Weboo’s Blog

Weboo can turn your on-line presence from a web site that is occasionally updated, hard to change, and a chore to manage, to a flexible system with massive growth potential and the ability to achieve your organisations on-line goals.

Content Management Systems (CMS) can assist your business to achieve these goals. Weboo are CMS specialists. With over 6 years experience with a wide range of CMS solutions, Weboo can assist your business to get a web site that meets your needs.

Content Management Systems (CMS) offer the following benefits to small and medium sized businesses:

• Easy to use. No longer do businesses have to learn code to maintain their web site, CMS use a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) approach to managing content. Microsoft Word is an excellent demonstration of a WYSIWYG program as it prints on paper what you see on the screen. CMS use WYSIWYG editors in the same way as Microsoft Word by enabling web site editors to see their changes as they will look on the web site before they apply them.
• Image and file management. CMS make adding a photo of a new staff member, photos of your last job, or the annual report, easy. Simply upload the file to your web site via the CMS, and link the file to the appropriate page. Images can also been seen and positioned via WYSIWYG editor.
• Fast additional functionality. Do you want to make money from your web site with an on-line store or offer visitors the ability to sign up to a newsletter? CMS offer a plug-in system for adding new features and systems to existing web sites quickly.
• Security and Updates. The internet can be a dangerous place and there are thousands of hackers trying to gain access to private information. As the updates are released they are applied to your web site as part of the maintenance agreement and your site continues to be extremely secure and benefit from additional new features or bug fixes.
• Vendor-independent flexibility. If you find Weboo doesn’t offer you the extraordinary level of service you expect from your web site professionals, or you want to work with other web site professionals, you are welcome to. Weboo does not own your web site, it is created by Weboo using open-source software. This means you can have other web site professionals work on your web site. Unlike other companies, we will not ask you to sign any licenses or lock you into exclusivity agreements with us.
• Templates. Professional businesses update the look and feel of their web site every 1 or 2 years on average. Often this is important to show web site visitors the organisation takes the web site seriously and the changes often incorporates current design and web technologies. Using CMS, updating the look and feel of your web site is easy. The CMS has a template systems which enable the whole site to change its look and feel. Changing the look and feel or your site is now a cost-effective and time-efficient process which offers your business the ability to change with your market.

Weboo can deliver the following aspects for your web site:

• Professional look and feel thanks for a large selection of ready-made templates or custom-built templates from world-class designers based on your logo and style guide.
• Easy to update and modify. Weboo includes a minimum of 2 hours training with all of its web sites to ensure your business can quickly make the most of your new web site.
• Lower cost than traditional web sites. Due to the flexibility and ease of use, the CMS costs less to setup and less to maintain than traditional web sites. Plus, leveraging open-source software means the cost is dramatically lower.
• Flexibility to work with the best web site development business, not the one that manages or owns your web site.
• Fast development and implementation. Weboo’s web sites are quickly developed and implemented enabling customers to begin utilising their new web site sooner.
• Support. Weboo offers some of the best customer support in its field. If we are unable to answer your query, we will work with our customer to investigate and resolve their question.
• Expansion. As your web presence expands, Weboo can offer you the fastest method to incorporate new features in to your site whether this be standard features like a blog or advanced features such as the latest advertising or payment systems.

To find out how Weboo can assist you to maximise your web site’s online presence and gain all of the benefits listed above, email or call us, we look forward to hearing from you.

Many customers of Weboo want to know how to make their site popular without the need for effort or on-going work. Unfortunately my response to these questions is “You can’t”. Tonight I have decided to write an article about SEO and in particular content with the hope of helping Weboo’s clients and Weboo’s readers.

Firstly, there are currently millions of web sites on the internet. Millions of these sites are not updated frequently and millions more are updated so infrequently that no one would bother visiting the site occasionally to see if the site has changed. Search engines deem these sites to be updated ‘infrequently’. When a search engine considers a site to be irregularly updated they don’t bother sending their robots to crawl the web site and therefore the search engine does not update its records about the web site often. This leads to a web site being considered static and the likelihood a person would want to visit this site therefore is reduced. The result is a web site is not crawled or updated or visited often therefore its content is less useful than a web site that is updated frequently.

You may think this point is fairly obvious, and you’re right, it probably is. But you would be amazed at how many people want their web site to be number 1 on the search engines yet they don’t want to create and upload any new content. If you think about the web sites you visit frequently, they are sites which always have new content. These sites usually have a dedicated team who update them, they often have advertisements, and they usually are easy to find on search engines.

Now you’re probably thinking “Ian’s right but does he realise how hard it is to come up with content and find the time to update a web site”. You may be surprised when I say it took me nearly a year to create Weboo’s web site, and it has taken me 6 months to begin prioritising this blog and adding items frequently. I know how hard it can be to decide and stick to adding content to a web site frequently.

Therefore I have come up with the following checklist for people who want to have a successful web site which ranks well on the search engines and captures a lot of visitors:
1. Create a web site.
2. Set the meta information correctly and register it with search engines.
3. Create an easy method for web site maintenance such as utilising a CMS or blog.
4. Think about your new site and decide how much effort you can afford to spend on maintaining it.
5. Collect a bunch of information for possible content, I keep a spreadsheet of possible topics I can write about.
6. Start with small pieces of content and regular updates on a long cycle.
7. Decrease the cycle if you want your web site to become a web site people regularly visit.

A web site with a CMS can work particularly well if you would like to post news items. If you want more order for your content or the ability for people to participate in your content, I suggest you try using a blog.

There are many other aspects of SEO which I could discuss today but I think this will do. In future SEO fundamental articles, I intend to discuss the benefits of blogs, the need for correct linking, and I hope to dispel some of the methods people use to promote their web site which you shouldn’t waste your time on because they don’t work.

If you would like assistance with your web site or blog please contact Weboo.

If you would like to share your thoughts and ideas on this post with me and fellow Weboo readers please click the title of this blog post then add your comment in the form at the end of the article.

This blog entry will discuss how fast the web responds to events from the ‘real world’ and how understanding the market and leveraging associated technologies can ultimately lead to heightened growth and brand awareness.

Last night I attended the Future Music Festival at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The event ran for about 10 hours and included music by some of the worlds leading electronic music artists such as Ferry Corsten, Carl Cox, Infusion, The Egg, Felix Da Housecat, Nick Warren, etc. The event attracted roughly 20,000 people from their late teens to early 30’s.

I hadn’t been to an event at this venue before and I was excited as I knew the music and weather were going to be good. I made sure my mobile phone was charged and my camera’s memory card was empty. I was destined to utilise my geek toys to their maximum and hopefully create some happy memories for myself and my friends.

As the day wore on I began to take photos and decided to play with my camera’s built-in video capture facility. I was surprised at how well the feature worked and that was when I got the idea of putting some videos of the event on the internet.

I had seen videos on the internet of other live events before. Usually the videos are good but capture only snippets of the action and usually without context. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that taking a video of an act performing their trademark song will make a popular video on the internet.

So, as the closing act, Ferry Corsten, rolled around and started belting out track after track, I grabbed my camera and headed to the heart of the action – the front of 20,000 people underneath a massive, state-of-the-art lighting setup – where I captured the video which would ultimately lead to this blog story.

At 10 pm the event finished, I left and headed to my car for the 40 minutes drive home. I was worn out but eager to see how my videos had come out. So at 11 pm I downloaded the first video off my digital camera, viewed it on my computer and within 15 minutes I was uploading the footage to youtube. Once the upload had begun I went to sleep – I was exhausted!

The next day I woke and finished uploading a few images and some other videos to the internet. By the time I finished and got around to reading my emails I found a few alert emails from youtube reporting the video I had uploaded last night had received some comments. As you can imagine, I was impressed. This meant people had found my video without me having to be awake or even try to publicise it.

I was happy with the comments, someone commended me for uploading the video so quickly, and other people loved the moment the video captured. I was extremely impressed at how quickly people found the video and that it had already been viewed over 200 times.

I have been thinking about this phenomenon all day. As more and more comments appear on youtube and the number of views of the video increase, I began to think how easy it would be for businesses to quickly promote themselves to like-minded people.

It is no surprise that video online is taking over the internet. I think this case study highlights the success I can have without any forethought of planning. Imagine if I had intended to publicise this video and had added it to this site, forums which discuss electronic music, emailed it to my newsletter, etc. This small video could have been easily seen by thousands of people.

So my little 1 minute and 3 second video of last night’s performance has now nearly been online for 24 hours and has recorded 8 comments, been added to 19 youtube users favourite lists, and been viewed 784 times.

If you are interested to see the video, find out how its statistics are going, or read the comments I refer to please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y09lw7SLBHg.

I have included the video below in case you would like to view it: