Cooloola Business Newsletter

Newsletter April 2010

Welcome to the Cooloolabusiness.com Newsletter for April 2010.

WOW!  Where did March disappear to?  It feels like I only sent the March newsletter a week ago but here we are again.  With Easter in the middle and the constant stream of website update requests, I didn’t achieve all of the goals I had set for the month but our plans for content syndication and network development are still on track. 

However, syndication has been “turned down a bit” as updates for Member listings in the Cooloolabusiness.com Gympie Directory are not being sent in by Members.  I urge all Members to check their listings in Cooloolabusiness.com and send us an updated description/profile with products and services for your business.  Having a good description will not only make it much easier to find your listing in Cooloolabusiness.com, IT WILL ENSURE GOOD BACKLINKS FOR YOUR WEBSITE as we proceed with syndication of your listings in our network.

MEMBER NEWS

We would like to welcome Jim’s Cleaning and Toby’s Kiosk to Cooloolabusiness.com.  Jim’s Cleaning are offering professional cleaning services in the Gympie region and a special offer for cooloolabusiness.com Members – read the offer in our Member Classified Advertisements below.

We have developed a new custom WordPress CMS for Toby’s Kiosk, a Toowoomba based company specialising in Ice Cream Van and associated equipment hire and sales.

INTERNET NEWS

We routinely receive calls requesting assistance with email accounts.  These range from forgotten passwords (an easy fix -we just re-set the password on the mailserver) to accounts blocked by large email attachments.

If you are having trouble downloading your email with Outlook (or similar email client), it could be that there is an email with an attachment that is causing the problem.  The solution is to use webmail to login to the account, review the emails and delete the one that is causing the problem.  We have found that the easiest online webmail program is www.mail2web.com – click for our information page on using Mail 2 Web.

Email was designed as a quick and simple communication system – not to send files over the internet.  Attaching files to an email can cause several problems:

• The attachment may be too big to pass through your ISP gateway resulting in the email bouncing back to you
• The attachment may be too big for the recipients mailbox again resulting in a bounce back with a message that the mailbox is full
• The attachment may block the recipients mailbox preventing download of email

These problems can be easily addressed by using one of the many free file transfer systems that are now available.  If we need to send a file quickly, we use www.yousendit.com, a website system that uploads your file and sends a download link to the recipient. 

HANDY SOFTWARE

File Sharing and Backup – We are trialing a new system at Dropbox, which offers free file storage up to 2GB.  The system gives you a small program to install on your PC that synchronises the PC Dropbox folder with the secure online storage and allows you to share sub-folders with other people who can either login to the folder online to download the file or use their own Dropbox program to access the file.  Click here to get the free Dropbox Program – 2Gb of free secure online storage is very handy to keep a copy of your critical files and make it easy to share files online instead of emailing them.

Acronis PC Backup – Have you ever had a computer crash and lost critical data or even important files? The cost of losing critical data can be huge to a small business but the good news is that this can be easily avoided by implementing a proper backup system.  We have used Acronis software since it was first released several years ago and it provides us reassurance that we have safeguarded our business data – a very inexpensive insurance policy.  The latest release is Acronis® True Image Home 2010 and is full featured and provides automated backup set via a scheduling feature.  It is currently on special at USD$49.95 till 30/4/2010 and comes with a free Plus Pack Add on which includes the flexibility to restore files, applications and an operating system to a different computer with dissimilar hardware(Plus pack usually retails at USD$29.99).  Click here to visit the Acronis True Image website where you can buy the special version or download a trial version to test the software on your PC.

OpenOffice – We mentioned OpenOffice software in our March Newsletter.  It is a very good, free product suite that is a true alternative to Microsoft Office.  Over 100 million downloads in just over 12 months shows just how popular and good this software is.  It has lots of additional functionality, templates ands clipart all available free for download.  Read more about Open Office in out software page at www.cooloolabusiness.com/software/openoffice-suite  and view the online video for using free templates in OpenOffice Writer.  

MEMBER CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISEMENTS

Jims Cleaning – April/May Special 

Mention this advertisement and we will give you a *20% Discount on any quoted residential or commercial cleaning service until 15^th May 2010.

House and Office cleaning starts from as little as $4 per/day, this price is based on a regular fortnightly clean on a standard townhouse or office, please ask for a FREE QUOTE for your cleaning job. Call 131 546 to contact your closest Jim’s Cleaning Professional in your area. Your local Jim’s Cleaner who quotes on the job will also be the one who does the job, we give you our Satisfaction Guarantee. Call now 131 546.

*Special applies to any one job from first time clients only.

---

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).

---

Cooloola Business Newsletter

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