five tips for effective business website design

1) Use an established web design company that knows what they are doing; 2) There’s no one solution for building an effective website; 3) Don’t let budgets determine quality; 4) Leave budget for ongoing development; 5) Build a site that grabs people’s attention. Find out more here.

web page make-over!

Expert and real-world advice here on how to make a landing page really work on your website.

The experts at the Copyblogger site take a sales web page of a struggling small business and give specific advice on how to improve it and attract purchases from it.

Tips on everything from the text and images on the page to shopping cart placement and getting the right emotional hook. You’ll learn a lot from these guys.

who searched for what in NZ in Google in 2008

Not sure if these will be of any use for adjusting your website’s keywords (Ford beat Holden, Marmite beat Vegemite, Hayley Westenra beat Kiri Te Kanawa and art topped sport) but here’s a bit of a rundown on what Kiwis searched for on Google in 2008.

Have a successful online 2009 everyone.

make your website more useable to more people

Some tips here to make your website more useable to a wider range of people …

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make websites more accessible to older and disabled people.

Version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2) applies to text, images, audio and video. It also covers web applications and is said to give developers more flexibility than the old guidelines.

WCAG2 focuses on making websites:

• Perceivable: including descriptive text for images, audio captions, flexibility of layout and colour contrast
• Operable: making sites usable with keyboards and improving navigation
• Understandable: making content easier to read and input more logical
• Robust: ensuring content and applications are compatible with assistive technology such as screen readers and magnifiers

Find out more at the WCAG2 site or read this article from the BBC.

how to effectively market online using video

Here’s a knowledgeable article about how to effectively use video on your website to market your products and services.

NZ tourism’s online marketing push

A marketing drive from Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) will see personal messages from visitors to New Zealand recorded for them and then posted to social media sites to be played by the tourists’ friends and family back home.

It’s a plan to capture global attention for the country using social media strategies.

TNZ has a fully-equipped mobile recording studio inside a van to enable tourists to “rave” on camera about their New Zealand experience, add their own photos and video footage  and then post the messages online to influential social media sites such as Facebook.

TNZ plans to capture around 3000 video diary clips over the next four months in a tour around New Zealand.

The clips will be published immediately into unpaid media channels, including a YouTube ‘Have Your Say’ channel which is then fed on to Tourism New Zealand’s consumer website – www.newzealand.com. Visitors will also be able to post video directly onto their Facebook profile pages. The clips will also be used in future advertising campaigns.

“If every clip is viewed by 10 friends and family back home, and if 3000 clips are filmed that’s 30,000 messages about New Zealand sent to our key markets  a very cost-effective form of marketing,” says TNZ boss George Hickton.

I reckon that if the messages can be kept authentic, the videos do not reek of corporate marketing or shine too much with ad-man polish and the advertising use of the messages does not overwhelm the ‘real’ nature of the messages, this plan could get good results.

It’s something we’ll follow with interest as a real-life case study. There’s more information about the initiative here.

marketing and product advice for online start-ups

Your online business needs marketing and product plans (and advice on what to focus on) right from the get-go.

Here are three free marketing training modules from NZ-based The Small Business Company. If you find these modules useful TSBC has a range of others available for subscription.

And this presentation comes from the United States but there is lots of good info that will be helpful to NZ online start-ups too.

handbook guide to setting up an online business

Internet Unmasked

This ‘how to set up a  business on the internet’ handbook for small businesses in NZ covers all the bases.

Learn the basics of web design, working with images, creating and maintaining content, costing and scoping a project, what to look for in a web designer, and more.

Find out about domain names and website hosting. Get ideas and advice on creative marketing, modern web-based business structures, Web 2.0, as well as management advice and predictions for the future of online business.

The book is written by Aucklander Dennis A. Smith who says he has built more websites than any other New Zealander. It’s easy to read and provides good information in a self-published kinda style.

redesigning the stop sign

Funny! A good lesson and a good laugh here about keeping design simple to produce the best results. Something to keep in mind for websites.

how to get good digital photos on a website

We nearly all use digital cameras but how many of us understand what makes a good digital photo and what print quality you need to put a photo on a website or a publication? This article clearly leads you through some of the basics.

The website it comes from, Photoshop Essentials, is packed with all sorts of tutorials for using Photoshop to edit and improve photos. Heck, it even has tips on how to remove five o’clock shadow and beard stubble from a photo!