AAPT: Tell it like it is!

I love AAPT. Really! I have been with Telstra, Optus, DingoBlue, OneTel, Dodo (my worst telco experience EVER!), Vodafone and now AAPT for the past two years - and they really are that good. We use AAPT for landlines and broadband and used to use them for mobile, but have just recently shifted to Virgin Mobile’s Bean Counter plan (which is fabulous too - 10c calls, 10c text and a winner of a Money Award 2007). But why do we love AAPT?
No contracts! I hate being forced to sign up to a deal for 12 or 24 months - especially when i am not purchasing hardware. Why do i have to sign a contract? Who knows what my requirements will be in six months time or what better deals will be around. If their deal really is that good, why do they need to lock you in??
No connection or joining fees! You only pay for the service - there are no other hidden transfer or connection fees. So, if you try it for a month and then find a better deal - you haven’t lost a cent - you have just paid for what you’ve used.
Free ADSL modem! If you have your landline with AAPT, they give you a free broadband modem with your internet connection - and still no contract! Beautiful! Many other suppliers will charge you $129 plus joining fee - particularly when you are not on a contract.
Great rates! The land line plans have really good cap deals (eg $29 with $50 of calls, or $49 with $100 of calls or $149 with $500 worth of calls) and you get $10 discount on your broadband if you bundle your land line with them. We are on a 1500k plan with 15GB of download for $49 per month.
Great service! In the two years we have been with them, AAPT has provided brilliant service on at least 10 occasions (even when they didn’t have to - such as when we were having problems with our wireless broadband which was nothing to do with them!) and stuffed up once (which they finally got right on the next phone call). And their call centre is in Australia! In my experience of Telcos - this level of service is amazing!
No contracts! Did I mention this already? This really is such an important feature. How many people tell you about their crappy phone plan and then tell you that they are stuck for another X months? No contract is such a liberation! if you try it and don’t like it - move!
So, if you are looking for a better phone deal - it may well be worth your while checking out what AAPT has to offer.
Posted by: Web Design Company - Webcare (http://www.webcare.com.au)

Simple Really! Take Control of Your Day

Many people who run their own business struggle with the need for discipline and routine. I love working in my own business and I love what I do. For me, it is not an issue of not focussing on work. Rather, it is about being focussed on the right type of work. I find it easy to get distracted by an email I have received or an idea that pops into my head. Then I tend to follow the scent of that new trail, rather than completing the task at hand (and then pursuing the other task at a more suitable time).
One of the emails I read and followed was from a guy called Mark Joyner. Mark has developed a goal setting and time management program called Simpleology. This is a slightly twee name, but the concept is fantastic. If you take the free 18 day program, you will find it all a bit slow until about day 12 - but then it starts to pay dividends. I skipped through quite a few of the first 12 days in a single setting, so you can certainly speed it up a bit.
Now though, I use the Daily Praxis program every day (a routine that takes about 15 minutes each day) - and you can manage it all on the web using the Simpleology Web Cockpit. This process enables me to identify all of the tasks that I want to get done, then all of the things I need to get done today. It is quite a bit more involved than that - but the gist of it is that you do not lose things that you haven’t prioritised for today (you put them either in your mental lockbox or your dreamcatcher). You then pick them up tomorrow when you make a decision about how best to get them done.
Anyhow, my day is much more productive when I start with my Daily Praxis, than when I get lazy and skip it. So, if getting through the really important stuff each day is a bit of a challenge to you, then have a look at Simpleology. I reckon you might find it extremely useful.

For more information on web design services, visit webcare at http://www.webcare.com.au

WebCare: Australia’s First Totally Green Web Design Firm

We at WebCare are very excited about being Australia’s first 100% green web design firm. From the core of our business model, we are totally committed to being not just carbon neutral, but carbon positive (WebCare produces much more carbon than it uses)!

Modern technology and communications infrastructure allows us to operate our business from anywhere with power and an internet connection. So we chose to set up our headquarters on a farm with more than 4000 mature trees (if each tree absorbs 650kg of carbon in its lifetime, then this property can absorb 2600 tonne of carbon) and new plantings of about 3-400 trees (260 tonne of carbon) occurring each year. The property is located about 35 minutes from Adelaide, South Australia - so ordinarily that would mean a long commute for staff and long drives to see web design clients or for clients to visit the office.

That is where our web design business model provides a solution - about 95% of our work is conducted by phone and email rather than face to face. So we are able to keep travel by car to an absolute minimum! The environmental benefit of this approach is huge. But that is not all!
The electricity that WebCare uses to power its business is 100% Green (Renewable Energy) Power. The other emissions from our business (such as the few times that a car is required and plane travel, and our host server) are offset by carbon credits from Easy Being Green.
Our office practices also support this committment to being environmentally conscious in everything we do. The office uses recycled copy paper, recycled toilet paper (yes - it is a bit scratchy, but we cope :-), is self sufficient for water (relying upon rainwater and dam water) and, of course, all lights have low energy globes.

If you want a website that is 100% green from its very conception, then talk with WebCare and you will know that the design and building (and hosting, if you want it) of your website is totally carbon neutral. You can read more on our environmentally friendly web design page.

For more information on web design and development services, visit us at http://www.webcare.com.au

Editing Your Photos for Web - No 2!

In our last blog posting on this topic, I wrote about some free software you can use to edit your images for web. In this article, I want to focus more on the practicalities of image size - why it is so important that your images are optimised, and what the real difference in image size means.
A couple of important rules of thumb for you to remember:
1. Image size - between 4kb and 20kb per image (depending on the no of images per page)
2. Page size - each page on your site should be a maximum of 50-80kb in total (though I reckon in these days of broadband that going to 150-200kb is probably acceptable).
3. Stickability - 50% of people leave the average website within 30 seconds! If your website hasn’t even loaded after 30 seconds, how many people will hang around?
I have recently had some clients who have experienced some challenges from this issue of image size - both clients I am thinking of have shopping cart (or ecommerce) websites. One of them had product images that were about 50kb and the other had product images in the order of 400kb!
Now, just having one image that is that much bigger than standard (4k to 20k in size) is not going to be a huge issue. But in shopping carts, you might have a page with 30 of these images showing at a time! 30 images at 400kb each is a whopping 12,000kb (12 MB) per page! Even at 40kb per image you are still looking at 1200kb (1.2MB) per page.
How long does it take to fully load a web page that is 1.2Mb or 12Mb in size? Lets check the

Download Speed Calculator :

Page Size - 50kb
7 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is quicker than people on Dial Up usually get)
1 sec - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
Instantly - Slow Broadband (512kb)
Instantly - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
OK Page Size (150kb)
21 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is quicker than people on Dial Up usually get)
4 secs - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
2 secs - Slow Broadband (512kb)
Instantly - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
Huge Page Size (1200kb)
2 mins 55 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is slightly quicker than actual Dial Up speed)
36 secs - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
18 secs - Slow Broadband (512kb)
9 secs - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
Massive Page Size (12,000kb)
29 mins 15 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is slightly quicker than actual Dial Up speed)
6 mins - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
3 mins - Slow Broadband (512kb)
1 min - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
So - you can see the problem with large image files!

From a speed perspective there is no question that you want small file sizes. So why would anyone want to use large image files? To preserve image size (ie the physical dimensions of the image) and image quality (low-resolution, medium-resolution, high resolution, very high resolution). If you are selling products (or services for that matter), you want the customer to be able to see the product in its best light - the image needs to be clear (not blurry) and large enough to see all the detail.
So, it comes down to a choice between SPEED & CLARITY!

The great thing about the way images display on the web, is that usually you can look at a fairly low resolution image and it looks pretty similar to a much higher resolution image.

For more information, visit webcare solutions at http://www.webcare.com.au

Two Million Businesses in Australia!

Wow! According to a Dec 07 ABS Report, in June 2007, there were 2,011,770 businesses in Australia - or one business for every 10 people. 96% of these businesses (1.93 million) are small businesses employing less than 20 people and 1.2 million have no staff at all!

The good news is that 58% of businesses that opened in June 2003 were still operating in June 2007 (four years later!). If a business is going to fail, around 1/3 of them will do it in the first year.

It is these 1.93 million small businesses (variously known as home businesses, SME’s (small to medium enterprises) and SOHO (small office home office) that are the target group for WebCare’s web design and development services. There were 2.4% more businesses in 2007 than 2006 - or around 48,000 new businesses. All of these businesses need a website and WebCare’s fixed price packages suit start-up businesses with low capital reserves to a tee!
If you are one of the 10% of people in Australia with their own business, and you don’t have a website, give us at WebCare a call today. We can talk through the options for your website - what sort of site you need, what is its primary purpose (attracting new customers, providing information to existing customers, selling services, selling goods etc), and what are the best options for marketing this site. Best of all - this consultation is free - a great way to canvass the options for your businesses website and to make sure you have enough information to get quotes on your new website.

For more information on web design and development, visit us at http://www.webcare.com.au

How are the Prices of Web/Online Advertising Calculated?

One of my students was thinking about adding online/web advertising to his website and asked for some info about how rates for online/web advertising is calculated. I thought it might be useful to post my answer on the WebCare blog:
Web advertising is a bit different to display advertising - but I suppose the principles are similar.
The main cost driver is not size, but no of impressions (ie how many times the ad is viewed) - so how much traffic is each page on your site getting? Until you are getting reasonable traffic levels, advertising is not really worth much (because very few people are seeing it).
The other driver is click through rate (CTR - how many people actually click on the ad to go through to the advertiser’s site?).
You can sell ads by:
no of impressions
CTR
size
location (top rather than bottom)
sub-pages
time
etc
I was talking with a client yesterday who told me they looked at advertising on one big niche market site - start price is $20k!!! So - they are advertising with the competitor of that big niche market! But, they are not advertising on their site - but in the emails that get sent out to people on their mail list - and that is costing $900 per email just to people in one state!! It is massive traffic that is driving these prices.


To my mind impressions and CTR are a much better measure than time - as you could buy a months worth of advertising that only gets 50 impressions and 0 CTR’s!! CTR is better than impressions (which is why google adwords works so well) as you are paying for actual traffic rather than potential traffic! So, if you can guarantee advertisers on your site a certain level of traffic to their site (which is what CTR measures) then I think you are offering a much better deal than just impressions.

For more information visit us at www.webcare.com.au

Do you process credit cards online? Be Scared!

Just heard about something extremely scary! If you already process credit cards online (ie your customer types their credit card no directly into your website) OR you are trying to decide what sort of credit card processing system to use online, then you REALLY NEED TO KNOW about this.

There is now a $10,000 minimum fine for small online merchants in Australia who do NOT adhere to the new PCI-DSS standards introduced in September 2007 by the Security Standards Council (SSC). Standards? What Standards?

You can download the standards here:

PCI- Data Security Standards v1.1

The upshot of this document is that there are a whole bunch of minimum requirements that an ecommerce that receives credit cards numbers (called PANs - Primary Account Numbers) MUST have in place. These requirements are:

Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other
security parameters
Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data (ie encryption)
Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software or programs
Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
Requirement 8: Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data
Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes
Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security for employees and contractors
If you are already doing all this. Wow! Great job! If you are not, then you might want to look for an alternative way of processing online credit transactions!

Here are some options:

1. Use a bank’s merchant facility that DOES NOT require the card no to be given on your website. In other words, the credit card details are given “off-site”. If the customer wants to pay by credit card, when they click on the “Pay Now” button (or equivalent), they are taken to the Bank’s Merchant Facility to enter their credit card details. At no stage are you, the merchant, in possession of or responsible for the customer’s PAN (ie credit card number). So, the PCI-DSS requirements do NOT apply to you! Examples of merchant facilities that fall into this category are:

ANZ eGate
NAB’s NSIPS
Commonwealth’s XXXXX
2. Use a third-party processor. Paypal is the most popular example of a third-party gateway in Australia. It is secure, it is free to set up and WebCare integrates PayPal into all of our ecommerce websites - free of charge! The only cost is the roughly 2.5% transaction fee. Yes, this is higher than you pay with a bank, but there are no other fees! So could be saving many hundreds of dollars in the first year alone (depending on the volume of transactions that go through your ecommerce site). Paymate is another example of this type of processor but their fees are significantly higher than PayPal (if you include the 3% fee they automatically charge your client!).

3 . If you have manual credit card processing facilities and you are authorised (or can get authorised) for “no-card present transactions” (including phone and fax), then you can use e-Path to gather the credit card details from your customer and to make them securely available for you to process manually. e-Path looks like a third party processor to the customer, but it does not actually process the card. Rather, it captures the details on your behalf. You then retrieve the credit card details from your e-Path account and process in the usual way. Because your website is NOT receiving the customer’s credit card number, you are not subject to the PCi-DSS requirements. Of course, you still need to treat those credit card details in accordance with your merchant agreement.

The other great advantage of e-Path is that you can then investigate the legitimacy of each order before processing the card (eg check country, delivery address, valid phone number, non-free email address (hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc)). This should reduce significantly the amount of credit card fraud that you are subject to. Yay!

4. Stick with non-credit card forms of payment - cheque, money order, direct deposit to your bank account. You won’t have to worry about any of these issues, and there are virutally no transaction costs. Any (or all) of these forms of payment can easily be added to your e-Commerce system but…and it’s a pretty big but…this form of payment is manual - your ecommerce system will not know that a payment has been made until you record it in the admin system.

If you are not sure which type of approach is best suited to your business, give us a call on 1300 656 902 to discuss. We will happily talk you through the advantages and disadvantages.

For more information on ecommerce web design, visit us at http://www.webcare.com.au

Small Business Web Design Solutions

Every small business in Australianeeds a web site ... and with web design from just $295every small business can afford one.

Looking for a professional web design in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, or anywhere else in Australia? Finding a high quality, reliable and skilled web designer can be difficult. Webcare is a leading web design company offering web design, web development, ecommerce web design, CMS website design, seo web design, web hosting services in Adelaide, South Australia, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and anywhere in Australia. we are specialized in custom web design Adelaide, Shopping Cart web design Sydney, Small Business Web Design Perth, CMS Web Design Melbourne and Web Design Service Australia. Compare our web design prices. Compare our web design portfolio. Compare our quality service. Call us now on 1300 656 902 and put us to the test!

For more information visit webcare at http://www.webcare.com.au/ or http://web-design.webcare.com.au/