Web Design Adelaide Blog

If you thought I was going to give out some magical secret as to how you can achieve this result, sorry, I’m merely pointing out that it can (and has) been done!

Earlier this week I was analysing local web design firms in Adelaide, Australia, and I noticed something interesting about the website that came up in first place for the phrase “website design Adelaide.”

My blog article on SEOMoz created quite a bit of discussion, it also managed to spread the word of the great city of Adelaide around the world and even created an inadvertent plug for Mcleod’s Daughters! If that isn’t inspiration for you to start a blog I don’t know what is!

Read the full article on Getting Number One on Google with Frames here!

I just took the SEOMoz.org online SEO Test. Wow lots of tricky technical questions.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to be an SEO Expert, click the link below and try your luck!

Apparently I am an:

SEO Dark Lord - 93%

Interesting…

Are you an SEO Expert?

Parents are checking if their babies domain name is available! Apparently its becoming a key factor in child names in case they become famous one day! Check you kid’s domain names now before the world goes crazy.

read more | digg story

As I listen and watch and podcast and twitter and scribefire and fleck and stumble and youtube and web 2.0 my way through the pre-season of the 30 day challenge I find myself learning more about the tips and tricks and leverage of the social media sites, blog tools and new media than I could have ever thought possible within the given time frame.

As someone who spends all day online as part of my job I found it amazing how much I managed to learn from watching Ed’s videos and taking part in the challenge!

If you’d like to learn more about internet marketing and using social media sites to increase your brand or product awreness online check out the 30 day challenge. But be prepared to listen… Ed likes to talk!

Have a great day

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Top signs that you are addicted to search engine optimisation!

1. You check your rankings every day just to see if they ‘might have changed’

2. You hold your breath when your ranking analysis program says ‘updating’

3. You open up 200+ SEO blogs per day and never get to read half of them because you keep clicking links to ‘other blogs on this topic’

4. You have 40 social media profiles

5. You see the sites ranking above you as your “Arch Nemisis”!

6. You check to see if someone has written a wiki entry about you or your business.

7. You analyse every site you visit for linking potential

8. You check the PageRank of every webpage you visit

9. FLASH, FRAMES & JAVASCRIPT = EVIL!

10. You dream about the day you are ranked number 1 for ALL your key phrases

Google have created a lot of fantastic tools for various purposes but as a friend of mine recently discovered there are also negatives.

My friend had a client ring them recently up and exclaim “you’ve broken our website!”, confused my friend asked exactly how their website was broken… “all my form fields are yellow, why did you do that, please change them back to white!”, after explaining to the client that no updates had in fact been made to the site recently, my associate had a look to see what was going on, all looked fine on his machine so asked a few mates to check it out, all looked good on theirs too!

Eventually he went to the client’s office to look at the site on their machine - when he got there he found that they had installed Google toolbar (which by default change your forms to yellow!) Problem solved, however do you think he sent Google the bill for the hour of work he spent trying to solve this problem??

If you know of any “Helpful tools” that also cause headaches, please share them!

Imagine the joy on the faces of Internet Service Providers all around the world when they realise that thousands of people would be increasing their monthly download by about 500%…

That may seem like an exaggerated figure but when you think about MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and other social media site profiles all containing music, slide shows, uploaded pictures, videos, games and animations it isn’t hard to imagine.

Let me give you a case study:

A friend of mine has the internet which she uses for checking her bank account, paying bills, emails, and university research. She is on a cheap plan with a small monthly cap with a 300 MB transfer limit. A friend invited her to join MySpace to “keep in touch and share photos”.

Many of her friends had music, videos, and many photos on their MySpace profile and she had a great time looking through all the photos and leaving comments… until she got her next internet bill!! Her monthly download had gone from around 100MB to over 5 gig! And of course had a price to match for exceeding her cap.

She didn’t understand and asked me how she had “downloaded” so much when she hadn’t “downloaded” anything! After explaining to her the best I could the ins and outs of data transfer, she has since given up on using MySpace on her home computer.

There must be thousands of people jumping onto other social media sites unknowingly downloading tonnes of data and then being hit with the bill, thousands more parents screaming at their teenage children and ISP’s laughing all the way to the bank.

This morning I was reading an interesting article on Internet Explorer usage at Onestat.com. This article shows the different percentage of browsers used in certain countries around the world.

It was only when I scrolled down to Australia that I noticed Austalians have an extremely high usage of Mozilla’s FireFox browser and also the Opera browser compared to the other listed countires? Why is then, that the world wide avergage of 85% IE, 11% FireFox and barely 1% Opera is Australia sitting at 65% IE, 26% FireFox and 4% Opera??

This reminded me of a coversation I had with a client earlier this week as to why he prefers to use FireFox. I’ll give you some brief background information, my client is in his 50’s, runs his own business in a very traditional not technical based trade.

In response to my question he stated that he liked FireFox because it loads web pages quickly, logs into banking websites quicker and is nicer to use! Sounds like a few good reasons to me! He said he still uses IE occasionally, but only if something is not displaying correctly in FireFox (damn those non standards compliant websites!!)

So… for the rest of Australia, who knows what their reasons are. I think I’m going to look into this further, have I stumbled across some sort of anti-microsoft browser rebellion? Or is there a secret hidden force driving Australian web users towards the less popular browsers?

I’ll be in touch!

That is the question! We have had mixed success with designing rough website templates for clients to send in with our web proposals. Now here is my concern…

We recently missed out on a potential web project because another bidder had included a ‘Possible Design Template’ of what the client’s web site could look like with their proposal. Sounds fair enough you might say, people are visual creatures and like to see things and get excited.

Now the reason why we didn’t include a ‘Possible Design Template’ is that we have indeed done this in the past, and recently have ceased spending hours of time roughing out a web site layout for clients who have decided to go ahead with the project but don’t want their web site to look anything like the ideas we had thought of.

So… do you spend the time doing a rough design without any ideas from the client (before an initial design meeting) that may not even get a second thought and hope that it may increase your chances of winning a project?  Or do you hope that you previous work, experience and proposal writing skills will get you through?

I’d love to hear any thoughts from both designers as well as business who have chosen a designer and their basis for doing so… have a great day

Hi there! A couple of weeks ago we attended Search Summit 2007 for 2 days of fun and exitement hearing all the latest thoughts, news and techniques from the leaders in the area of Search Engine Marketing.

We got to rub shoulders with the likes of Andy Beal who’s Marketing Pilgrim Blog is always an informative read. Chris Sherman, partner and Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, and Adam Lasnik, Search Evangilist from Google to name a few!

The summit consisted of presentations, interactive workshops and time to chat with the presenters at the end of each day. All in all it was a great couple of days with everyone learning a lot and enjoying discussions on the different methods of improving search engine rankings and what the next online craze might be.