Recent Articles

Recently I've had two different clients feel that their sites are outgrowing their current hosting plans, either by running out of space or by loading... very... slowly...

Sometimes these problems are easily rectified with the current hosts or may be caused by a temporary glitch on the server computers that is quickly set right. However, if problems are consistent or if you are setting up your site for the first time I have put together some of the most common hosting solution that I offer to clients.

There are many hosting companies offering different solutions out there, this is simply my own experience of the ones I have found to be the best with a simple explanation of how some of the packages work. Also, this is by no means comprehensive and I'm really talking about hosting suitable for small to medium sites.

Shared hosting

In a shared hosting situation the hosting company puts many sites onto each server computer. This is the easiest, cheapest and most common way to get hosting.

The problem can be that the dodgier the company, the more sites are sharing the same system resources - which can result in a slowdown for your site if other websites on the same machine are working hard at the same time. It's very normal to have 100s of sites sharing one server and not unusual to have 1000s.

Ilisys: Ilisys is a hosting company out of Perth, WA that provides high-quality shared hosting and I have always found that they manage the resources of their servers quite carefully and don't overload them. They have excellent tech support and customer service, and they are also 100% carbon neutral if you care about that sort of thing. The business has been recently bought by MYOB so it will be interesting to see if that has any affect on their performance.

I have been asked to appear on the panel for the next Geelong Chamber of Commerce Q&A event, providing advice for small businesses wishing to leverage the power of online advertising and sales.

The Q&A sessions are a Geelong Chamber of Commerce initiative that provide advice on a range of topics of interest to local businesses, and take place in the form of a panel of experts that the audience can ask questions of.

This month's Q&A has the topic of 'How to grow you business online' and you don't have to be a chamber member to come along.

Read more on the Geelong Chamber of Commerce website or in the invitation pdf file.

Many of our clients run small businesses or startups in the Geelong area. If this is you, you may be interested in these training grants currently available for Gordon TAFE's 'Enterprising Futures' program.

The small business grants provided by the City of Greater Geelong are to undertake business training, skills building and business development. The grants fund half the costs to participate in one of two Enterprising Futures training and business support programs, either 'Explore Your Business Idea' or 'Focus on Your Business'.

This is your opportunity to benefit from expert small business support and training at half the usual cost.

For more information and eligibility please see the flyer below.

Download the Enterprising Futures flyer.

Reviews are a great way of adding user-generated content to any website, but what happens when your reviewers turn nasty and leave very critical comments? Not only does it reflect negatively on your own site, but here in Australia there can be legal ramifications.

The laws I am talking about are regarding libel, the written form of slander. It prohibits a writer from damaging the reputation of someone else, known as 'defamation', and the laws are designed to temper the power to falsely sway public opinion that an unscrupulous member of the press or other influential writer might have.

Neither freedom of speech nor freedom of the press are constitutionally guaranteed in Australia in the way they are in US. Instead, there are several acts under which civil or even criminal action action may be brought, with statutes in some jurisdictions providing for fines and even imprisonment for serious offences.

Most defamation cases are civil proceedings, often brought by politicians and corporations who consider someone in the media to have defamed them by publishing information critical of their activities.

Fair Comment

For defendants, there are several legal defences available but the most common for reviewers is that of 'fair comment' or honest opinion. The defence of fair comment is available if the comment or opinion is based on statements of fact which are true or commonly known and if it relates to a matter of public interest.

This protects most reviewers, even those that write negatively, if they express their opinion carefully and lay down a bed of facts before presenting their opinions.

Over the last two years we have become increasingly involved in Internet Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as part of our follow-up service to web design clients. Often building a website isn't enough - once up and running, the site needs to be found by customers in order to perform correctly.

We have recently launched this service under its own banner, calling it 'Webmojo'. If you'd like your website to perform better for your business or if you'd like to know more about SEO and Internet Marketing, Webmojo is a great place to start.

There's three main ways a website can be found by potential customers:

1. Through a search engine like Google.

The vast majority of us use a search engine like Google to help us find what we are looking for on the internet. By making sure that your website appears high in the results for relevant searches you can ensure that people will visit your site.

This is the role of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - to adjust your site so that it has the best chance possible of being found in major search engines.

2. Through advertising or links on other websites

Whether it's paid advertising or free endorsements, having links on sites that your potential customers are already viewing means that some of them will click through to visit your website. Options for advertising range from inexpensive text ads like Google Adwords through to large animated banner ads on popular websites.

See the Online Advertising page on Webmojo for more information.

Ebay has dropped its proposal to move to a PayPal only system in this country, causing a collective sigh of relief amongst concerned Australians.

The backflip follows a conference help last week by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on the company's plans to only accept PayPal on the site.

Ebay had argued that its Paypal system of online payments is more secure than other methods, and would reduce fraud.

Personally, while it seems most of the arguments at the ACCC conference were concerned with the extra fees that Paypal incurs, I think their basic premise is also unreasonable.

I don't know anyone who's ever managed to get a refund from Paypal, yet my list of friends who have had grievances with them is as long as my arm. While none of us have experienced any security breaches like hacking or theft, a total of eight inluding myself have experienced fraud and none of us have been covered by Paypal.

The reason many of us chose to pay using Paypal at all is because of the claims on the Ebay website that you are 'covered' if your product doesn't arrive. Despite these guarantees, in the last eighteen months none of us were able to get a refund from Paypal when products did not arrive from a clearly dodgy seller. This sours not just our experience of Paypal but the whole of Ebay.

So when Paypal doesn't deliver on the only reason people want to use it anyway, it's fair enough that the public react when Ebay suggested they were making it the only available payment option. Let's just be glad that people power has won in this case!

On a couple of websites I've built I've wanted to change the default Drupal menu into something that closely resembles buttons.

For example:

This is easy to do using CSS.

The menus in Drupal are formatted as unordered lists using <ul> and <li>, with some funky CSS included in by default to give the standard bullets and arrows.

To create a blocky, CSS button look we need to overwrite the default CSS with some of our own. In theory it's not that difficult, but it took me a while of playing around to figure out what CSS rules needed to be overwritten.

I start all my themes with Zen, so I'm not sure if this CSS will work by default with other themes - give it a try.

In your theme's CSS file, add the code:

/* menu buttons */
.block-menu ul.menu,
.block-menu li.leaf,
.block-menu li.collapsed,
.block-menu li,
.block-menu .item-list ul,
.block-menu .item-list ul li {
    list-style: none;
    list-style-image: none;
    list-style-type: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}
.block-menu .block-inner a,
.block-menu .block-inner a:visited {
    color: #333;
    text-decoration: none;
    display: block;
    /*width: 168px;*/
    padding: 1px 6px;
    margin: 2px 0;
   
    border-width: 1px 1px 1px 8px;
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: #DDD;
   
    font-size: 0.9em;
}
.block-menu .block-inner a:hover {
    color: #FFFFFF;
    background-color: #880a0b;
    border-color: #880a0b;
}

Fill in your own colours, mess around with the margins and padding to suit your site and away you go!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Evangelism on the web

Evangelism is one of the most important parts of the church, and the internet can be used to help us with this task as much as the previous two uses mentioned.

Evangelism websites - like any other evangelism media - should be targeted at a specific group, meeting a need in a given community. If you've got a group in mind and you've thought of a fantastic way to reach them online, that's great. Be aware though, that starting an online ministry is a hard process if you don't have the real-world contacts to back it up. People won't visit your website unless they have a reason to look for it.

I guess what I am trying to say is – don't get confused into thinking that your church website has to be evangelistic, because it doesn't. Evangelism is a whole different sport.

Some things to think about if you're designing an evangelism website:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Building Community

“A true Web site is a gathering place – a watering hole that people
will go to so that they can meet other people who go there.”
- Leonard Sweet.

The internet is becoming a larger part of our culture. More than 50% of teenagers use the internet every day, with average usage for this age group at 1.5 hours per day. Gen X-ers, who are now well into their 30s and 40s, are also huge internet users, and even older generations are catching on.

My wife's grandfather bought a computer last year and in his mid 70s now browses the internet and uses email several times a week.

With more people spending more time online, it's no wonder that online communities are becoming popular.

Ebay is a good example. One of the largest internet companies, its user base covers all age groups, and part of its success is attributed not only to its buying and selling model but to the way it builds community. Through leaving feedback for others, posting in the forums or chatting in the “Ebay Cafe”, users interact with each other informally, sharing interests and building relationships.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Did you know that here in Australia we have 14 million internet users? In a country of 20 million or so people that's a lot. When you consider that a simple website can reach any of those people and costs less than a yearly ad in the yellow pages (in some cases it can cost nothing at all) it's an easy and important way for a church to express itself. The web is an opportunity that we should be taking advantage of, both as individual churches and as a whole.

In this series of short articles I want to talk about three ways that a church can utilise the internet through having its own website.

1. Advertising
2. Building Community (Covered in part 2)
3. Evangelising (Part 3)

 

1. Advertising

“The Internet is becoming the town square
for the global village of tomorrow.”
- Bill Gates