The more links to your website from other websites the greater the chance there is that visitors will link through to your website.

From a search engine point of view there are lots of factors that search engines take into consideration when ranking your website and incoming links is one of them.

The links however must be relevant to your website for them to be valuable.

So how do you create links?  Here’s your homework for the week:

•    Create a profile on all free web directories such as finda.co.nz, nzbusinessdirectories etc
•    Participate on other people’s blogs making sure after you comment you add your web address.
•    Make a list of other websites that are relevant to your business and contact them to ask them to link to your website.  You may need to offer a reciprocal link for them to be interested.

Overall the goal should be to have as many relevant links coming into your website as possible.

An MYOB report into New Zealand’s e-commerce economy has revealed that in the last year businesses with a website earned and sold significantly more than those who didn’t have an online presence.

The study of more than 1000 businesses was conducted in the year to April 2011 and found 5 – 9 per cent more businesses with a website saw revenue growth, than those without.

read more

On Technology

“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

read more

The vehicle’s designers want the car to always be connected to the cloud, which will allow it to know the driver’s work schedule, constantly keep tabs on traffic and weather conditions, and assist and monitor the driver in an attempt to “enable a seamless lifestyle between home, office and car linked by access to the driver’s personal information.”

This sporty four-seat concept car was first rolled out in Germany this week. The Evos will debut at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show in September.

read more

Let’s say you’re at Trafalgar Square, and you want to visit Madame Tussauds. With a simple directions search, you’ll see all the possible public transport connections. In Maps, click “Get directions” in the left-hand panel, and then the train icon to see public transport directions. Enter your departure location next to A, and your destination next to B.

read more

Setup of Email Marketing Campaign

This includes:
- Setup of the system template design and implementation
- Adding distribution lists
- Setup of reporting
The cost of this set-up is $500 plus GST

Email Management (for up to 2000 subscribers)

This Includes:
- Formatting email and adding content
- Sending email
- Reporting
The cost of email management is $150 plus GST per email send

Click below to view some examples of our clients email templates:

1. Content is king
Although you may be able to gain interest with your current content you are unlikely to get your visitors coming back if you don’t keep your content fresh. Keep your site updated with new content on pages, posts and latest news area. If you have an article or blog section you must keep these fresh – outdated news areas are detrimental to your website. Give your visitors a reason to come back to your website.

2. Relevant directory and website links
List your website in relevant directories – ones that relate to your websites content. Some popular and known general directories are Finda, Yellow Pages & nzpages. Also setup link exchanges with similar or related websites. Links will not only help your pagerank by increasing back links but also drive more traffic to your website.

3. Usability
Users are far more likely to return if they can use your website so make it easy to navigate, get around and find information. If you have products or a large site, ensure you have a search function available. Google search functions are great – if you don’t have one contact us for a quote.

4. Social networking
Advertise your company on Social Networks. Setup an account with Facebook & Twitter and start advertising. Ask us about what plugins are available so that your site and social networks can interact.

5. Get feedback from your customers
Sometimes it’s hard to see the pros and cons of your site if you work on it every day. Ask your customers what they think and ask them for feedback on what content they would like to see.

Freshen Up Package – $1850.00

Logo Design – 5 concepts provided
Business Card Design with 1000 printed on luxury card
Letterhead Design with 1000 printed on standard paper
Email Signature design

view our graphic design portfolio

You may even be interested in a new website refresh – call us on 09 360 1678 to talk through your design options.

So today I would like to go over a few ways spam is picked up. The biggest way spam is contracted is via ‘cookies’, each time you write in your email address on a website is it logged in your cookies. If these sites dont have the proper cookie functions, the email is stored ‘un-encrypted’. When an unencrypted cookie is created, any website technically has access to that information and will pick up emails and file them into there database.

One way to deal with this type of spam is to use a third party application that filters your inbox of spam, and the other way is to filter the spam before it gets to your inbox.

Third party applications are often expensive or dont quite do the job, and hosting providers sometimes miss spam too. Unfortunately there is no 100% sure solution to filter out these types of emails so we have to do our best at preventing the spam when we can as it comes.

We have created an email address in which you can send your spam to and we will block future sppam from this sender. To send us spam we require you to send it as an attachment email to spam@designerwebsites.co.nz.   Simply create a new email and drag and drop the offending email into it  Please note forwarded spam emails will not provide the information we require.

Generally speaking, when you receive spam it will come with a score in the subject line, such as [Spam Score = 7.2]. These sets of emails have already been flagged as spam and can be deleted.

A couple of posts before this we touched on access your online account management and webmail, if you follow those instructions you are able to access the Email Management page, here you can set your spam score and choose to either have the emails deleted before reaching your inbox or to keep them for you to go through and filter out.

Mikogo is a free remote desktop client which allows us to connect to your PC/Laptop remotely to fix any unfortunate issues you may be experiencing. Our Administrators can assist with a wide range of issues, ranging from Email Setups to Office Installs, backing up of data for short periods of time on our CDN (Central Distributions Network/Backup thingy on the net), and much more!.

To get started head over to http://www.mikogo.com and download the version that suits you, there is Windows, Mac and Linux support so no matter what the operating system is they have you covered!!

To make this process even easier here is a list of instructions that will help you get all set up and started for us to provide assistance, installing Mikogo is free, easy, and very lightweight (doesnt hog your computer).

• Download Mikogo to your desktop or another place you will remember
• Follow the quick on screen instructions to proceed with the install
• Close the installer and there will be a new ‘M’ icon in your taskbar (Close to the clock)
• This is when you will give me a quick call
• Mikogo will ask you for a login (username/password), we have all those details on file for you so you never need to worry about signing up to another service!

There is a small charge depending on the type of issue that you face, and if it takes less then 5 mins then its completely free as long as you have followed the steps above to save some time

I would love to hear from you in the near future, so if there is anything i can help with or anything that you are fuzzy on please feel free to let me know!

Kyle Mcgill
09 360 1678

If you want to find out more - contact us today!

To see how this works check out the right hand side of your screen.

If you want to find out more – simply ask

Change Password

For this you will need to browse to http://webmail.webhost.co.nz. You should see login box that is pretty similar to this one…

If you place your user information into these boxes(username is your email, password is your password) then select from the drop down Email Management, you will be presented with a screen where you can change various settings on your email but most importantly you can change your password.

When you do change your password please make sure you write this password down, if you do happen to lose your email password then you can always give us a call or send a email to support@designerwebsites.co.nz and we will be able to assist from there in changing your password.

Setting up a New Computer with an Email

If you had a computer break down or you have a new computer and wish to gain access to your emails via Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, the following should give you enough information to set up these Email Clients to access your emails.  You will need to know your password, however if you dont, we will be able to reset this for you.

Generally you get a display name, this display name is the name that will appear next to your Email when you send your Email, for example: Support – Designerwebsites (support@designerwebsites.co.nz).

Username refers to your email address, so our username for support would be like the email above.

Incoming Mail Server is the address in which your email client logs onto for all the emails it will need to receive, in our case and most of our clients cases the incoming mail server is “pop3.webhost.co.nz” and the account type would be POP3.  If this doesn’t work for you please contact us.

Outgoing Mail Server is the address in which your email client will send emails through, so this is generally set to your internet provider’s smtp. So if you are on Xtra, then it would be smtp.xtra.co.nz or Slingshot, smtp.slingshot.co.nz and Orcon, smtp.orcon.net.nz. If you are having issues trying to send emails this is the best place to look. Your internet provider is the best place to get assistance on this.

Try it out and if you have any suggestions send them through to our support email. If you liked this post and would like to see more or there is a topic you would like to see get covered then let us know!!

Until next time, safe browsing and take care.

Kyle
Designer Websites

When­ever I sit down with a client that I am con­sult­ing I gen­er­ally tend to men­tion the fact that there are two pri­mary ele­ments that they need to be aware of to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful web­site which leads to more enquiries and/or sales.

These two Pri­mary Suc­cess Ele­ments are text and pictures…

Let me explain. With typ­i­cal web­sites you have a mes­sage that you are want­ing to com­mu­ni­cate to your tar­get mar­ket. There­fore the nature of the Inter­net being infor­ma­tion dri­ven means that the actual text you have on your web­site is of para­mount impor­tance. How­ever the text needs to be writ­ten in such a man­ner that it is inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant to peo­ple but also search engine friendly so that you get more peo­ple read­ing the mes­sage in the first place. There­fore text is an absolute key and an area of your web­site that you can def­i­nitely ben­e­fit hav­ing a pro­fes­sional help you with.

The other key area of web­site suc­cess is the one of design & visu­als. A web­site that has pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phy com­bined with a pro­fes­sion­ally designed look and feel cus­tomised to your tar­get mar­ket oozes cred­i­bil­ity. How­ever more impor­tantly, it also facil­i­tates the key require­ment of guid­ing your read­ers visu­ally to the infor­ma­tion, pro­mo­tions and ser­vices that you want them to see. This sim­ply means that you are able to achieve higher con­ver­sions for your most wanted cus­tomer responses online.

How­ever the Inter­net has changed…

The Inter­net has come a long way since the early days of the 1990’s, how­ever most web­sites are still very sim­i­lar to what they were back then which were sim­ple text and pic­ture web­sites. With the advance­ment of inter­net tech­nol­ogy and world­wide inter­net infra­strusture there is now another suc­cess key and that key my friends is sim­ply inter­net video.

Inter­net Video offers your web­site the abil­ity to have that lit­tle extra touch that can make all the dif­fer­ence to sales, enquiries and what­ever other call to action you desire on your web­site. You can see how pop­u­lar this trend of online video has become just by look­ing at the huge pop­u­lar­ity of web­sites such as YouTube. Hav­ing video on the Inter­net has rev­o­lu­tionised it and it is this same power that I would like to encour­age you to start har­ness­ing on your own busi­ness websites.

How­ever if video is an expense that your busi­ness is not ready to make yet, you could always con­sider the cheaper alter­na­tive of sim­ply hav­ing audio on your web­site. Again not a lot of web­sites are har­ness­ing this and by doing it you dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self. There are many excel­lent free audio recorders that you can sim­ply plug your micro­phone into and record your own per­sonal voice mes­sage. Hav­ing the actual audio inserted into your web­site could be done by your­self but depend­ing on your com­fort level with web­site cod­ing it may be best left to pro­fes­sional web­site design com­pa­nies to han­dle for you.

So what are you wait­ing for?

Har­ness this new Suc­cess Key for your web­site and stand out!

- Increase Your Conversion

- Generate Repeat Sales

- Up-sell and Cross-sell Products and Services

- Customer Feedback

- Offline Purchases

1. Increase Your Conversion

Conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to. This could be making a purchase, requesting a quote or signing up for your newsletter.  The conversion rate for a website would be the number of visitors who took action out of the total number of visitors.

For sales conversions, It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, most visitors wont convert into sales in their first visit. Research shows that the average visits to a website before conversion is 5 times!  So how do you keep them coming back?  IF you have captured their email address the answer is simple.  With no email address the challenge is large.

At the end of the day, capturing an email address gives you a ‘Plan B’ and allows you to follow-up with someone after they’ve left your website.

2. Generate Repeat Sales

Getting new customers is hard work – it’s also really expensive.

In fact, it can be up to eight to ten times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one.  Therefore, a chunk of the initial sale is recouping the costs you’ve outlaid to get the customer in the first place.

While new sales are great, the value of an existing customer is much higher. Too often, businesses focus only on the initial sale and forget about the lifetime value of a customer.

Keeping in touch with customers on a regular basis via email allows you to generate repeat sales which can be up to four times more profitable than the initial purchase.

A good email marketing campaign will increase the frequency of repeat purchases from your existing customers.

3. Up-sell and Cross-sell Products & Services

Email provides a great opportunity for you to up-sell and cross-sell your products and services.

By using Designer Websites email marketing software, it’s easy to keep in touch with your current clients to upsell them.

If you’re selling a service, like a baby cot, once a customer has made an initial purchase you can use an email to follow up with related services, like bedding and a matching changing table.  This basic technique by itself can easily add an extra 30% to your average order value and is used by almost all major companies online.

4. Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a great way to improve your business.  When you work in your business all day it is sometimes hard to see how it is perceived. People are often too shy to give proper feedback to your face so email is a great way to get honest feedback about your services and products.

5. Offline Purchases

Surprisingly, email marketing is often a catalyst for web users to go and make a purchase offline. When surveyed, 59% of email users said that they have made a purchase offline after receiving an email promotion.

Why? Sometimes a user will find something they want online but they need it straight away and can’t afford to wait for delivery. Other times, the product might need to be more expensive and they want to see, touch and feel the item.

If you run a conventional offline business you can use email marketing to drive foot traffic through your door.

Find our about Designer Websites great email marketing packages – we can design a template with your branding to use and provide an excellent program to assist you in your campaigns.

The term cloud computing is appearing everywhere nowadays and as a business owner you need to be aware of this new emerging online trend and what consequences it potentially has for your business.

In this post we will be taking away the fog that often covers understanding exactly what cloud computing is.

So give me the non-geek definition of Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is simply software, service and hardware that is delivered to business over the Internet. This service is provided to businesses at affordable rates that will save businesses costs in the long term as you don’t need to maintain your own software, servers etc.

The above definition has some interesting connotations for you as a business owner:

• No need to always buy the latest version of software or hardware
• Ability to setup virtual offices in very little time
• Long term cost savings
• Increased collaboration between team members by working on company information in one centralized location.

Watch this video to get an even better picture of “The Cloud”

PART 2

Your contact form should be simple and straight forward to ensure your visitors are not put off to contact you.  Users are not going to waste their time filling out long forms or forms with fields that they are nervous about submitting info to. Only add fields that are necessary to have. Consider having tick boxes instead of text fields where appropriate.

Ask yourself, what information is useful in providing great customer service. If a field that is usually included in the basic contact form is of no use to you, can it!

Some registration forms are sales barriers, remember keep it simple and easy for your visitor to contact you!  The less time a user has to spend filling out your form, and the simpler the questions are, the more likely they will be to break that barrier. A broken barrier may mean a prospect converted to a new customer for your company.

You need to have a marketing plan for your website before you invest in one.  Your website and your presence online really is like a living breathing organism. If you want it to grow you have to feed it!

5 tips on how to make your website ‘grow’

• Blog – create a blog like this so you can get your visitors interested in coming back to your website.  Offer useful tips and advice to make it worth their while.
• Social Marketing – create an online presence through facebook, twitter
• Video – make your site human by adding a video so your visitors can understand your business better and feel confident in who they are dealing with.
• Google Ad Words – Invest in a campaign to drive more traffic through your website
• Analytics – Check your analytics regularly – is there any trends in traffic, how is your bounce rate

I challenge you to act today and start making your website grow.  call me today for any help you may require to achieve this goal!

For Online Success with Impact!
Emma Boddie
Managing Director

If you are connecting to us for email, you will need to set up your account settings in your email program. The important things you will need to know are…

Your username (this will be your email address in full)
Your password (contact us if you do not know it, or need it reset)
Incoming Server (pop3.webhost.co.nz)
Outgoing Server (this must be the smtp setting for you Internet Service Provider, ask them or call us and we will let you know what that is)

How do I access my email when I am away from home/work?

If you are in an internet cafe, or on somebody elses computer, it is not a good idea to leave your email username and password there. WEBMAIL access is the ideal way to access your email accounts on such computers.

To check your email from another computer, simply open a browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc) and type the following into the address bar…

webmail.webhost.co.nz

Enter your username and password, and you can check your mail.

If you check mail in this way, the mail will still be there for you to download when you check it from home using your usual email program (outlook, entourage, outlook express, etc) unless you delete it of course.

How do I change my SPAM settings?

Using your browser, go to the following site…

controlpanel.co.nz

Log on at the bottom login option (EMAIL) using your email username and password, and change the SYSTEM dropdown box to read Email Management.

The spam Filter reads all incomming mail and if it regards it as spam, gives it a threshold number depending on what words were found in the text, and what email address it was sent from (ie Russian email addresses get higher scores as this is where most spam originates from)

The spam threshold number will appear in the subject line if the number is higher than the threshold setting.
You can change the threshold setting and change what is done with mail marked as spam.

Remember: the higher the threshold number, the more spam you will let in. The lower the threshold, the more likely your legitemate mail will be marked as spam. The default is set at 6.0

How do I change my email password?

Using your browser, go to the following site…

controlpanel.co.nz

Log on at the bottom login option (EMAIL) using your email username and password, and change the SYSTEM dropdown box to read Email Management.

Set your new password in the provided fields. Scroll to the bottom of the page and save your changes.

How do I set an Auto Response on my Email?

Using your browser, go to the following site…

controlpanel.co.nz

Log on at the bottom login option (EMAIL) using your email username and password, and change the SYSTEM dropdown box to read Email Management.

Set your auto response in the provided fields. Scroll to the bottom of the page and save your changes.

You can also set what time the auto response will be active.