Newsletters

Newsletter March 2010

Welcome to the Cooloolabusiness.com Newsletter for March 2010.

Some long term Members may recall our old newsletter that we discontinued a few years ago. We have decided to re-commence a regular newsletter after discussions with some Members who would like to be kept up to date with our news.

In our new newsletter, we will bring you some regular sections including Member news, Internet news, handy software programs and member advertisements.

MEMBER NEWS

We have been “snowed under” over the last few months developing new sites and systems for our members. We are now specialising in custom Wordpress development as WordPress offers many advantages over standard HTML design and other development systems. 

Our latest WordPress Member site is M1 First Aid Safety Supplies, a shopping cart system for Michelle at M1 First Aid & Safety Supplies that offers online safety product ordering (and not forgetting that we have developed a custom WordPress system for Version 3 of our Gympie Business Directory at www.cooloolabusiness.com).

With the completion of version 3 of the cooloolabusiness.com directory, we have introduced some new and beneficial features for our members. The most important feature is that each member is provided with an individual listing page that can display a Business Description/Profile as well as your contact details and a live Google map. We are happy to keep your listing page updated for you and urge all members to review their listing and send us a profile or description that tells visitors what products you sell or services you provide. Adding this information to your listing page will add a lot of value to your listing, make your listing easier to find for visitor searches and give you better backlinks to your websites. Also, in about 2 weeks time, we will be syndicating the content of these pages which will provide more backlinks and help your Google rankings – so please send us the descriptions to update your listing (you can email this to us or use the Listing Update Form provided under the Member Tab on the website)

We still provide our standard HTML design services for managing our Member sites and some new sites like the just completed re-development of the Weeroona website at www.weeroona.org.au

Our development services are undertaken in-house here in Gympie (not just outsourcing to other companies to do the work). We don’t have to cold call or employ any special sales tactics to source new clients or development work – our workload in looking after our clients and their “word of mouth” referrals usually exceeds our time availability.

INTERNET NEWS

We have recently changed ISP providers. After relying on the excellent service provided by Westnet for the last few years, we found the we were starting to exceed the data bandwidth provided for our 20GB ADSL plan. Our options were to increase our bandwidth with Westnet or find another provider. After reviewing the plans offered (and researching customer service capability), we opted to “churn” to Internode. 

So far, the new ADSL2 50GB service from Internode has been very good. The “churn” changeover process was handled faultlessly and their customer service has been excellent (phone calls were answered without being placed in a lengthy queue and without the difficulties of trying to understand someone in a foreign call-centre). If your are regularly exceeding your download and need a better plan, I would have no hesitation in recommending that you include Internode as a potential provider – their website is at www.internode.on.net.

HANDY SOFTWARE

In each Newsletter, we will try to give you some information about some of the software programs that we use that you may find useful in your business. The program we have selected for this newsletter is one we used as a free version but found it was so good that we had to purchase the pro version. 

The program is Roboform, a small utility that manages your passwords – it is secure, remembers your passwords and other details you wish to store and can then complete these details in webpages and forms for you. We have found this software invaluable and time saving in our operations as we have a lot of passwords for membership sites and online systems that would take forever just to find sometimes. 

I recommend that you download the free version by clicking the image above.

(In our next edition – “Open Office” Free software that is comparable to Microsoft Office and we have an instruction video for members explaining how to use open office document templates).

MEMBER CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISEMENTS

Gympie Meat Hall – call and see Gary and get 10% of any order over $100 by mentioning that you are a member of cooloolabusiness.com (by the way the cheese kranski is very good).

Note: if you would like to have a classified advertisement in our next newsletter, please send the advertisement to admin@cooloolabusiness.com