• WordPress installation and customisation
• Thesis flexible DIY Template that allows you to upload your own image as a banner – Thesis normally US$87
• Gravity Form – DIY Contact forms and database – normally US$39
• Basic pictorial user guide to help you get started
• 1 year US Standard Hosting
• 1 year .com domain registration
• Retail price $750

Wait for it…..   This week's price: $300

Limit: 5 buyers

My boss might be (is!) crazy. So the rest of us sane White Dog staffers have decided to limit this offer to 5 people! Call or email us this week to get started!

(Note: offer does not include formal web design)

This is a ready to go WordPress site, providing the "Thesis" premium theme which normally retails at $87 as part of this package.  Thesis allows you to customize most features of your website.  You can upload your own banner image and change your colours and font in the theme.

We are also including a premium Contact form package called Gravity Forms, which allows you to easily set up new contact forms, including validation, via a simple interface (pretty much drag and drop).  You can store the results in a database, send them via email, or even, if you are that way inclined, write code to handle the entries yourself.

To get started or ask for more info: send us an email at our support address asking for the "Newsletter WordPress deal" and we'll be in touch with you!

Haleemon

After nearly 3 years with us here in Australia, Haleemon is relocating to the US to be closer to family and will be continuing to work remotely for us.  We'll miss Haleemon's cheery physical presence almost as much as she'll miss the black and white stripes but she'll still be around!  Haleemon will be on holiday until Dec 10th and only checking email occasionally, so if there is something urgent please send your email to support@whitedoggreenfrog.com as usual. Bad Collingwood jokes always help ease her day so send them along too.

We will have some new friendly voices on our helpdesk from January, so stay tuned for the introductions from then.

Christmas 2011 holidays

White Dog Green Frog will be operating on a skeleton basis as usual over Christmas this year from 23rd December, and will reopen on Monday 10th January 2011.  As usual, support will be available from our email address at support at whitedoggreenfrog.com or via our contact form.  Also as usual, we will continue to monitor our servers 24/7 over the holiday period.

Voicemail will be checked only occasionally so we ask that all support issues be addressed by email or our web contact page (we can call back if needed).

Internet addresses and IPv6

Interesting news is that the internet's "IP addresses" (IPv4) are going to be running out over the next 12 months.  An "IP address" is assigned to most internet users, although web servers share them between websites.  When we run out, it's likely ISPs will change the way they work and there may be some growing differences in the ways things work which you'll start to notice as the year rolls through.  Although a new form of addressing called "IPv6" has been invented to solve the problem, with more than enough addresses for the future, it is not widely used at this point, and not well understood technically so we're not holding our breath on that one.  As usual, our own ISP, Internode, is at the forefront of deploying and using this technology in Australia.

New stringent Anti-Virus measures come into effect

Today, 1st Dec 2010, the Aussie ISP industry released a code that could see your PC being quarantined from the internet if you get infected with virus "zombie" code.  Zombie code lives on your PC and while it often affects you very little, it does affect ISPs (wasting their internet bandwidth) and can be used for many and varied illegal purposes, unknown to yourself (propagating spam, botnets, attacking others, organized crime, etc).  See the industry site and the ITnews writeup for further information – and make sure you have active current antivirus on your PC (and/or use family filter etc). [Ed: this is an exciting step forward in keeping the internet safe for us all, though it makes having current anti-virus a lot more important! - Brian]

Christmas blog offer vouchers – $150 for your own blog and domain name for a year!

Temporary insanity has again prevailed and this year we are almost giving away $1000 websites as Christmas Vouchers – your own fully fledged WordPress sites, which can be used as your own self-maintainable website or your own blog for a fraction of the normal price! We don't normally do this, but we will throw in the same set of professional plugins we use in our website development (starting at $1000+!), and we will advise you on how to set up posting by email – so you can literally just send an email to automatically update your site!!

Ideal as a Christmas or holiday present for your family – keep them entertained over Christmas!

This offer expires in 3 weeks!

Possible uses:

• Small business website
• Family news blog
• Family name domain and news site  (eg @smith.com for the Smith family)
• Could be used by a travelling family member

We will also advise on how to choose a template for your site, or how to find a "premium" template if you want something a little snappier. This is a cut-down version of what you can pay over $1000 for! (Note: not included: blog support, graphics and template work and adjustments, training) Short pictorial training manual available, vouchers must be redeemed by end of March to get the free plugin install, .com/.net/.org or .au domain included, ABN required for .au domains, user support for blog not included.

Please note: this offer expires on 21 Dec 2010!!

If you’re not a Collingwood supporter, you must sing it with gusto…twice !

Go the PIES!

You may have set up Facebook, Twitter, maybe even an RSS feed of blog posts, but don’t discount what a newsletter can do for your business – and for your customers.

When your visitors sign up to your mailing list via your newsletter sign up form, you are in control of what you send and when you send it; and email newsletters cost almost nothing to send compared to paper newsletters – these being distinct advantages!  By the way – your newsletter should provide valuable and useful information, and don’t forget the ATTENTION GRABBING HEADLINE!

It’s important not to be annoying or self-serving in your newsletters;  I always recommend only very subtle selling, if any, especially in the first 2 – 3 newsletters, then perhaps add a special offer in the fourth newsletter. Obviously it depends on what industry you are in as to what the right mix is.  You should, of course, have links to your blog posts that are relevant to the content in the newsletter.  Also, don’t discount the value of getting people to sign up at your counter or in your office on paper for the newsletter – you can get a lot of people via old fashioned techniques!  If you do that, one important thing is to make sure you do add them to the newsletter in the next few days so they remember you.

Mailing lists are simple to set up and maintain, if you would like a consultant to contact you to assist you in setting up a contact form and mailing list, give us a call.  Mailing lists are a thing that builds up over time; if you start today, you could surprise yourself by how quickly you build up a big list – and that can be a valuable asset to your business.  After all is said and done, business is about human contact, and a quick note with some helpful and friendly information can be one way of staying in touch that costs very little.

Contact us today and get 15% off the setup of a newsletter mailing list.

One of the most amazing, and under-discussed, ideas to come out on the internet over the last decade is the concept of “Wikis”.  Most of you would, of course, be familiar with Wikipedia, which is an example of a certain type of Wiki – albeit on a huge scale!  However, Wikis in their original idea are much more simple – the idea being that they provide an easy to use and easy to search medium for dumping ideas and thoughts down.  There are several key concepts in the Wiki paradigm that make it extremely useful:

1. Wikis are easy to add text to and require little knowledge to use.  We use MediaWiki internally and added a module to it called “FckEdit” which allows easy-to-use formatting (see example of editor window below)

   

2. Anyone can change a Wiki – As little security as possible is enforced, the idea being that the more control that’s imposed the less likely people are to contribute.
3. Documentation evolves – it doesn’t have to perfect at first try, it’s better to just get something out there so the community can assist with evolving it

Initial experiments with Wikis have proved them to be a highly successful way of documenting processes, ideas and systems – they often work where more formal approaches have been tried and failed.  Obviously Wikipedia itself is a great example of just this, but there are many stories of Wiki technology transforming businesses and government departments.

One of the key ideas of Wikis is that anyone can modify a page.  This works because it keeps a history of changes and if you want to revert to a change, it’s only a click away. This means that if someone makes an edit which introduces errors, the change can easily be reversed.

Wikis are searchable – so it makes it easy to look up concepts and work done in the past, even if it was done a few years ago.  For instance, we were talking about some custom work we had done on our PBX phone system the other day.  We looked up the Wiki entry, which took us about 30 seconds to find, and instantly we had some basic info on the work that had been done 2 years ago, which none of us had been able to remember in detail until we saw the short (10 line) article we’d written when the work was done.  One of the tips here is to make sure you include keywords that might help to find the article.

At White Dog, there have been times when it’s been hard to get the idea of how important documentation is into the team’s head.  In order to bootstrap our Wiki when we started it in 2008, the deal was that coffee would be free at our team meeting every week if you brought an article you’d created in the Wiki!  Over time, as a result of the coffee policy, we’ve collected 337 articles in our Wiki and it’s become an invaluable and fairly complete record of our work practices, process and policies.

Some example articles from our Wiki:

• a 3 line article summarizing 3 hours of research to make it easy to find next time we need it
• 5 liner on when the garbage bins goes out and how to contact the council
• an article outlining some standards for web development practices
• a summary of key plugins for Joomla
• Documentation on our servers and their configuration
• Policies on email and internet use

A wiki takes time to build up, but can be an absolutely vital tool in taking your business to the next step.

Staff training can be accelerated with a Wiki too – new staff can read the article then discuss it with existing team members, and we also ask them to update articles as they find inaccuracies or unclear writing.

One important thing to remember with a Wiki is that the articles can actually be very short – sometimes a quick tip or a link to a useful website can save many hours of research.  It’s also important to remember that you are generally writing for a knowledgeable person and there’s no need to spend ages documenting the more obvious details – at least initially, getting the broader or the rough details down can be a big start and you can come back and refine what you’ve written later.  It’s better to get something down rather than nothing!  As your Wiki evolves, it can become an online process manual which can greatly contribute to the value of your business.

Wikis are actually relatively easy and cheap to set up, and can even take the place of a normal website if it’s relevant to your business.  Most are based on free software and there are some good options – TikiWiki and MediaWiki being the strongest as far as I know, but there are many others.

Has anyone else used Wiki technology in their companies?  Please comment and share if you have.

If your interested in a wiki, shoot us an email or give us a call. We will install and configure it for $600 ( though mention this blog article and get $100 off if ordered during month of July). We also provide a PDF cheat sheet on on how to do the basics. Turnaround time is 3 business days.

When you buy your White Dog Green Frog hosting you receive a login to cPanel (control panel) which allows you to set up as many emails as you need, backup your website etc. It also gives you access to a range of software programs which includes Joomla and WordPress.

If you have some level of competence, you could set up a website using Joomla or WordPress. If time and inclination hold you up, why not call us? We can do your web development for you for a very reasonable rate. We use Joomla and WordPress (both full content management systems) which then allows you the ability to make any changes to your site.

Our Joomla websites start from a low $999! Visit our website and look under the Web Design tab for some links to what they look like!

The first 5 readers to mention this article will receive the free setup of a WordPress blog with any new Joomla project.**

**New Joomla project must start before May 31, 2010

If you are a Collingwood supporter, flash us your Dane Swan membership card and we’ll give you $100 off your web development package!

St Kilda and Carlton supporters will be charged an extra $50. GO PIES!!!