May 2010 Newsletter

In this issue of Website Builder News, May 2010...

  • Free Training Sessions - Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch
  • One on One Training
  • Customise invoice/receipt/docket headers and footers
  • New Document Not Found page
  • Free Tickets to Bizzone Business Expo
  • Additional Small Business Training Seminars
  • Web 2 Expo Wrap Up
  • Become a Facebook Fan
  • Social Media - Twitter
  • SEO Tip of the Month - Cool online SEO tools
  • Change of Address and Onehunga Office Space Available
  • How to help us promote Website Builder and get a 20% rebate
  • Websites of the Month

 

Free Training Sessions NZ Wide

Our free training sessions will teach you how to use our website builder to build your own website or on line shop. The course covers all the basics with some tips on bulk emailer, shopping carts, and search engine optimisation included. We also have advanced courses available for a small fee.

  • Whangarei - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours  - 30th June at 1pm - FREE
  • Whangarei -Search Engine Optimisation 2 hours - 30th June at 3pm - $50
  • Auckland - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours  - 8th June at 5:30pm - FREE
  • Auckland - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours  - 9th June at 10am - FREE
  • Auckland -Search Engine Optimisation, and intermediate web design 4 hours - 12th May at 1pm - $75
  • Auckland -Social Media and Web2Expo Download - 3 hours - 19th May at 2pm - $75 
  • Hamilton - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours  - 8th July at 1pm - FREE
  • Hamilton -Search Engine Optimisation 2 hours - 8th July at 3pm - $50
  • Wellington - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours - 24th July 2010 at 10am and 1pm - FREE
  • Wellington - Search Engine Optimisation 2 hours - 24th July at 3pm - $50
  • Wellington - Search Engine Optimisation, and Social Media 4 hours - 21st October at 1pm - $75
  • Christchurch - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours - 14th August 2010 at 10am - FREE
  • Christchurch - Search Engine Optimisation, and Soscial Media 4 hours - $75 - 14th August at 1pm - $75 
  • More Locations and Times - Book Your Training Here

Please invite any friends along to our training events. Remember you will get 20% referral discount off your hosting ongoing for any who go live with their website..

  

One on One Training / Hourly Web Design Service

One on one training is a great way to enhance your website at a discount price. Sit down with one of our professional web designers for an hour and see what evolves. This is a great way for intermediate users to increase their skills, or for novice users to speed up the process of creating their website. For just $90 your website will be greatly improved. The same hourly fee also applies for SEO or any other professional help you need. One on one available at our Onehunga Auckland office with either Albie or Mike. Or in Christchurch and Wellington with Reuben ($120/hr) timed to coincide with our scheduled training courses. Reply to this email or phone to book a time.

If you are not based in the main centers, our design staff can still provide the same service over the phone. They will look at your website, and make changes that you will be able to see as you refresh your browser.

  

Customise invoice/receipt/docket headers and footers

Did you know you can customise your headers and footers on all your notification emails from the shopping cart. A recent change has made it easier to upload photos or banners into your invoice headers as well. This is a great opportunity to brand your invoices or to advertise additional products and services, or to include terms and conditions of trade.

 

New Document Not Found 404 Page

Next time you publish your site, and then access a broken URL, you will now have a more user friendly error page, with standard look and feel of your website, full menu links, and a link back to your home page. For example, our one looks like this

/404.html

 

Free Tickets to Bizzone Business Expo

Get your free tickets to the Bizzone business expo. We'll be there, and so will many other great businesses and speakers at the National Bank seminar series.

EVERYTHING YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS
Auckland 2 - 4 June, ASB Showgrounds
Wellington 21 - 23 July, TSB Bank Arena
Christchurch 11 - 13 August, Convention Centre

http://www.bizzone.com/expo-registration/guestof/webwidgets.aspx

 

Additional Small Business Training Seminars

We'd like to bring your attention to a new small business seminar series. Reuben will be presenting the SEO course. In summary, the seminar topics include:

  • Human resources - recruitment and managing performance
  • Effective Communication - marketing and business documents
  • Websites - SEO, Content Writing, Social Media

These 2 hour seminars will be taking place at the Ponsonby Yacht Club, and cost $45+gst, with discounts for attending multiple seminars.

http://www.smallbusinessseminars.co.nz

 

Web 2 Expo Wrap Up

This conference/expo held last week in San Francisco was amazing. Thousands of attendees being people like us making cool online applications in the "cloud". The size of the venue was astounding, with 400 attendees at some seminars, with at least 8 concurrent seminars at anyone time. The topics covered technical geeky stuff, but also lots of online marketing tips, social networking approaches, search engine optimisation techniques, and stories from lucky few who deal with millions of unique visitors per month. I look forward to updating all our online FAQs and presentations with all the new info.

Anyway, here's some nice new vocabulary for everyone

  • Phsychographics - targeting someones personality type rather than age/sex
  • FFF - friends fans followers
  • Astroturfing - pretending to be a FFF, bad bad bad... don't do it... authenticity is the winner in social networks
  • Crowd Sourcing - The companies behind many facebook applications, you may actually find you are doing real world work when you play their games, or joining someones customer database. 
  • The Cloud - the collection of online services which offers any sort of real online service, like us, xero, etc... once called SAAS = software as a service
  • Platform - services in the cloud, but typically those with API = application protocol interfaces
  • Mashup - taking unrelated widgets or providing collection of widgets from multiple sources, and then combining them together into your desktop or onto a website. The mashup itself is arguably a widget itself
  • WPO - web performance optimisation - faster websites get better ranking on google now, faster websites are more likely to increase the change of a completed sale.)
  • Freemium model - sites which offer free and premium subcriptions, like google apps

 

Social Media - Twitter

You might have heard about twitter alot recently, but what is it all about really? Essentially it is where people can "broadcast short text messages" at the world around them. This has been embraced by many businesses and individuals alike.

Unlike other social media sites, anyone can follow anyone, no one has to agree to the connection. You see messages from the people you follow. Others only see your messages if they follow you.

Although it might seem like a great idea to jump in there and start broadcasting adverts, consider that people need to want to follow you. It is also a noisey space, so you need to time your tweets to happen at regular intervals. If someone only checks twitter once or twice a day, it is likely your messages will be lost in the past. So pick a few times in the day to log in and have something to say.

It's also a good idea to communicate and participate in other peoples discussions. When addressing feedback to someone, start your message with their username prefixed with a @. For example, you might send feedback to us like so.

@webwgt We really like your free website builder

If you see a # tag, then this is a way of using a unique identifier to discuss a topic that many people are talking about. eg #w2e is discussing the expo I recently attended in San Francisco. You can easily search by tag names to see many different tweets all about a specific topic.

And you might see RT a fair bit, that means retweet, when you repost someone elses message. Just because you see a message from people you follow, that doesn't mean your followers see it. The aim of social networking is to encourage retweeting and sharing. This is when you leaverage the power, because you might only have 100 followers, but if your 100 followers retweet to their 100 followers, then your message has reached 10000 people.

What you really want to achieve from twitter is not just putting your message out there, but hopefully having lots of happy customers or followers positively tweeting public messages at you using the @ directive, or retweeting your messages. This has been well achieved by AirNZ using the @AirpointsFairy where you can make a wish to the fairy for free airpoints. So encouraging competitions, or composing a "message worth sharing" is the altimate goal.

You can also configure other social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to automatically receive your tweets, saving you time posting the same messages in mulitple places.

Don't forget to follow @webwgt as your first task, and your second task to post us a personal message saying how much you love our service, with tags and url, something like 

Next month we will look at Facebook and other social networks in future months.

To learn more, go to the twitter 101 page.

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

 

Join our new facebook page

We'd like to increase participation in our new facebook page. Please become a fan of our new facebook page. You might like to post a link to your own website, and either leave a comment about how you found using our services, or alternatively seek comments from others on how they think you might improve your website content or design?

Become a Fan of our new Facebook Page

 

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Wow, the Web 2 Expo in San Francisco last week was amazing. So much good info there. Here are some links we have since added to our DIY search engine optimisation page. You're gonna love these.

Picking/researching better keywords

Link Analysis

Other cool tools

More tips at the following link, or book in for one of our SEO training courses.

/DIY-search-engine-optimisation.html

 

Change of Address

We have just purchased new office space on Richmond Rd in Grey Lynn, Auckland. Our new office is more centrally located for all our Auckland customers, and still with free parking outside.

Our new physical and postal address is be 14/386 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn 1021, Auckland.

Please do not use our Onehunga PO Box any more. Thanks

 

Onehunga Office Space Available

We are vacating our previoud office in Onehunga and still have 4.5 months to run on the leases. There are 2 units, both situated in the main street of Onehunga in a quality office block. Both have ceiling mounted air conditioning units, and are sunny and light with polished wooden floors and high ceilings.

Office 1 is 100sqr meters, including full bathroom, laundary and separate kitchen. Potential to live and work in same space. Well setup for photographers. Lease is $26460p/a +gst and no opex. We will either pay the first month rent if lease signed before end of May, or provide office 2 free of charge until end of August. 

Office 2 is 33sqr meters and has a sink. Use of shared toilet facilities. Indicative lease is $8500 p/a, and no opex. We can sublease at $120+gst per week until end of August. 2 free desks can be included if you let us know asap.

If anyone is interested in aquiring this space, or know someone who might be interested, please let us know. We will give 1 years free web hosting included for a successful referral.

 

Help us promote our Website Builder (20% referral discount for your troubles)

There are many ways for you to help us promote website builder. If you would like any brochures or business cards, please contact us and we will send you a bundle. Please let us know how many you require.

If you would like to promote website builder from your website, you can now easily add an affiliate page using the "add page" button. This page will allow you to write your own introduction about how wonderful our service is and will include a link with tracking codes so that you will receive the 20% referral discount automatically.

Alternatively, please encourage your friends to just sign up directly for a free trial, or to come to one of our free training courses. Once they have signed up for a free trial, please don't forget to contact us and let us know so we can link your referral.

Or if you are finding work a bit slow in this recession, why not start your own business selling websites. Did you know that we really like customers who want to resell our services and add their own value. If you have SEO skills, business skills, graphic design skills or just super enjoy building websites with our free website builder, then we encourage you to start a business doing it. You will not be stepping on our toes at all. We want to support you in your business endeavours and will give you access to special advanced training courses and support, so that you can in turn provide better support to your customers. Using our affiliate scheme or our official reseller scheme, you can also make ongoing revenue from web hosting. But we encourage you to correctly place a commercial value on the time you put in to helping your friends start websites. We hope we are providing you with a great new opportunities during this recession. 

White label reseller accounts also available for a setup fee.

More information about affiliates and reselling here

 

Websites of the Month

Here's a selection of some of our recent Go Lives. DIY websites are always a mixed bag, so we encourage you to view several example sites if determining if Website Builder is right for you.

Do you want a more professional look and feel for your website? A more professional look will instill greater trust in your customers, and encourage them to stay longer on your website or make a purchase. Please use our online quote or contact us.

 

Do you have any feedback on our newsletter or CMS products? Please let us know.

 

Best regards,
Reuben Jackson (CEO)
Web Widgets - Free Website Builder

www.websitebuilder.co.nz
Phone: 09 6220797

Posted: Mon 10 May 2010

Back

 


Menu Sitemap
Categories