Our latest website is for Consulting Psychiatrist, Dr. Ross Kirkman.

Tony Lomas is the owner of Island26 and also the designer of the website. Tony is not just a great photographer but a very good website designer. Tony has been building websites for some years now and is a partner in this website, Hobart Website Design. You will find Tony’s number on the contact page.

Why not give Tony or myself a call about your website needs.

Waterworks Estate is a clean website design using WordPress to showcase the promotion and sale of real estate near Hobart.

Located within 3 kilometres from Hobart’s CBD, Waterworks Estate boasts large north facing blocks in a bushland setting.

There are 8 allotments ranging in size from 1084 sqm to 17,200 sqm with all day sun and spectacular views of both the River Derwent and Mount Wellington. All the allotments are perfectly positioned to build your energy efficient dream home.

 - Peter

Bill’s website has had an overhaul with a different look and it now includes on-line purchasing of his products including Whisky, Vodka and Gin with more to follow.

Gary is expert in the supply & installation of quality heating & cooling products from reverse cycle split systems ,including  ducted systems, through to gas heaters, ducted gas heating, Gas & heat pump hot water systems, & all manner of gas cooking appliances, domestic and commercial as well as ventilation systems to suit these products.

Gary believes in doing it once and doing it properly. I have seen Gary’s workmanship and it is first class.

If your business needs a new or updated website, we may be able to help you. Give us a call or send us an email.

 - Peter

Custom WordPress theme advantages:

1. More closely meets the needs of the user.
2. All the clients requirements are taken into account during the design phase and implementation with such things as layout, fonts and function. What they want is what they get.

1. They are considerably more expensive as the designer will need to code the theme.
2. Will usually require more expense to maintain as the original designer would usually maintain the website.
3. May be harder to update or change to a different theme at a later stage.

1. Pre-designed themes are usually quite cheap and in some cases may even be free.
2. Most premium themes have a large range of layout and are quite flexible in their design look and feel.
3. More easily maintained. Updates are usually just a click on the theme update or at worst a file (ftp) upload.
4. Many are well designed an allow a good level of customisation often without needing a knowledge of coding.
5. There are thousands of quality and well maintained themes to choose from.

It all comes down to what do you want and how much are you willing to pay.

WordPress is great for building small business and personal websites and if you can find a pre-built theme that is coded by a company that keeps  it well maintained, it is hard to go wrong.

Bill is using the crystal clear water from natural springs on his property to produce his line of whisky, gin and vodka. Bill has all three ingredients available, pure spring water, clean air and the best climate for whisky production.

Further work is to be done on the McHenry and Son’s website including the addition of on-line purchasing of his products which is coming soon.

 - Peter

The Hobart Wedding Photographer website is built upon WordPress, the world’s best and most popular Content Management System (CMS) using a professionally designed template and framework. The new website is fully responsive for the new world of mobile browsing with portable devices such as tablets and mobile phones.

If you need a new website, give us a call, send us an email or fill out our on-line quote form and let us see what we can do for you. It costs nothing to ask.

–  Peter

RedKelpiesProject.com.au is an independent Australian physical and digital publishing house based in Tasmania.

On-line purchases are now available with the release of their first manuscript, a hard hitting stage play with the promise of more to come.

–  Peter

Find out the reasons why you should consider updating your branding and website over at SEO.com.

Our latest design is a for KAM Joinery one of the leading Joinery businesses in Tasmania manufacturing a large range of quality kitchens, bathrooms, office furniture and shop fitting components and fitouts.

Using the latest in computer aided design techniques and capabilities, KAM Joinery will happily discuss your building needs and can provide you with a quotation for your special project.

KAM Joinery uses all the latest materials and also the traditional natural warmth of beautiful Tasmanian timbers by highly skilled craftsmen with an eye for detail and perfection and have won many awards for their products.

KAM Joinery is a member of the Master Builders Association (MBA) and Housing Industry Association (HIA) of Tasmania and is located at 41 Electra Place, Mornington, Tasmania where you can visit their showroom, browse the many products available and talk with their highly skilled staff about your special needs.

–  Peter

Our latest design is a for the Australian Huian Association one of the leading welfare organizations catering for the interest of over 500 members of the Huian community living in Australia.

The Hui An Association head office is in Melbourne, having 8 branches distributing in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, Adelaide, Tasmania, and Darwin. The Hui an Association has been operating over the last ten years as a social club, providing a platform for the young and the old, to get to-gather and enjoy social entertaining and professional opportunities around Melbourne and Sydney.

The new Australian Huian Association website will help to represent the interests of the Huian community and over the weeks and months ahead more information will be added so check back occasionally to see what they have been up to.

Hobart Website Designs can offer a new web design package that may be suitable for you. Below is a summary of what we can offer all wrapped up in an affordable price.

• Client consultation to find out about your products, services and needs.
• An easy to use award winning WordPress content management system (CMS).  Wordpress gives you full control over your website. You can easily add, delete or modify pages, content, images, video and audio files and documents.
• Custom design of a web site to your requirements.
• Customised branding to suits your business needs. We can design your logo, business cards, stationary to match your new web site.
• A contact form for customers to email you.
• Social media integration to your requirements including a “Like” button for your Facebook visitors.
• An integrated Blog or news page for you to communicate your products and services to existing and potential customers.
• Feedburner RSS setup and installation for your visitors to receive regular updates.
• Browser testing for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers.
• Full search engine optimised (SEO) website.
• Google Analytics setup and installation so you can monitor your traffic statistics.
• Complete website installation including domain name and web hosting.
• Full backup of your website and data.

If you would like to find out more, head on over to the contact page, send us an email and see what we can do for you.

–  Peter

On January 18th, many large internet companies will be blacking out for 24 hours. There is a short video below that gives an insight into what is proposed.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Ideally, your domain name should match your brand name. Think of all the large brands that you can such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Ebay and so on. They are amongst the biggest brand names on the internet and are recognisable world wide.

All the above domain names play a vital role in a website’s popularity but for your small business looking for a web presence, choosing a suitable domain name can often be quite challenging. If you have a brand name but it isn’t widely known, you should think of a domain name that is as close to your business or service as possible.

For example, everyone knows that Ebay is primarily an on-line auction company and to access it you simply need to type in ebay.com. However for your small business domain name it would be best to select a name that you feel would best match the search term that prospective customers would be likely to type when searching for a product or service that you would provide.

If you are a supplier of water pumps, then waterpumps.com.(plus country shortcode) would be a suitable name. It is most likely that that name would already be taken so the next best thing would be to add your locality to the front of the domain name such as hobartwaterpumps.com.au where hobart is an example of a location where I just happen to live. You would simply add the location that your small business serves.

Therefore your small business domain name should:

• Be short yet meaningful. This helps people to remember your domain name when searching.
• Include a keyword that represents the core essence of your new website.
• Include your location if the domain name that you are after is already taken. This will increase your chances of getting a suitable name. If the domain name is already taken, you will need to become more creative in finding a suitable name. It may be worth thinking about renaming your business.

Why should you optimise an image.

• Most modern digital cameras produce images of several MB in size. This is much larger than you need and will slow down page load speed particularly for any one browsing with a slow connection. Slow page load speed is guaranteed to frustrate visitors and cause them to move on and may also harm your page ranking.
• There are many image formats available but not all image formats are supported on the web.
• Most computer monitors display images at 72dpi (Dots Per Inch).
• Images are usually the slowest part of a web page to download and display.

If you want to make your website load fast then you need to optimise any images that you use.

How do you optimise an image.

The best way of optimising an image is to use a program where you can compress the image, reduce it’s resolution and save the image in a format suitable for your website. There are many programmes that can do this including Adobe Photoshop as a high end product to free photo editors.

Free photo editors may include Picassa, Irfanview, Gimp, Paint.net, PixBuilder Studio and many others that are available for download. Some of these are quite powerful but also complicated to use so if this is new to you, try one of the simpler ones such as PixBuilder Studio from WnSoft Ltd.

When you have decided on an image editor you will need to optimise your image to make it ready for uploading. This process is usually quite easy and it is just a matter of importing your image into the image editor and re-saving it to a suitable format, size and quality.

For photos, jpeg is the preferred format and image size is largely your personal preference as to what looks best on your website and if you intend the image to enlarge when clicking on it. My preference is to set the maximum image size to 700px (pixels) on the longest side and at 72dpi.

Another important point to note is to make sure that you title your image with a meaningful name. This is important for SEO reasons. An image file with a name such as dsc_2433 is totally meaningless for search engines. Give your images meaningful names and descriptions.

  –  Peter

If I want to hire an excavator or similar business or trade for example, I personally would go to the Yellow Pages as I know that there are not a lot of these type of businesses with an online presence yet but times are changing.

With the rapid increase in smartphones and other online devices, more people have the ability to search online for a product or service than ever before.  The ability to search online is easier than it has ever been. Looking for a photographer,  Civil Celebrant, fishing guides, boat charters, dinner for two, or just about any other service or product, the way to go is online.

There are many advantages with a website compared to a Yellow Pages advertisment and below are a few of them.

• Cost – Your Yellow Pages advertisement is very expensive for just a few words and perhaps a small picture. With a website, there is little or no practical limit to the available content that you can have.
• Effectiveness – There is no effective and easy way of measuring your return on investment with Yellow Pages. A website can easily have very effective measurement and tracking of visitors and conversions.
• Changes – You can only change a Yellow Pages advertisement once a year whereas a website can be changed whenever it is needed.
• Targeted search – With the Yellow Pages, you need a different advertisement for each category that you want a presence. A website can easily be designed to be found in multiple categories on a search.
• Availability – Your website is available worldwide. The Yellow Pages is only available where the Yellow Pages book is distributed or found.
• Content – Basically unlimited with a website, very small with Yellow Pages.
• Interactivity – Your website is usually interactive with such things as contact forms, online sales, surveys, social media, polls and many more.

Our latest design is a for Condo Rossa, a premium waterfront accommodation property on the beautiful banks of the Derwent River in Hobart, Tasmania.

John and Kerry Edwards run Condo Rossa  and are now taking bookings for accommodation starting from 29th October, 2011. Imagine waking to a water view that is nothing short of fantastic on one of the best waterways in the world.

Thinking of a break or a get-away, call John and Kerry Edwards or send them an email.

The Condo Rossa website is typical of the sort of website that we can create for you. Do you want an online presence for a great price, give us a call.

If you would like to find out more, head on over to the contact page, send us an email and see what we can do for you.

–  Peter

Our latest design is a for Trout Fishing Tours of Tasmania and can give you some idea of the work we can do to help your small business build an online presence.

Alex and Charles Gilmour run Trout Fishing Tours and will take their clients to some of the best fly fishing areas in Australia. They can provide overnight accommodation in their cabin where you can visit some of the over 3000 lakes in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.

Alex and Charles will be posting some of their adventures over the weeks and months ahead so if trout fishing is among’st your interest, then check back occasionally to see what they have been up to.

For those who want to know what you can get in a new web design package, here is a list.

• Client consultation to find out about your products, services and needs.
• An easy to use award winning WordPress content management system (CMS).  Wordpress gives you full control over your website. You can easily add, delete or modify pages, content, images, video and audio files and documents.
• Custom design of a web site to your requirements.
• Customised branding to suits your business needs. We can design your logo, business cards, stationary to match your new web site.
• A contact form for customers to email you.
• Social media integration to your requirements including a “Like” button for your Facebook visitors.
• An integrated Blog or news page for you to communicate your products and services to existing and potential customers.
• Feedburner RSS setup and installation for your visitors to receive regular updates.
• Browser testing for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers.
• Full search engine optimised (SEO) website.
• Google Analytics setup and installation so you can monitor your traffic statistics.
• Complete website installation including domain name and web hosting.
• Full backup of your website and data.

If you would like to find out more, head on over to the contact page, send us an email and see what we can do for you.

–  Peter

Tasmanian Waterfront Properties focuses entirely on waterfront and waterview properties in Tasmania only and offers a free listing service for those real estate agents with waterfront properties to sell. Private sellers wanting to sell their waterfront or waterview properties are also catered for.

The real estate market is very slow and down in Tasmania at the moment and any exposure is important to help assist the sale of advertised properties. There are lots of listing services on the internet but there are few if any that only concentrate on Tasmanian waterfront properties. The web has become the go-to place for looking for real estate.

Tasmanian Waterfront Properties website is built upon WordPress, the world’s best and most popular Content Management System (CMS) using a professional template. Building a website with WordPress is the most cost effective way of of building an on-line presence.

If you need a new website, give us a call, send us an email or fill out our on-line quote form and let us see what we can do for you. It costs nothing to ask.

–  Peter

WordPress now powers 14% of all websites worldwide with over 280 million users per month and 2.5 billion page views. It is powering websites, blogs, portfolios, stores and much more. Business, companies, organisations and individuals such as CNN, NFL, TED and millions more and including of course, this website are all powered by WordPress.

Mullenweg has been named as one of the 25 most influential people on the web, Matt Mullenweg founded and runs WordPress as an open source web platform which has revolutionised website publishing. WordPress has evolved from a blogging platform into a general-purpose CMS which is used by millions of sites on the web and it is one of the most popular content management system around being used by many Fortune 500 companies.

Memburn has an interesting interview with Matt Mullenweg.

WordPress is free and maintained by a large group of professional developers who donate their time to make WordPress better and more powerful. It offers great SEO staight out of the box, an easy to use content management system and great extensibity.

Why would you want to use anything else for your small business website?

 -  Peter