Web Design Adelaide

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!

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!