Have you ever considered how social media may benefit your business? If not, perhaps you should.

The world as we know it is changing in many ways, one of the things that has changed dramatically in the past couple of years is the social media takeover. Today news is spread to all corners of the world before it ever appears on a single news website, never mind on TV or radio. Facebook and particularly Twitter has become the fastest way to distribute information  and developing social networks can help grow your business.

If you’re interested in learning more we’re seeking expressions of interest from those interested in participating in class to help you learn what you need to know to make social media work for you.

With the Australian Dollar performing so well (particularly against the US Dollar) at the moment for the first time Australian consumers have a bargaining tool most are not yet taking advantage of.

This applies more so with electronics than other items but the savings you can gain by being prepared will astound you.  Electronics and technology are typically much cheaper in the USA and the low value of the Australian dollar pushed up wholesale prices for retailers but now the tables are turned and you should be taking advantage of it while it lasts. [Read more...]

If you’re a small business like us you’ve no doubt had difficulty sourcing a business to print a small quantity of business cards.  We don’t use paper cards a lot because we mostly correspond by email. I used to print my own and did a decent job of it but it can be time consuming cutting them to size when you don’t want to use the cheap and nasty looking punch out inkjet or laser printer templates. [Read more...]

Are you using Windows 7 and frustrated with the way files are organised in Windows Explorer?   I was too!  I frequently sort my files by “Date Modified” when looking for things I’ve been working on recently.

Windows 7 tries to be smart and decide how I want files to be displayed.  For example, if you’re looking at a folder with photos in it it will automatically display thumbnails.  This is quite useful at times but if you want to find your most recently edited photos (rather than most recently taken) it can be difficult to do because by default Windows 7 will arrange “image folders” without a “Date Modified” field to sort by.  To get around this you have to click towards the upper right corner of the window to select additional columns (or right click somewhere within the window) and then after you’ve asked windows to display the date modified field you have to switch from thumbnail view to Details view to be able to see the column names in order to sort by the “Date Modified” column you just added!  [Read more...]

You might want to hold off on that, here are a few reasons why.

• Studies show that 80% of visitors hate flash intros.
• They’re annoying.  Visitors want to get to the content of your site as quickly as possible and with as few clicks as possible.  Splash intro pages waste time by forcing your visitors to either sit and watch or click unnecessarily through to another page.  Your website should make it as easy as possible for people to get what they want, not to put roadblocks in their way.
• Splash pages will affect your search engine ranking. By having a splash page instead of primary content on the home page of your website you’re not only putting a roadblock up for your visitors, but for search engines too, this will certainly have a negative effect on your ranking.
• Web expert Jared Spool of “User Interface Engineering” says:
  When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.
• If you were to survey people who use the internet on a regular basis most of them will admit they will click on “skip intro” before watching the splash animation. By looking into website access logs it has been shown that at least 25% don’t even make it past the splash page.
• Flash discriminates against the visually impaired.  “Screen readers” cannot read flash content.  Users with visual impairment will typically enlarge the text on a page to enable them to read it, if there is no text, there’s no reason for them to stay on your site.
• Typically visitors will be coming to to your website looking for information, not entertainment.