Recent Articles

Be inspired and entertained by film maker Adam Elliot when he speaks  Geelong Young Professionals on Wednesday 17th March.

Adam is the Academy Award-winning writer and director of claymation films such as Harvie Krumpet. Hear how this Melbourne man started an animation course in 1996 and accepted an Academy Award seven years later.

I had an interesting experience on the road last week that made me think of how the decisions we make as travellers should affect website design.

Before going to visit a potential client I plugged their address into Google Maps to see how to get there, and I was suprised to see the route that it showed.

To me, the obvious path seemed to be straight up the highway and then down a major road that their business is on. But Google said the quicker and shorter way was along a series of smaller back roads.

I pegged out the route I thought better on the map and found that it was several kilometres longer and would take me three minutes more.

No matter what sort of business you run or the size of your profile, chances are that at some point it will be mentioned on the web.

When it is, will it be good or bad? Wouldn't it be great if you knew what people were saying immediately so that you could respond either way?

Google Alerts lets you monitor specific keywords in the Google search engine, and it will send you an email every day (or however often you choose) with links to new pages that match your search phrases.

This can be useful for people doing research, following a breaking news story or who are simply interested in a particular topic. But another key reason to set up an alert is to monitor your brand.

Recently a friend asked me to look at a website he's creating for a church organisation he's part of.

My friend is not a website designer by trade but he's done a fairly good job with the site. There were a few things I told him to change, but I went easy on him for the most part. One thing I was adamant he remove is the 'search the web using Google' box he had place in the header on the front page.

'But if I put it on there people will bookmark this page and use it regularly,' he said.

No, they won't.

People will use google.com if they want to search using Google. Why would you ever go to a site other than a search engine to perform a search?

If you want people to visit your website you need to offer them something unique, something they can't get elsewhere. It doesn't have to be complicated but it should be information or a service that people want.

Have you ever wondered how big the internet actually is?

The answer is: big. Really Big. And growing bigger every year.

2009 saw some amazing growth again, as shown in these stats release by entireweb.com

Design Victoria is running a workshop in Geelong to help local businesses create and maintain a successful media relations strategy.

Could your business profit from greater media exposure? Media relations can enhance your image, help connect with your customers and improve your bottom line.

This free workshop, held on Wednesday 10 February 2010, will show the business advantage of a media relations program that is simple to devise and implement.

Register on the Design Vic website.

The Australian Government today launched a new Small Business Support website to help people starting or running a small business understand their legal and tax obligations.

The site talks about starting a business and covers topics like tax, record keeping and becoming an employer. It also helps you understand your entitlements and has a list of places that can give you more help.

While the website layout is a little hard to understand and the visual design ugly, the content is simple and sound. If you are just starting out it will be the perfect resource to answer common questions.

There are also links from almost every topic to more information, so even if your questions are hairy you'll likely find a link to a page that will help.

Visit http://ato.gov.au/businesses/content.asp?doc=/content/00221703.htm to start using the website.

The Google team are always introducing new features to their products, and the latest to receive major upgrades is Google Analytics, the powerful statistics tool that is used to track visitors to your website.

Yesterday Google announced seven new features in Analytics, some are improvements to existing features like goals while others allow new analysis like tracking mobile marketing.

The Announcement from Google

Read on to read the announcement from the Google team and then sign in to your account to try these features.

Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals

You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.

 ... read more »

Choc Chip recently completed a major website design and online marketing campaign for www.visitgreatoceanroad.org.au using the Drupal CMS (Content Management System).

GOT (Geelong Otway Tourism) contracted us to build the new website to provide tourism information and represent the tourism association members by giving them prominent pages on the site.

Site Build

As well as an attractive, dynamic design, this site includes a considered navigation structure and content targeted to attract site visitors and lead them to the member pages.

The challenge in building this site was to incorporate data for the tourism association members from two different external sources.

Due in part to the Movember campaign's well-designed website I'm currently growing a moustache to help raise awareness and funds for men's health issues

The Movember campaign is a good example of how social media can interact well with traditional marketing.

As a participant I can log in to the Movember website and add photos of my mo's progress while also commenting on other members and interacting with the rest of my team. My personal profile page is aptly named my 'mospace' page.

A running total of donations for both myself and my team is encouraging and also makes it a little competitive. Which men like, as a rule.

There are also options to automatically update my facebook and twitter pages if I want to.

I was lucky enough to get a hands-on play with an XO laptop at last night's Geelong web tech meetup.

The XO is a small, robust laptop computer that has been specifically designed for the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) movement.

The OLPC project has a vision of getting a simple, rugged laptop into the hands of every underpriveleged child in the world to enable education and opportunities that they would otherwise not have.

The laptop itself is impressive, especially considering the mere $180 price tag. It's sturdy with a solid casing and a small screen that's made to be hardy and easily carryable. It's waterproof and dustproof and uses very little power, lasting around three hours under average usage.

Naomi Simson is one of Australia's lauded young business entrepeneurs and I Want What She's Having is her book describing the building of her successful corporate gift business, RedBallon Days.

In my mind there's two basic types of business books: instructional and inspirational. This offering falls mainly into the second category.

I Want What She's Having is an entertaining look into the struggles and joys of business as RedBallon Days goes from a small startup to the thriving trans-Tasman business it currently is.

Negotiating is an important beginning to many projects or agreements, and no matter what sort of business you're in you will need to negotiate in one way or another with both your customers and your suppliers.

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury is a practical, informative guidebook to help you negotiate effectively.

What's all this fuss about Google Wave?

It's Google's latest collaborative tool and the buzz in the last week or two has been over preview logins that have been handed out. A couple of us here at Choc Chip were lucky enough to receive previews (thanks Elbert!) and have checked it out.

I must admit that for the first ten minutes after logging in I still couldn't see the power (or the point) of this new technology. How does it work? More importantly, what can I use it for?

A bit of experimentation and the search term "with:public" helped a lot, and my early impressions are below.

But first, if you're not even sure what Google Wave is, this quick video has a simple explanation and overview.

Google Maps results often appear above other listings for a location-based search in Google, so having your website shown on the map can give you a significant advantage over the other businesses that are only shown in the normal organic results.

So how do you get your business to appear in the Google Maps?

There are three basic actions you need to perform to get your listing to appear in Google Maps:

One of the most exciting things that your business website can do is increase the recognition and perception of your brand.

Branding

As a small to medium business, increasing your brand's fame is often one purpose among many in the marketing and advertising that you do both online and in other media.

"Branding" means making sure that people hear about your business in a consistent, positive way, and connect it with solutions or emotions that relate to your product or service.

This is very important for ongoing recognition and sales, so even if you are advertising a specific product or offer you should think about the lasting impression that your ad will leave with the viewer. Use every ad or public interaction to produce a positive impression or memory.

Are you having trouble understanding the new Fair Work Act? Have you even thought about it yet?

This act came into affect on 1st July 2009 and controls how your small business employs staff.

Luckily, the Federal Government this week released the Fair Work for Small Business website to help small business operators to understand their rights and responisibilities.

This free site provides online webinars, email newsletters, online guides and informative whitepapers and aims to highlight significant changes and make it easy for small business employers to conform.

If you live online you're probably using Firefox, arguably the best browser around and the world's second-most popular after Internet Explorer.

People love Firefox because it is free, open-source and very customisable.

Mike at SeeCure IT is a power user of Firefox as well as a friend of mine. He uses Firefox with all sorts of customisable addons, and he recently wrote an article about 12 of his favourites. Here they are.

A new program for Small to Medium Enterprises in the Geelong region will provide sustainability tools and training to key staff members. Gordon TAFE in conjunction with government bodies invites businesses to submit an Expression of Interest to participate.

The aim of this project is to:

• ENHANCE your company’s competitive edge through cost reduction and improved efficiency.
• IMPROVE your company’s environmental performance by reducing water, electricity and waste.
• EDUCATE your staff through an engaging project-based training program, tailored to meet the needs of your business.
• IMPLEMENT real measures to make real improvements to your triple-bottom line.

Download the Sustainability Program flyer (500K pdf)

Google released a new version of its search engine earlier this month which promises to make searching faster and more accurate.

Code named 'Caffeine' the new technology takes place behind-the-scenes, so there should be very few immediate changes but the increase in speed and flexibility means that future upgrades can happen more efficiently.

Google's Matt Cutts explains, "We're shooting to get results identical to previous version. We'll open up a few datacenters with it first and then roll it out."

"Caffeine will be more powerful, flexible and robust - allowing Google to index faster."

"(Caffeine) builds a powerful foundation for including any changes we want to do with indexing. Not so much for taking advantage of semantic, real-time indexing, but for getting good infrastructure in place for growth and unlock more power."