LANcom Technology Blog

1. Is your website easy to read?
   

   Patterned or speckled backgrounds decrease readability, as does unusual or inconsistent fonts.

2. Does the first page load fast enough?
   

   The first page of your website should take no longer than ten seconds to load.

3. Is it clear from the beginning what it is you do?
   

   In the first few sentences a website should communicate what it is you do and what it is the customer will gain from doing business with you.

4. Is your website easy to navigate?
   

   If you make it too difficult or confusing to find any information then people will quickly become frustrated and leave

5. Is your contact information easy to find?
   

   One way to ensure that potential customers can easily find how to contact you is for you supply a link to your contact information in the same place on every page

6. Are you annoying your customers with ads?
   

   One way to annoy those that visit your website is by using pop-up advertising for products and services that have nothing to do with what it is you are offering

7. Is your website out of date?
   

   If the information on your site is obviously out of date viewers will likely leave the site and never return

8. If you are trying to portray a professional image, does it look professionally designed?
   

   If you are thinking of creating a new website, and you can afford it, it pays to hire a professional.

   This topic is covered more in-depth in our Introduction to internet based marketing report, coming soon.

Ever wanted to get a closer look at something on the web? Holding down Ctrl + or Ctrl - will zoom in and out in Internet Explorer 7,  and increase the text size in Firefox. If you’re using Internet Explorer 7 and you would like to increase the text size, without zooming in on the whole page, go to Page then Text Size. From here you can select from five sizes of text.

Transit New Zealand has a great site, www.trafficnz.info, designed to help you do just that.

ATTOMS, Auckland’s Traffic Management Centre, runs 24 hours a day 365 days a year to deliver up to the minute traffic information on Auckland’s Southern, Northern and North-Western motorways. This site divides the motorways in to 26 different sections and grades each from free flow, moderate, heavy, to congested. There are also 7 web cameras located at Greville Road, Onewa, the Central Motorway Junction, Market Road, Mt Wellington, Alfriston Road, and Te Atatu Road which allow you to see for yourself the current state of traffic.

The Auckland City Council has plans to create an outdoor, open access, Wi-Fi network for the Auckland CBD and CBD fringe as part of their ‘CBD into the future’ strategy. This would mean much more affordable internet for businesses and people, in or close to the CBD. At this stage there is no definite timeline of when this may happen, but this initiative is part of a plan aimed for completion by 2010.

Click here for more information.

Getting frustrated with trying to find what you want online? Here are a couple of tips to help you get the most relevant results from of your favorite search engine.

1. Search for an exact praise – By putting “quotation marks” around your search phrase you can ensure that the search engine only returns results with all the words you use, together and in the correct order.
2. Advanced searches – Most search engines have an advanced search option. Clicking on this option will provide you with a number of ways to further refine your search such as which language, from which country and which file format you would like results to be.

Google also has a one page PDF of search tips specific to their search engine available for download here, but here is a quick summery.

Considering whether to do an online transaction or send a cheque? Online may actually be the safer option. Cheque fraud costs banks millions per year while the losses due to online fraud are tiny in comparison.

Banks take a number of security measures such as: Encryption, Digital Certificates, and Session Timeouts to prevent security issues. Also when a security issue does occur it is much easier to trace online than for example if someone steals your cheque on rout to its destination.

If you would like to know what online security measures your bank takes, simply click on your bank name below.

ASB, ANZ, BNZ, Kiwibank, National Bank, Westpac

Hat tip to Philip Fierlinger for the idea for this post.

Our new information report, ‘Introduction to internet based marketing’, is reaching its final stages of production and should be available shortly. This is the fourth information report we have released and covers the topics of Websites, Google AdWords and Google AdSense, Email marketing, Blogs, YouTube, Online communities, Banners ads, and Search engine optimization (SEO). This report provides a brief overview of each of the topics, as well as offering a few helpful tips. In each section we have also included links to what we consider to be very useful sources on the topic so if you would like to learn more on any of them you know where to start.

Our other information report titles include ‘How does your computer support measure up’, ‘Internet security explained’, and ‘Remote working for your business’. If you are interested in any of these titles they are available free for download from our website click here. Or alternatively you can contact us through info@lancom.co.nz or 09 377 8282 ext 112.

The new Palm Tero 750v smartphone, which recently became available in New Zealand though Vodafone,  has a long list of exciting feature such as the ability to:

• Review and access business documents like Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Get your Outlook email as well as your calendar, contacts and tasks
• Play music
• Shoot videos
• Surf the net

Here at LANcom we recently purchased three and for the most part have found the experience of using them great, so much so that we are buying another. Perhaps the best and worse feature is the ability to send and receive emails from anywhere. This feature this invaluable especially in Auckland traffic when you’re brought to a stand still, but it can easily lead to working 24 hours a day. Another thing we like about it is the size. It has a full keyboard but is still small enough that you can type with one thumb. It’s also incredibly useful to have access to your calendar from anywhere at anytime.

We have experienced a few problems such as the keys sometimes stop working, or the modem, and every 3-4 days you need to press the reset button. We’re waiting for a firmware update that hopefully will address these problems.

For more information on the Palm Tero 750 click here

Highrise is a contact manager designed to keep contact histories and manage tasks. Its top features are:

• A page for each contact/person with: a space for personal information, a notes section for contact histories and other notes, Images, links, attached emails, attached files, a task bar for tasks needed to be done for this contact, and a background/history of the person.
• A task page which shows all your open tasks. Overdue tasks appear in red at the top and other tasks can be grouped into buckets for example “Tomorrow” “Next week” “Later”. Highrise adds hyperlinks to tasks that are associated with a particular person, note or email so you can quickly access the information you need to complete the task.
• Company pages which aggregate all the people, notes, emails, and files to do with a certain company. All notes appear in order from most recent to oldest.
• A Dashboard page, which shows an overview of all the most recent activity and your own upcoming tasks. This page also has a search bar so you can search for a particular person from here.
• Case pages, which allow you to keep all the information together for a particular project. This page contains the list of companies involved, the list of contacts, and all notes, files and emails associated with the project. Each list is hyperlinked so you only need click on a contact or company to be taken to their page if you need more information.
• Email integration. You receive your own highrise drop box, which you then simply forward any emails you would like to be added. Highrise then automatically attaches these emails to the contact it is concerning.
• Allows you to add tags to people for example you may add a location tag to contacts as you enter them. You can then at any time see all the contacts within a particular area e.g. you click on the ‘Hamilton’ tag in the list of tags and it shows you all the contacts in that area.

From a customer relationship management perspective Highrise has a number of benefits such as: it develops a single view of the customer with all information on a client stored in one place, Its accessible to anyone the company wants to make a user, it has high usability with an easy to understand web style interface, it has scalability in that you can upgrade to up to 50,000 contacts and unlimited users so it has the ability to grow with your business, and it has real-time email integration which means that those using it have access to the most up to date email history.

Highrise’s main disadvantages over more comprehensive CRM systems include: Flexibility as its features can not be changed to suit the organisation, it does not seem to have the ability to establish who the most profitable customers are or prioritise response to them, and it doesn’t have the ability to search the data for certain characteristics or identify patterns or relationships in the data. This is useful in identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities or those customers that are most likely to churn.

All in all Highrise is a useful time saving tool which may be more cost efficient to small business than a comprehensive CRM system. It’s missing some of the features of other CRM software, but this may not be a huge downside for a small business as the benefits from some of these are limited when the number of customers is small. Whether Highrise will be effective for a company will depend largely on the size of the company and the company’s objectives.

We have a more in depth look at Highrise available here on our website. Or if you would like to visit the Highrise website click here.

As some of you may already know Office 2007 has a new file format. This means that if someone sends you a 2007 Office document and you have an older version for example 2003 you can’t open it. Microsoft has a compatibility pack available for free on their website that addresses this problem. If you would like to download this click here.