Turboweb Limited News Feed

Getting traffic to your website from search engines

2010-07-21 00:00:00

At a network meeting with clients from three different businesses the other day, I heard some interesting things. The clients were talking about radio, newspaper advertising and websites. The consensus was that newspaper and radio have their place but are an expensive option.

It was agreed that websites were very cheap advertising in comparison to traditional media. However, while a newspaper is delivered and a radio message is broadcasted, how do you get people to a website?

Search Engine Traffic

The cheapest and easiest traffic to a website is from a search engine like Google. Search traffic is generated by good quality on-topic content. If you are a plumber you want plenty of text based on plumbing related subjects on your website. If someone searches for plumbing on Google ideally your site shows up in the search results.

Google make their money providing good search results, that's why people use Google. Google search looks for the site/s with the best content related to the search topic.

Feed The Search Engine Beast

If the beast is hungry - we need to feed it. Give the search engine what it is looking for, good quality on-topic content therefore the content of your website pages should be on-topic. The next opportunity is to use news items. News items make your site look professional and up-to-date and the content in those news items help feed those elusive search engines.

What Content?

You can write a news item about anything, it's never fails to amaze me how people overlook interesting stories they have to tell. Often things you may find mundane and ordinary can be of interest to your audience. For example, I spoke with a plumber and discovered their father is a craftsman plumber who specializes in restoration work for heritage houses. This is a great news item and if someone is searching 'restoration plumbing' this news item could attract them immediately. In reading the article they will see that you can provide historical restoration and contact to get you to do the work. That's the power of the Internet.

Summary

Good quality on-topic content feeds search engines, search engines get people to websites and news items make you look proactive.

Your news items do not need to be novels, two or three paragraphs is a good start. If you can't find the time to write them yourself consider hiring someone to do it. Turboweb can put you in contact with a good commercial writer if required.

Happy writing.
Article by Paul Southworth

Paymex announce imminent closure

2010-07-06 00:00:00

Overnight Paymex, a New Zealand based credit card processing facility announced imminent closure of it's service. This affects some of our customers and we'll be contacting them shortly to help them switch to one of our other credit card processing providers. Below is the announcement from Paymex:

Regrettably, Paymex will no longer be accepting new customer accounts as of today, and will no longer process any credit card transactions from *Friday 16th July 2010*. Any balances in your Paymex account are safe and the Paymex system will continue to allow you to withdraw your funds up until *Friday 23rd July 2010* when the system will be shut down.

Why is Paymex doing this?...

This decision has been predominantly based on two factors: expected processing volumes over the last few months have not been achieved and a substantial increase in resource cost for monitoring and dealing with suspicious and fraudulent transactions and account holders.

So, what do I need to do?...

You will need to make alternative arrangements for accepting credit card transactions if Paymex is your only transaction method. If you have other processing methods then you will need to remove Paymex as a payment option in your system.

Will I lose the money in my Paymex account?

No, your money is safe. You can withdraw it as per the usual withdrawal process up until *Friday 23rd July 2010*.

What happens if there is a chargeback after the site is gone?

You will continue to be responsible for any charge backs on your account *up to 90 days after 16th July 2010*. Paymex will continue to operate as per usual for dealing with charge backs and customer queries up until the end of October on the support@paymex.co.nz email address.

The Paymex Team

Paymex was a useful service if the amount of transactions you processed through your website wasn't enough to justify setting up a montly account with one of the larger processing companies. We will continue to keep an eye on the market so that we can offer a range of online credit card payment solutions that suit the needs of our customers.

If you are directly affected by this and you have any questions, please get in touch with us and we can help you out.

Xero & Paypal Payment Integration

2010-06-08 00:00:00

In the last few weeks we have been experimenting with Paypal & Xero.

For those of you that haven't heard of Paypal, it's simply an online payment gateway (probably the biggest in the world) that allows you to make a payment to someone without giving them your credit card details.

Xero is an online accounting system, produced in Wellington, that has taken the country by storm. The main benefit of Xero is that all parties (accountant, business owner etc) can acess the application at anytime via the internet this can save a great amount of pain compared to the old desktop applications.

Turboweb have been using Xero for the last two years to manage our accounting and invoicing and it has performed very well. There has been a few times where clients have wanted to pay by credit card but we have had no way to take the payment and get the information into our accounting system (Xero).

Xero now offer bank feeds from Paypal. This means you can setup a Paypal account for free and take online payments from anyone in the world by credit card. The transaction lines are then imported into Xero every six hours.

The cost? 3% (from PayPal) which is very attractive as opposed to setting up a full blown merchant account with the associated monthly fees. With paypal transaction lines feeding into your Xero accounting system your away laughing.

This is the best possible way for a small online store to get started, low fees, great acounting and a simple website. You could be up and running in a week for less than $130 a month (approx).

If you would like anymore info on how Turboweb work with these tools just drop us a line.

Breathing Space Pays Off

2010-06-02 00:00:00

After a few weeks at the new Turboplex location we have been working on some really exciting projects. It must be the new space, complete with great artworks, music and some natural light has really helped bring some great ideas to fruition.

In the near future you can expect to see some big advances in Simple Content Manager with the templating possibilities, subscriber and mailing list management and changes to the built in e-commerce system.

We have also been testing a brand new custom built email server over the last few weeks with fantastic results. Our customers can look forward to one of the best email services around once we have finished testing and roll it out.

All in all its been a great few weeks! We will put it down to the breathing space.

New Features in the Simple Content Manager

2010-05-03 00:00:00

Hello all. We thought we would round up just some of the improvements that we have made to the Simple Content Manager recently.

Features Added:

Exciting new themes to choose from.

People running the Store feature can now:

Select featured products list for the front page of their site.
Add products to your newsletters.
Moved subtotal to below the GST deduction line in most invoices etc.

Newsletters now have the ability to be full HTML and branded to suit.

Sorting of items in most places are now a simple drag and drop away. There are still a couple of more places to move away from using "Weight" numbers but most things should be able to be more simply sorted into the order you want.

Bugs Fixed:

We fixed a bug where the multiple image fade feature wasn't working as expected on the downloads page.

Also fixed a bug for sites running the Store feature couldn't delete products. Those unwanted products now can be deleted.

There was a bug that caused people to not be able to use the contact form or the subscription features. This has been fixed.

Problem with SCM and the contact form

2010-05-03 00:00:00

There has been a recent problem with the contact form in SCM.

What went wrong

Anyone trying to contact you via your website would have received an error message. The problem started on Friday morning (30th April) and was fixed this morning (3rd May) at 9:15am.

This happened because we were making changes to the SCM product and one of the changes affected the piece of code that determines whether an email address was valid or not. During our testing we did not notice this issue and as a result the bad code ended up running all SCM websites.

What went right

To follow up on the problem we notified all affected customers this morning of the issue, and then rounded up all the enquiries that were not sent to them and sent them through via email. If this affected the way you do business please let us know so we can put it right for you.

Additionally, we have some changes to make to our testing plan to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future. We will be implementing automated testing of all websites to check for issues like these. We are committed to putting this in place before the next SCM release.

As always, we appreciate your patience and understanding in these matters.

Hospitality more than a name

2010-04-30 00:00:00

Dunedin has some remarkable companies and one of the great things about our business is getting to work with some of them. One has recently provided us with a challenging website development that we are proud to announce has just gone live. Southern Hospitality started in Dunedin in 1989 and has grown into a major player in the catering and hospitality industry with 13 showrooms around the country and more than 10,000 product lines. Grant Jones, Southern Hospitality’s IT manager, told us they wanted something open source based with a content management system that would give them control over the site look and feel as well as the content.

It was a complex site to work on not only due to the large number of products ranging from teaspoons to furniture and because it has two different main customer types – one industry based and the other public shoppers – but also because they didn’t want to double up on data entry. That meant the site needed to be fed by their existing back end order system.

This is where Grant said we made a real difference because just as they have built their company around great personal service in the hospitality industry, we provided the human touch throughout the website development. Like them we understand the importance of listening to our customers’ needs and spent the time to give Southern Hospitality the outcomes they were looking for.

Interesting fact: If you were to purchase one of each item Southern Hospitality has on its website it would cost you $2.3 million! Check out the amazing product range at: www.southernhospitality.co.nz

New Location For Turboweb

2010-04-21 00:00:00

Big news - the Turboweb crew have moved to a new location. We have grown the team over the last two years and as a result we simply ran out of floor space with our shared arrangement with the Colortronics team.

Our new location offers much more floor space and gives us a fresh outlook on how we work.

You can find Turboweb at 23 Vogel Street, Dunedin in the Milne Bremner building.

Our relocation also means that the Colortronics guys are looking for tenants. If you're looking for some office space in central Dunedin please contact Geoff Bilson at Colortronics on (03) 477 6379.

Stoney Creek - Boots and All.

2010-03-03 00:00:00

When Stoney Creek owner Kerry Crawford asked us to quote for his new website we jumped at the challenge to provide a comprehensive and extensively customised site. Kerry wanted to be able to imbed video, add a blog, and send out newsletters with stock items attached. We chose ecommerce platform Magento www.magentocommerce.com and contracted design company Firebrand for a visually pleasing, easy to navigate site.

We asked Kerry what it was about our proposal that sold it to him. He said that while many website companies tried seducing him with amazing technology and glamorous features we knew his audience and approached the job with the “eye of a retailer”. We also understood that a lot of Stoney Creek’s customers are rural and still battling with dial up internet connections so needed a site that was quick to load. While we may have had an advantage because we built Stoney Creek’s earlier websites it was gratifying to hear that of all the options Kerry considered ours is the one he believes will best sell his great range of outdoor gear.

Even better was hearing that we have achieved a site that is simple and clean with a non-computer geek focus for Stoney Creek’s non geeky customers. If you are looking for great winter boots or other outdoor gear check out Stoney Creek at www.stoneycreekshop.co.nz