Jezweb Australian Website Design

In my quest to discover what was considered acceptable for the setup of a home based business in Newcastle the following has reasonably explained to me what the requirements are. From the glossary section of the Newcastle business document:

Paymate is a credit card payment system produced by an Australian company to compete with Paypal. It has lower fees and is somewhat easier to use i think. One thing they recommend is:

Insert a Paymate Express Payment logo on your auction listing or website? This enables buyers to use an easy, secure and cheap method of payment to pay you right away.

Which i have done on www.jezweb.com.au and I am sure it will eventually be used more often.

Australia's sixth largest city, Newcastle has some of Australia's best beaches. Nobbys, Newcastle, Bar, Dixon Park, Merewether and Stockton Beaches are all within 5 km of the city centre. All six beaches are patrolled, tend to be quite busy over summer, especially on holidays. Alternatively the ocean baths are great and have a lot less marine life in them than the sea.

The Bathers Way, is a five kilometre coastal walk that starts at Nobbys and finishes at Merewether Beach. Newcastle is built around a large working harbour, the entrance to which is guarded by Nobbys Lighthouse and Breakwater. The adjacent foreshore area is the perfect place to while away the hours watching the busy harbour traffic while enjoying a drink or meal in one of the harbourside cafes, bars or restaurants.

Large expanses of grassy parklands on the harbour's edge are perfect for a relaxing family picnic. Mingle with the hundreds of Novocastrians who flock to the foreshore each weekend for recreational activities such as kite flying, roller blading, jogging or bike riding.

• Newcastle Kite Shop
• Newcastle Entertainment Agency
• Newcastle Removalists (Ausmove)
• Newcastle Motorcycles (Inskip)
• Newcastle Website Design and Hosting
• Newcastle Diesel Engine Servicing
• Newcastle Boat Builders

Oh how search engine marketing has changed since the first real website I created. It was for the Lake Macquarie Catamaran Club all those years ago on a free geocities account. Back in the days before myspace and facebook, when you needed to know some html to create a web page and just about everyone in Australia was on a 36.6k dialup connection. I don't know how I could update that site anymore because the username and password are long forgotten, geocities was since bought by yahoo and the email address i think i had at the time was with an internet service provider that no longer exists. I guess its a little internet time capsule now.

Back in 1994 once you created a website for your business, marketing was fairly simple. You would make changes to your HTML metatags for search engine optimization and for the most part promoted your website through offline methods such as business cards, letterhead, print advertising and other such methods. The novelty of having a website was almost enough to entice people to have a look.

Fourteen years later in 2008 the entire perspective of marketing your site on the web has become almost a science. Although, we are all eager to market our website on the web it can be unclear how to accomplish this task through a maze of policies set by the Big 3 search engines - Google, MSN and Yahoo.

The major search engines use link analysis as part of their method of determining the order of search results, it is a very helpful way of determining which pages are good for particular topics.

By creating link networks, you can help improve how well your pages will rank. Your purpose is to more highly integrate your website into the internet. Link analysis is not about popularity. It's not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from reliable, regularly updated web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.

Finding good link partner sites: Search for your target keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Look at the pages that appear in the top results. Visit those pages and negotiate a link on the various sites. Not everyone will, especially sites that are extremely competitive with you. However, there will be non-competitive sites that will link to you -- especially if you offer to link back and you have a great website.

By searching for your target keywords, you'll find the pages that the search engines themselves are telling you are good, as evidenced by the fact that they rank well. Hence, links from these pages are more important -- and important for the terms you are interested in -- than links from other pages. Additionally, if these pages are well positioned, then they are likely to be receiving many visitors. This a link on their site may result in you receiving some visitors who initially go to those pages.

One way links are the best and appear to hold more weight of relevance than a typical reciprocal link.

Since registering my details with the Australian Direct Marketing Association in 2006 I do seem to have had a decrease in the number of telemarketing calls, faxes and sms that I receive which is great. I hadn''t expected much from adding my details to the ADMA site but it appears to be working which would seem to indicate that the Australian telemarketing businesses are respectful of the legislation. Overseas marketing calls from 'India' or wherever are just a common but I suspect they usually find my details on my website.

The Australian Direct Marketing Association gives this page for removing yourself from mailing lists: http://www.adma.com.au/asp/index.asp?pgid=1999

The link if you want to ban telemarketing people from calling you is: https://www.donotcall.gov.au/

Let's say that I decided to start a pet hotel business and because I put a dog and a cat on the sign, suddenly no other pet shop could use a dog and a cat on their pet shop sign? Mmmmmmm, that would make sense wouldn’t it. We’re not dealing with the golden arches so basically the whole deal about being a well known brand doesn't hold, if there are lots of pet businesses with cats and dogs in their logo then i can use artwork of my own to do the same so long as i don't outright copy another logo design that is trademarked or exceptionally unique.

And now for our expert opinion…..
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Copyright or Trademarked logo will only create an issue if it is an
exact replication - no one can OWN the visual id rights to a Dolphin, my
view from what I have seen and cover in Professional Practice does
suggest that - a Dolphin out there already , perhaps more than one I
would think means your logo probably lacks that distinctive special feel
a logo driven ID should have. But in the end as long as you do not use
their DOLPHIN, colour or attitude etc - it then becomes subjective.

Allan Morse - Senior Lecturer Design, University of Newcastle

I've never run a business that didn't have web marketing as a big component of it's advertising strategy. Understandable given that the web and computer business is the only industry i've really been involved in.

Websites are a business owners advertising dream. You will still get dud clicks and the conversion rate on an impression might only be 1000/1 but compared with the old media this is so reliable, easy to measure and scale to suit the requirements of the business. Search
advertisements, the text links on the results pages of search engines charge advertisers only when a user actually clicks. It's reasonably safe to assume that if they get to that stage they are fairly interested in what you have to offer and from there it becomes mainly about matching the user to the right product/service and the sales pitch your website gives and how easy it is to order.

This really is one of my pet peeves. People saying they got such and such number of hits to their website. Immediately I wonder, do they mean impressions (page views) or file requests? Are they trying to make their marketing data sound good by giving the number of hits rather than the more useful statistic of unique visitors? Argh, honestly, the sooner this is all undertstood by the general population the better.

There was a great article in The Economist this week that explained it really well:

[Page views are] the number of times web surfers call up web pages on
a given site. Page views became popular in the late 1990s, because they
were far superior to the existing measure of “hits”, also known as
“file requests”. Hits are confusing because every graphic on a page, as
well as the page itself, counts as a hit. If a site owner puts more
graphics on his pages, he gets more hits, even if visitors, clicks and
everything else stay the same.

Page views [as compared to hits] are easy
to comprehend by analogy to the offline world because you immediately imagine all of these people staring at computer screens viewing the page, and that is exactly what it is. Whereas a hit is like the same visual but you would have to count ever image file, stylesheet and page file that is displayed to the user each time they go to another page.

A vertical search engine is more commonly known as a 'portal' or 'niche search engine' or sometimes a directory. In the past, if you had a search engine or directory that had specific topic boundaries to the information it covered then you would be known as a portal. However as thes portal sites grew and the search became more relevant than the directory aspect they became more widely known as vertical search engine. For example, www.expedia.com - a travel vertical.

If you think of 'vertical integration' in a business, it means that a business acquires other businesses in it's supply line or distribution chain. So for example, as a web designer, if I were able to buy a domain registrar then i'd be securing my supply side and if i were to buy a set of computer retail shops that could arguably be a distribution side. By contrast, horizontal integration is buying out other businesses in your industry that are not part of your supply channel. For example, Woolworths buying a bottleshop master franchise, etc.

Backordering (reserving) a domain name that is already registered and in use does not guarantee eventual registration of the domain name. The person who has it registered may continue to renew it every 2 years and they get plenty of warning so unless they really don't want it then chances are you could be waiting a while. Plus, because multiple people can place a backorder on the same domain through different registrars you might be unlucky enough for someone else to get it first.

If the domain name you want isn't available the best thing to do is be happy with an alternative and then if you still want the doamin that is already registered, put it on backorder and carry on with business as usual. The only time you might get it earlier is if you can convince the person to give it to you or you have a legal case for getting it such as rights infringement.

In short, no. You cannot sell any .au domain name, including, .com.au, .net.au, .org.au, .asn.au, .id.au. You do not really own it when you are using it anyway, you're paying for the right to use it, sort of like a lease.

You can not buy, sell or transfer .au domain names (however you can transfer them to other people/entities). According to auDA policies
registrants should not, directly or indirectly, through registration or
use of domain name or other, register a domain name for selling and the
registrant must not transfer or purport to transfer a proprietary right
in domain name registration.

So basically, you can give it away if you are a helpful, generous kinda person, but you can't put it on ebay.