Happy New Year!

The New Year is a time when we want to start fresh and put our best foot forward. One good way to do this for your business is to give your web site a 'freshen up'. This may be as simple as just updating your content to keep it relevant to your customers, or as involved as completely re-designing your site to give it a more contemporary look and feel.

There are lots of great reasons to update your website. Customers will only return to your web site if the content changes and is updated regularly. Your web site is really not working for you unless it has information that is relevant to your customers and that is maintained and updated - even just with a quarterly update to a 'News' column. You may well have new products, services, staff members, new phone numbers etc and this all is of interest to your customers.

Another really vital reason to update your web site is that Search Engines love updated and regularly changed content. They will rank sites more highly if they can see that the content changes regularly. This is because from their point of view, that means that the site is an active site and so therefore more likely to be a popular site and so they rank your site accordingly.

Adding a 'blog' is a great way to keep your content changing and is fun to do. A blog is just like an online diary and many businesses are now using them. We have a fantastic example of these blogs under construction at the moment. A new client, Getaway Sailing, is using a blog on their site that will be written from the perspective of 'Flinders, the ships cat'. Flinders Blog or 'The Cats Meow' as they will call it, will tell of the tales from yacht races like the Sydney to Hobart. Many other businesses are using these blogs to discuss all sorts of issues that are relevant and interesting to their clients. Wineries could use blogs to discuss what is going on in the vineyards at the moment - and how their wine is coming along. Engineering or architectural / building firms could discuss interesting projects they are working on etc. A blog will get your customers coming back to your site frequently - keeping your business name in their minds for their next project.

For more information, please contact us on 9440 7769 or email us.

Trendwatch for 2008 - E-Commerce

Trendwatching.com has stated that the Next Big Thing for 2008 will be E-Commerce. They state that although e-commerce has been around for ages, consumers are now more likely to feel safe purchasing online and

"in other words, 2008 should be a goldmine for smart e-tailers, who, if they get their act together, could make billions and billions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, kroner, lira and rand that are impatiently waiting to be spent by web-savvy consumers around the world. So in the next 12 months, spend blood, sweat and tears on improving your ecommerce presence; the pay-off will be immediate, and far more substantial than investing in Web 2.0 me-toos!"

Some statistics they site to explain the trend are:

If you are interested in developing an online outlet for your products, please call us on (02) 9440 7769