Project: Website Design and Development

Yoga With Kathy is the site of Yoga Teacher, Kathy Cook. The purpose of her website is to share her learnings as well as promote her retreats and workshops across Asia. As an Iyenga yoga teacher, she has included information on the Iyenga practice, including images for poses.

The project involved designing a mock home page based on the client’s business card colours. We took one of our WordPress themes and customising it. We changed the colours to reflect the clients branding, changed the font, adjusted the sidebar, gave it a clean and open feel, inserted all the site content and images, and added a contact form.

Visit her website: www.yogawithkathy.com.

For more information about WordPress Website Packages, visit our WordPress Blogs and Websites page. This is our Premium Themes package.

Project: Website Design and Development

Our Wedding Consultant provides professional and supportive wedding planning advice to brides and grooms. With over 12 years in event management and 6 of those years in the wedding industry, Michelle Brodie has the skills and experience to assist newly engaged couples in creating their dream wedding.

The project involved designing a mock home page based on the client’s colours and damask she wanted to use on her site. We took one of our WordPress themes and customising it. We changed the colours to reflect the clients branding, changed the font, adjusted the sidebar, added a background to the bottom half of the home page, inserted all the site content and images, and added a contact form.

Our client’s feedback:

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE the site!!!!!!!!

Visit her website: www.ourweddingconsultant.com.

For more information about WordPress Website Packages, visit our WordPress Blogs and Websites page. This is our Premium Themes package.

With the recent security incident over at WordPress.com and hack attack at Distribute.IT, an Australian domain registrar and hosting company, I feel it is important to address the three reasons to have an external backup of your website.

1. Your Website is Hacked

Having experienced this recently and my previous backup system not working properly, I was lucky it wasn’t more serious.  My personal travel blog was attacked and this prompted my developers to re-evaluate at our WordPress security procedures.  We had been securing our sites, however with WordPress being OpenSource software and hacking classes being taught in China and other parts of the world, it was very clear to us that we need to be constantly reviewing and improving our WordPress security procedures.

This is particularly important for us because we develop WordPress websites and blogs, therefore security for our clients is a priority.  We improved the security of our sites and offered a special package for clients that included increased security and new backup procedures.

We use Backup Buddy for our new backup procedure.  By using a quality backup solution and having clear guidelines, you will be able to re-install your website in no time.

2. Your Hosting Company Disappears

This is not uncommon… particularly with smaller hosting companies, however medium sized hosting companies are not at risk either. With the recent Distribute.IT attack more than 4,000 Australian websites have been lost with no chance of recovery. The hack attack caused so much damage that four of the company’s servers were “unrecoverable” and they had no offsite back up. OUCH!

A couple of years ago there was a small web design firm in Australia that created and hosted their client’s websites. Their target market were mainly work-at-home mums. One day the design firm closed their doors without prior warning and those that had their websites hosted with them lost everything. This example is one of the reasons why I recommend not hosting your site with your web developer.

If you have an external backup, you can find yourself a new web developer and hosting company, and be back online fairly quickly.

3. You Delete the Files by Accident

If you’ve created your site yourself using HTML software such as Dreamweaver, RapidWeave etc and your original files are stored on your own computer, deleting files on your computer and hosting is fairly easy – especially if you’re not really technical.

It is easy to delete files.  Another way that your files could be deleted is if you were having computer problems and someone reformatted your whole computer without copying all your important files.  Eeek… just thinking about it is scary!

With an external backup being sent to a web-based email account you’ll definitely avoid losing your website files.

Recommended Procedures

We recommending backing up your site up on a weekly and monthly basis.  Firstly check that your web host is running a nightly back up – if not, then a daily backup is required if your site is updated on an almost daily basis.

Have your backups being sent to you via email as well as being saved to your hosting site.  Ideally an external, web-based email so it is not stored on your computer OR copy the backups onto a removable disk drive.

When saving your backups make sure you save them with the date of the backup and once you’ve got a monthly backup, you can delete the oldest backups, making sure you have a fortnight (of weekly) backed up.  If you are backing up daily yourself, make sure you have at least three daily backups because if one does not work, the others are their as back up.

Special Promotion

If you have a WordPress site and would like to increase your security and have Backup Buddy implemented, we are offering a special promotion!  For $1000 HKD we will install security plugins as well as make changes to the backend of your site PLUS install Backup Buddy and implement a backup procedure for you.

Our promotion ends 30th June 2011.  Regular price is $1500 HKD. Contact Nicole to find out more.

I must admit there has been much confusion by many in terms of the Facebook promotion policy changes that went to press in December of last year.  To make matters worse Facebook has upgraded their Promotion Guidelines once again, causing a second round of panic amongst business owners trying to understand the rules.

If you continue to ignore the rules, which many seem to be doing, you run the risk of your page being closed from failure to adhere to the Facebook rules.

To avoid confusion here are the rules in their simplicity:

- Promotions must be administered using a third party application

- You must include the following in all of your Facebook promotions:

1. A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
2. Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
3. Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook.

- You can allow someone to like your page as part of the entry but it is not enough to constitute entry into your competition

- You are not able to notify a competition winner through Facebook whether by use of message, chat or posts on a page or profile

Hopefully the above points will help ease some confusion you may have been facing.

On a separate but similar issue, many businesses are also failing to understand the difference between a profile and a page.  You cannot set a business up as a profile as it is against Facebook Policy.  Profiles are reserved for individuals only.

A business must be set up as a page which then can be linked to an administrator profile.  If you need to befriend a company then quite simply that organisation is in violation of Facebook’s regulations and are at risk of having their account removed.

If you have any questions in regard to Facebook or need further clarification on anything, please don’t hesitate to ask.  I am only an email away!

About Michelle: Michelle’s career spans 20 years in various administrative and marketing roles.  She has owned and sold a successful online store, written articles for a number of online magazines and now focuses her energies on writing – proofreading and editing, ghost and copy writing and blog management.

You can read more about Michelle on her profile page.

A little while ago we touched on some keyboard shortcuts that can help simplify your computer usage. In this post, we’re going to look at some ways you can use your computer mouse to improve your productivity and help make your life a little easier.

Shift key and mouse click

Many computer programs allow you to highlight all or parts of your text by using the SHIFT key and the mouse. To do this, you need to place the cursor at the beginning of the area you want to highlight, hold down the SHIFT key, and then click at the end of the area you want to highlight.

Take full advantage of the scroll wheel

Everyone knows that the mouse wheel can scroll up and down on a page. However, this wheel has so many more functions, as shown below.

• The mouse wheel can also be used as a button. Pressing down on the wheel will act like a third mouse button. This will open a web page in a tab by clicking the wheel on any link and can also be used to close a tab by clicking the wheel on any open tab.

• Quickly Zoom in and Out on a web page, word document, excel spreadsheet, etc. by holding down the CTRL key and scrolling up to zoom in and down to zoom out.

• Move forward and backwards while browsing the Internet by holding down the SHIFT key and scrolling up and down. Scrolling down goes back and scrolling up goes forward.

Select with double and triple click

Any word can be easily selected by double-clicking the word. If you want to highlight the whole paragraph, click the mouse button three times on any text in the paragraph.

Use the right-click

When moving or copying, if you right-click on the file or text and drag it while continuing to hold the right button, when you let go you will be given the option to move or copy that file or text. This saves you the extra step of having to right-click where you want to paste the item.

While in a browser, pressing and holding CTRL while clicking on any link will open that link in a new tab.

Ctrl key and mouse click or highlight

While holding down the CTRL key you can left-click on any text to select the entire sentence.

To select multiple objects or highlight multiple sections of text, hold down the CTRL key and left-click to select.

Use the mouse side buttons

Many of the newer mouse models have been developed with buttons down the side. By default, the left thumb button is used to go ‘back’ when browsing the web. The buttons can, however, be programmed to any function the user desires.

Use the Windows ‘Snap To’ feature

To increase productivity using your mouse, I strongly recommend taking advantage of the Windows mouse ‘Snap To’ feature, which automatically moves your mouse to default buttons that appear in a dialog box. For example, if you delete a file or close a window you may get a prompt asking you if you are sure you want to perform the task. With the ‘Snap To’ feature enabled, the mouse cursor automatically moves to the OK button, so all you will have to do is click the mouse button if you agree. This saves you the time of having to move the mouse cursor over to the OK button and then click OK.

To enable this feature open the Mouse properties under the Windows Control Panel and check the ‘Snap To’ check box under the Pointer Options tab.

Customize your mouse

If you have a mouse with more than two buttons, installing the included mouse software will allow you to customize the mouse even more. For example, if you don’t use the side buttons to move back and forth in a web page, change it to something you do more often, such as switching between open windows or opening the calculator.

These simple tips should help you get more out of your mouse usage, and give you back some time each day.

About Dannielle: Dannielle’s career spans 16 years in various secretarial and administration roles. She specialised in Contract Administration and the experience has enabled her to refine her writing, proofreading and research skills.

You can read more about Dannielle on her profile page.

Free business advertising?  What?  Where? 

I am sure by now I have your attention.  Free advertising does exist if you know where to look.  If you visit many websites and check out their costs for advertising you will find that some charge an extraordinary amount for a link or a mention and your advertising dollars can quickly run into the thousands before you blink an eyelid.

Brand awareness is important for your organisation – particularly online – and there are many free avenues in which you can utilise to your advantage.

Business Directories

Free directories do exist and it is worth searching for these in and around your business field and submitting your details to the site.  The information you can submit will depend on the type of directory it is but at the very least they usually allow your business name, website link and some summary text about your organisation.  They may even ask for address details, logos and images which of course will all go a long way in promoting your business.

Blogging

If you don’t blog then start.  This is a great way to create information about your site and get immediate links to your site.  Search engines love a good blog and will create a number of links to your site within a short period of time.  If you do blog look out for free blog directories and take advantage of these. 

Article Marketing

Article marketing is another great way to get your name, experience and knowledge to a wider audience.  Article directories will usually allow you to add your company information and links to the author box.

Press Release Submission

Similarly, submit press releases to free press release websites.  If they are noteworthy, then you may also find that they are duplicated or referenced on other sites creating additional links to benefit your business.

Social Networking

Social networking is also a great way to increase your advertising power.  Whether you are a member of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or an online forum – all of these methods allow you to backlink to your main website while at the same time gaining trust from your readers and followers.

What are you waiting for?  My tip – don’t spend unnecessary marketing dollars until you have taken advantage of all the free methods available to you in the first instance.

About Michelle: Michelle’s career spans 20 years in various administrative and marketing roles. She has owned and sold a successful online store, written articles for a number of online magazines and now focuses her energies on writing – proofreading and editing, ghost and copy writing and blog management.

You can read more about Michelle on her profile page.

Having just celebrated Easter, I know quite a few people who have taken advantage of the extra long weekend to take some additional time to get away. But what do you do with your business while you’re off deck, particularly if you are the business?

There are a number of options open to you, including ceasing trade while you’re away. You can basically hang up your ‘Closed… back in 5 days’ sign and desperately hope that the trade that passes you by will consider you at another time when you are open. If you’re taking internet orders, be sure to let your customers know that delivery is going to be delayed until your return, and that customer enquiries will be dealt with at a later date.

Everyone needs a break, but just shutting up shop for a period, unless it’s absolutely necessary, just doesn’t look good, and certainly isn’t good for your business.

If you have a trusted friend or relative to care for your business, this is a better option. To keep your business running at seventy or eighty percent in your absence is surely a better alternative than putting business on hold. Be clear and concise with your instructions, and be sure there are clear boundaries about which decisions are theirs to make.

Another alternative is to hire a professional to care for your business. When hiring someone to care for your business, you are entering into a formal contract, and you know that things will be taken care of exactly to your specifications. It is essential in this case to have a current, fully updated Company Manual from which the employed person can work. Having a professional in place will give you the peace of mind to fully relax and enjoy your break, knowing your business is being well cared for in your absence.

Bauhinia Solutions can provide you with the solution to give you the work life balance you desire. Contact Nicole for further information.

About Dannielle: Dannielle’s career spans 16 years in various secretarial and administration roles. She specialised in Contract Administration and the experience has enabled her to refine her writing, proofreading and research skills.

You can read more about Dannielle on her profile page.

In our last post we discussed maintaining the motivation to write your blog and while it is one of the hardest aspects about blogging, there are some other tips which you can enlist to help make regular blog writing easier which will ultimately assist your desire your write.

1.  Maintain Focus

It is important to stay focussed on your writing and one great way is to write up a schedule to fit in with your lifestyle and your blogging plans.  If you blog twice a week then schedule three sessions during your week to write your posts leaving one extra session to refine your posts as necessary.  Try to schedule them during your quieter moments or when the kids are asleep avoiding times when you may not be at your best to write.

2.  Stay Ahead

To stay motivated it is best to write ahead – by a week or two – scheduling your posts as you go.  Finding the motivation to write when your post is due or if you are sick or overtired will add untold pressure to your writing and the quality will ultimately be affected.  Take advantage of periods when words are flowing freely and use this time to write more than one post scheduling ahead for later use.

3.  Be Prepared

One thing which really helps me is to think ahead about subjects I want or need to write about.  Coming up with the subject of the post can often be the hardest part of the battle.  Once you have that pre-arranged then the words can follow.

4.  Research Your Field

Research will also help – read other blogs or sites similar to that of yours to get ideas.  A post on a similar subject may just inspire you to write about something which had previously escaped your attention.

5.  Use Your Audience

Do not be afraid to reach out to your readers and ask for advice to help you move ahead.  Ask them what they would like to read – they may have some questions which you could consider answering in your posts or they may need help with a particular aspect which could inspire a post or even a series of posts.  Reach out to your readership using Facebook, Twitter and your blog to widen your research avenues.

6.  Minimise distractions

Distractions need to be minimised when writing – it is important that your mobile phone is switched off and all social networking sites and emails are closed.  Keep background noise to a minimum and turn off the television.  Trying to write while multi-tasking with your social life or in the middle of your favourite television program will not help one iota. 

Writing like anything else requires a discipline of sorts however at the same time keep it as flexible and fun as possible.  Good luck!

About Michelle: Michelle’s career spans 20 years in various administrative and marketing roles. She has owned and sold a successful online store, written articles for a number of online magazines and now focuses her energies on writing – proofreading and editing, ghost and copy writing and blog management.

You can read more about Michelle on her profile page.

“While reading Nicole’s blog over at nicole-graham.com, I noticed that a person who had commented had her photo next to her comment.  How can I add an image next to my comments left on blogs?” Carol, Children’s Christian Ministries.

These pictures are what is known as Gravatars – Globally Recognised Avatars. Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.

Creating a Gravatar is easier than you think, Carol! What you will need is a Gravatar account, added to an email that’s the same as the email account you use on your own self-hosted WordPress server.
Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to: www.gravatar.com

2. Create an account.

3. Link the e-mail address that you use on your WordPress blog/server to post/comment; then add your picture/logo/etc. to Gravatar. Hint: if you use multiple accounts on your own WordPress site or other sites that use Gravatar, you can simply add the e-mails for those accounts to display the same Gravatar image that you uploaded.

4. Your new Gravatar will appear once you add a comment to any blog post.
It’s that simple! You should now be able to post on blogs with your Gravatar happily displayed alongside your comments.

About Dannielle: Dannielle’s career spans 16 years in various secretarial and administration roles. She specialised in Contract Administration and the experience has enabled her to refine her writing, proofreading and research skills.

You can read more about Dannielle on her profile page.

During my last post, A Return To Blogging, we discussed in brief the advantages of blogging and how the issue of not consistently posting on your blog can have a negative effect on your business.  To maintain a quality blog – regardless of how good a writer you may be – you need one thing – and that one thing is motivation.

The motivation to write may be hard to come by when you have a busy lifestyle, are juggling jobs or children – or you may be struggling with a writer’s block of sorts and are not sure how to tap into your passion for what you do.  Negativity can easily creep in with the laziness and thoughts like “why bother”, “who reads it anyway”, “what good does it do me” may appear and others who see your efforts as a waste of time will add to the negative pile.  It is time to refocus on your desire to do what you do – and get back to work. 

Think back to why you started your blog and what you wanted to achieve.  There are many valid reasons for blogging.  Was it to share what you have learnt, did you want to teach others, or did you require a platform to show off your business, your family or your hobby?  If it was a monetary reason then often the focus can be hard to maintain particularly if you are not seeing an immediate return for your efforts spent.  So often the incentive to write has to be more than the dollar return.  What aspect of your subject focus do you love, what inspires you to get out of bed in the morning – draw immediately on your love for the subject and write about that to draw you back in to the routine of blogging.

Sometimes we need an outward motivator – look for a powerful quote or image and put it above your workspace to draw from – this can help immensely.  Or try the reward approach – reward your efforts once you have completed your post for the day or have finalised your monthly blog schedule - use whatever will work for you.  

If you are unable to tap into the passion it may be worth enlisting in the services of a ghost writer even for a short period of time to at least make it look like your business is still in operation - often outward appearances need to be maintained regardless of what is going on behind the scenes.  A break from blogging may just help you out of the doldrums and ignite your spark – or at least one can only hope!

In my next article I will share some blogging tips with you to keep you on the straight and narrow but know that only one person can be responsible for keeping you motivated and that person is you.

About Michelle: Michelle’s career spans 20 years in various administrative and marketing roles. She has owned and sold a successful online store, written articles for a number of online magazines and now focuses her energies on writing – proofreading and editing, ghost and copy writing and blog management.

You can read more about Michelle on her profile page.