Newsletters

Newsletter July 2010

Welcome to the Cooloolabusiness.com Newsletter for July 2010.

This month brings us to the start of a new financial year and hopefully the economic outlook is on the improve for small business.  However, with a Federal election due in a few weeks time, current business activity levels will probably be unchanged until after the election. 

It is a good time to look at your advertising remembering that the cost of having a website online for a year is about the same as a small 1 minute advertisement in the local newspaper.  If you do place an advertisemenmt in the paper, remember to include your website address to let readers know where they can find more information about your business products and services.

MEMBER NEWS

Gympie Family Dental – We have recently completed re-development the Gympie Family Dental website.  The site has been developed using a customised Genesis WordPress 3 release to provide a professional content management system and facilitate SEO for additional information to be added to the site.  Visit the site now to find out more about the painless microdentistry services offered by this Gympie Dentist.

Hartbeat Training & Consultancy– minor updates have been completed for Cindy Hartwig to add information on the latest training courses including GP and Nurse CPR training courses and on Gympie Training Rooms for hire.

INTERNET NEWS

WordPress 3. WordPress Version 3 was released a few weeks ago.  Some of our WordPress clients may have noticed an alert advising to upgrade to the the latest version with a link to perform an automatic upgrade when logging in to their CMS.  In most cases, the WordPress automatic upgrade is faultless but sometimes complications can occur due to site software and plugin conflicts or other bugs.  For this reason, we recommend that clients do not attempt the version upgrade themselves (at least not without undertaking database and theme backups first).  We will be implementing a free version 3 upgrade program for all of our client sites in the near future (as we expect that there will be a minor point upgrade to correct some new Version 3 bugs in the next couple of weeks).  Our upgrade program will include a full site backup to enable us to do a site rollback in case of any complications (we have learnt this necessity from experience with one of our own network sites – it is almost impossible to recover from a failed upgrade without a backup).

Backlinks & SEO – site owners should be aware of the importance of backlinks and SEO for website promotion to improve the placement of your website in search engine results pages.  We regularly undertake link building programs for our sites as well as basic link building services for our client sites.  If you would like to build some more links to your site, try the free version of the online link building program at www.imautomator.com as it will build links to your pages.  We use the “Pro” version for our SEO work and can offer a full linking program on a service basis – contact us for more information on paid linking services.

Antivirus Program – Microsoft Security Essentials.  Most reviews of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) have been favorable and the extent of protection is seen as relatively significant for a free product.  We have trialled several free antivirus programs including AVG and Avast and the current version of MSE compares favourably with these.  Microsoft is about to release a new Version (V2) with improvements in firewall & browser integration for online security.  The new version will be even better and is now our recommended free software for protecting your computer from virus and malicious software. Microsoft Security Essentials can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx?mkt=en-au

Mobile Website Versions – In our June Newsletter, we mentioned that we were preparing a development system to be able to incorporate mobile versions of our WordPress websites for handheld device users.  Although this may seem a bit futuristic, any doubters as to the potential that mobile brings to the e-commerce industry need only look at the recent second-quarter earnings report from Amazon, that revealed their worldwide mobile commerce sales in the past year surpassed $1 billion (Source: www.websitemagazine.com).

HANDY SOFTWARE

We regularly receive requests for information on image software and what is necessary to put photos on the web.  Digital cameras and photos are very convenient and it is necessary to learn how to “process” them for use on the web as a photos straight from the camera are much too big.  Processing a photo is called “optimising” and this can be simply reduced to a 2 step process:

1. Reducing the photo dimensions – This is making the photo dimensions smaller.  A typical photo may be up to 4000 pixels wide from a good camera and this needs to be reduced to fit the space available on the webpage usually something between 300 and 600 pixels wide (at 72DPI).  The photo may also be cropped to remove unwanted edge areas first before size reduction.
2. Once the photo has been resized, it is then further optimised to reduce the filesize by “compressing” the image.  This process is basically a percentage reduction in the image quality to minimise filesize to achieve acceptable download speed – the resultant image is  a balance between photo quality and filesize (site & page load speed is becoming more important as Google is measuring site speed as a factor in it’s algorithm for determining results ranking now – we have always treated page load speed with more importance than others and we still design page load time for dial up users unless a client specifically requests otherwise).

Some cameras may come with image software and there is a lot of image editing software available for processing images and a few online sites also provide provide that capability.  We have received recommendations for the following:

Online photo editor:

www.pixlr.com/editor or www.piknic.com – these websites allow you to upload a photo and use their systems for editing and optimising and then saving the new image back to your PC.  Online systems may be OK for occasional use but uploading/downloading may become time consuming if you have several photos to optimize.

Free Software:

Paint.net –  http://www.getpaint.net (take care – the big download buttons buttons are for paid software). This program is not the old Windows Paint program – it is an advanced, layer capable photo editor capable of complex photo editing.

Irfanview – www.irfanview.com – capable of editing, enhancing and optimising photos

Fly Free Photo Editing & Viewer Software – www.5dfly.com/free-photo-editing-software – capable of editing, enhancing and optimising photos with batch processing and upload Flickr/Google/Facebook.  This software would be very useful for Facebook users.

All of the above would be good for preparing images to be sent by email.  We still get questions from people trying to send large attachments to friends asking why their email bounces (some ISP’s have a 10MB limit on their email gateway).  If you need to send large files(anything over 5MB is a large file for email), it is much better and quicker to archive them using Winzip or 7Zip and then send them by a free file transfer service like www.yousendit.com

MEMBER CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISEMENTS

(send us an email to advertise here for free)

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Phone: 5483 6477 For all Printing in Gympie.

Starclub Copycentre Justin has some great specials for June/July 1000 Colour DL Flyers – $169 (was $270) 500 Economy Full Colour Business Cards – $85 1000 Colour Fridge Magnets – $499 (was $570) Signs and Stickers – %20 off

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Eastwood Farm B & B Winter magic! Breakfast in the sunshine on the verandah. Double rooms at $165.00 per night. Afternoon tea and breakfast included. Dinner by arrangement. Mention this ad for 10% off the nightly rate. gina.ostwald@bigpond.com Valid until 30/9/2010

Phone: 07 54831384110 Allen Road Chatsworth, Gympie Q 4570 Australia

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