how to get the cheapest Cost Per Click and most relevant Landing Pages and Ads and learnt some nifty paid search tactics to save clients money.

I then sat in on an interesting session on SPAM, the junk mail variety, not the ham.

The end of conference Site Clinic is always a good laugh with the who’s who of SEO battling it out over who’s got the biggest ego and providing some handy advice on what to do and what not to do with your site, more often than not, to the embarrassment of those brave enough to put their site up for critique.

The two days were topped of nicely with a  networking boat cruise around Sydney Harbour - networking on a boat – what a brilliant idea! The barbequed prawns weren’t bad either. Got to catch up with my old mate Philip Shaw from Clever Clicks and kicked on well into the night. Made many new friends and thoroughly enjoyed some boating and fishing banter with the legendary Bruce Clay – what a champ. Till next time…

Picture below courtesy of Andrew Ballard @ rebusiness.com.au

SMX Sydney: Bruce Clay, Luke Jamieson, Kate Gamble & Philip Shaw

In a move that is set to shake up the Online News arena in Australia,  News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has announced the company is considering the option of charging readers to access online content and news stories, and aims to do so within a year.

Websites such as News.com.au, The Australian and The Daily Telegraph will all be affected by the change. The mentioned sites, currently publishing freely available content for all to read, look to change to a subscription system charging website users to access their content. It will be interesting to see how long it takes other media companies to follow suit, particularly Fairfax for access to their Sydney Morning Herald and The Age websites.

One of the main reasons behind the move was the inception of The Wall Street Journal’s online subscription which starts from US$103 per year. This convinced Rupert Murdoch that consumers are willing to pay for quality news online that differentiates itself from the mass of information freely available on the web.

What will this mean for the bulk of Internet users who use sites like this for their news? Well they will have to either pay to read the news items or search for other free news related sites, but one may think if News Corporation starts charging for its content, a tidal wave of subscription news services will follow.

Not only is this a big step for news related sites, its also a shift for the traditional monetization model for many websites. Although subscription websites have been around for a long time, there has been a consensus of more recent times that to have a successful website you need to provide quality, free information, making your revenue from other avenues such as banner advertising, sponsorship, product sales or AdSense, and this could change all that.

What can News Corporation expect to happen to their website traffic? Initially you would think consumers will backlash, preferring to access freely available news source, but over time we imagine they will come around to start using the subscription service if they prefer the type of news and journalism provided by News Corp publications. To sweeten the deal, will members get special benefits for subscribing such as discounts on other News Corp networks and products? Who knows, we may even see an increase in newspapers production again!

It has been talked about for a while but finally Microsoft through its newly released search engine Bing and Yahoo! have struck a deal which will see them have enough market share to begin to tackle the Google dominance.

What does that mean for the average Internet user? According to the official Microsoft Press Release it will mean the following:

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.

Ultimately it will mean more competition and better search platforms for users. Bing, since its release has turned heads and made small in roads, particularly with its simplicity and usual Microsoft flair. Yahoo! has a big community of users (although not necessarily search) and many great tools to use. So it would seem the deal to join forces should give Google something to worry about and it will be very interesting to see how they respond.

To read more about the deal visit the official Microsoft Press Release or the Mini Site.

On June 5th we attended a reception at the picturesque grounds of the Governor General’s House which was hosted by his Excellency Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce AC CSC RANR, Governor of South Australia and Mrs Scarce where we were personally awarded a certificate of appreciation by Foundation Daw Park for our silver sponsorship of the Anzac Commemoration Gala Ball held at the Hilton Hotel Adelaide earlier this year. As part of the reception we mingled with over 70 friends, sponsors, volunteers and guests of Foundation Daw Park and enjoyed a tour of the facilities and grounds.

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!
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!