Our company has just launched our new Website Xero Plus One.
We have a large variety of Invoice Templates available to use with the Xero Accounting System.
Here is a screenshot of one of the templates called Long Black.
So if you are looking to spice up your invoice then have a look, l am sure you will find something you like.
If you would like to know how to customise your Xero Invoice’s, here is a video to show you how. It is easy.
When you run a web design business out Melbourne that’s as large as ours, you inevitably end up with lots and lots of customers who need your help. Most of the time, our customers don’t really need much from us. It’s usually some small niggling thing that they can’t quite figure out, and in some cases it’s an error we made. For a long time, we had to search through all of our emails and contact forms to find all of these customers. Now that we’ve got Zendesk, our lives are a lot easier.
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Let me tell you a story. Not too long ago, I wrote a quick post talking about HDR photography. I put some HDR photos on my website and wrote a quick description about them, thinking little of it at the time. A few months went by, and much to my amazement, those images had grown into a significant source of traffic for Blinq’s website. How did I do it? There were no programming tricks or hacks, no smoke and mirrors. I just paid attention to the rules of image SEO.
Pictures are something that we humans naturally “get.” We look at them and instantly understand what they’re about. The same can’t be said for the programs Google uses to search the web for useful content. They can’t “decode” an image in the same way we naturally can.
Put simply, we need to help the programs figure out what’s in our images.
That’s why images also have alt and title tags. By saying something relevant to the image in either of these tags, you ensure that Google knows what your image is about. You don’t need to jam every possible search query into these tags. By merely using them at all, you’re miles ahead of the crowd.
So, do you want to know how I got traffic just by posting an image? I put the following description into its alt tag:
subaru HDR 3 by exxx2005 HDR Photography Tutorials by Paul Stamatiou
This description hits on a lot of different searches people might enter into Google. Maybe they want to learn more about HDR photography. Maybe they’re interested in Paul Statmatiou’s work or Subarus. By placing these keywords in the alt tag, I’m giving myself the best possible chance of ranking high for these common HDR-related search terms.
Here’s where you need to enter it if you’re editing the HTML directly:
You’ll want to place the description in the “ alt = ” section. If you’re a WordPress user, you can place the same description in the Alternate Text box of the image editor. Be sure to fill in the caption and description sections too. The more written content surrounding your photo, the better.
Surprisingly, that was nearly all I had to do get the image to appear whenever people search for the term HDR photography. Want me to prove it? Here are the recent stats from my website’s search engine analytics.
As you can see, the search “blinq hdr” counts for nearly 3% of my total traffic. Imagine that! All I did was put an image up on a website and properly describe it. Easy.
Do be careful, however. You still need to follow all of the other rules of SEO. You need to write solid content around the images you’re putting on your website. That means writing an article that’s at least 350 words long. Don’t forget to provide your audience with substantial content, not just a bunch of images with links.
Here’s the big takeaway. Google can’t read images any better than you can read binary code. They’re one big blur of pixels. Help Google out. Properly describe your images by using the alt text and other tools WordPress offers. You’ll soon find yourself getting a lot more traffic from the images you post.
Business Apps. Which is better? Native or web-based?
Continuing on with some of the themes I discussed on Talking Technology earlier this month, I’d like to talk about another concern among small to medium business owners. What do you do to take care of all the people out there using mobile phones and other devices? Should you build an app for your business, and if you do choose to go down that road, how should you do it?
There is a difference between a business app and a mobile website. A mobile website is a scaled down version of your website, made to look good on a mobile phone. It includes everything normally found on your website, just in a smaller form. As a matter of fact, more web designers and developers are including mobile and tablet websites as a package with the websites they sell to their clients. People who walk through the door get everything in a one stop shop.
Apps are different. Apps live on your mobile phone (or iPod or whatever you like), and they work totally fine offline. Because they have more access to the resources on your phone, they can do a lot more interesting things. A good example of an app is a video game like Angry Birds. The graphics are sharp and crystal clear, and the animation runs flawlessly. You’d be hard-pressed to find the same experience with a mobile website.
As a developer, it’s a lot more fun to build native apps. The tools are a lot nicer, and you get more control over the experience. It’s funny. People complain about Apple’s iPhone being a “closed” environment, but your opinion will change rather quickly once you start using their developer tools. Superior doesn’t even come close to describing it.
What’s with web apps?
There’s a third category that’s somewhere in between. It doesn’t quite know what it is. I’m talking about web apps. Web apps are mobile websites that are built to look and feel like a native app. Most of them only work when you’re online, but some of them also work when you’re offline. The idea behind them is to create a single app that works on every imaginable smartphone or tablet-like device.
Is a web app really just a mobile website? I think you could make a pretty good argument that it is. I’m more inclined to think that if it’s just a website masked as an app, then who are we really kidding? Shouldn’t an app be something that does a unique thing? Shouldn’t it have some sort of usefulness that separates it from a standard website? You, of course, are free to draw your own conclusions.
Which one to choose?
I think all businesses need to have a mobile website. Whether they need to have an app is up for debate. A mobile website will make your website viewable to anyone anywhere with practically any device. That’s incredibly useful, especially as the world continues to adopt more and more of these devices. Pretty soon it will be an absolute necessity (if it isn’t already).
For an app to make sense from a business perspective, it needs to do things that a mobile website can’t do. If you’re building an app just to get your name onto the App Store, you aren’t building it for the right reasons. You need to have a feature in mind, something that taps into the power of the mobile device itself.
So maybe you’re a law firm and you want a simple app that your customers can use to send a voice recording or video of their legal plight to your offices for review. Maybe you’re a bank that wants to offer a quick and easy way for your customers to view their latest transactions. These are great reasons to build an app.
If you already have a great mobile website, and you want to turn it into an app without adding any extra value, why bother? Your website is fine. People will find you through that. And if somebody downloads your app, they’ll think it’s a farce because it doesn’t do anything interesting. Don’t create an app around your already existing website. Create an app that’s actually useful, and use it to advertise your business. That’s the best way to leverage the true potential of apps.
I’ve never been big on sales. Allow me to rephrase that. I am big on sales, but not the kind of sales that leave clients scratching their heads. My company, Hypnotic Zoo, works in web and mobile app development. We know how tech salespeople can be. They’ll mystify you with features you don’t need, all to sign as many clients as they can. We’re all about making lots of sales. We just want to make sure we’re selling you the right things. More importantly, we want to know you’re ready to work with us.
The topic came up during a conversation I had when I appeared on RMIT’s Talking Technology in mid-October. I was asked how we get our clients to commit to a mobile app for their business. The truth is this. There is no coercion involved. By the time our clients are ready for a mobile app, we’ve been working with them for quite some time. At that point, it’s a natural next step for both of us.
This is the way we’ve been operating for as long as we’ve been around, and we think it’s the right way to do business. We like to think of ourselves as website physicians. When you come to see us, we do a quick health check first. We have a look at your current website, see how you’re doing with SEO, and then we ask you a series of questions to see just how far into this you’ve gotten. Only after a thorough assessment do we start offering treatment options.
To be quite honest, you might not need us. We’re okay with that. We’d rather you be comfortable taking the next step than having any reservations. Some of our clients are excited to continue on with us, and others are happy where they are. We’d rather be the doctor. We’d rather tell you what your situation is and what you can do to improve it. If you want to work with us, great. If not, that’s fine too.
After we take enough baby steps, we’ll take off the training wheels and hit our stride. By then, you’ll be comfortable enough with the direction we’re going together. In our view, it’s a lot better than trying to sell every client who comes into our sights.
We’ve almost fully utilised the power of Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Last time, we went through some of the more advanced individual post settings and discussed why it’s important to keep certain pages and sections out of Google’s index. In a nutshell, you want Google to see the pages with lots of written content and few external links. Other pages, such as your login page, are like leaks in a faucet. They siphon off your total page rank, ultimately harming your chances of ranking well for certain photography related search terms.
In the last post, we installed the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and got to work on tweaking our blog posts for the purpose of SEO. We learned about the importance of picking the right focus keywords. This is all in an effort to bring in more traffic from our local area. After all, that’s where we’re most likely to get new clients.
I gave you a homework assignment in the last post. If you haven’t done it yet, please don’t continue to read this. What we covered in the [intlink id="wordpress-seo-installation-guide-for-photographers" type="post"]previous post[/intlink] is more important than what we will cover in this one. You need to get it done first. The rest is important, but it’s mostly the icing on the cake. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down before you can use it.
We recently worked with Melbourne Photography company Blinq Photography. This was originally posted on their website, but we thought it would also play a role on ours.
As most you would know, Photography and SEO, the two are rarely uttered in the same sentence. Photographers and other creatives often eschew the technical stuff like maintaining websites so they can do the awesome stuff like taking amazing pictures and pleasing their clients. I can’t blame you. I am you. And that’s why I’m so excited about Yoast’s new WordPress SEO Plugin.
Matt Mullenweg presented his State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco 2011 last weekend. He spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of about 1,000 people.
He shared some key stats about a survey that was conducted some months prior. Here are the key takeaways;
WordPress 3.2 introduced an update to the automatic updates built into WordPress to allow for partial downloads. This meant that when automatically updating your WordPress site, after 3.2, only a partial download (of changes) would be necessary, and not a full copy.
According to Napkin MathTM by core developer and Audrey Capital Tech Ninja Andrew Nacin, shipping 3.2.1 (the update that came right after 3.2) as partial builds saved WordPress.org approximately one terabyte in bandwidth costs compared to the previous full download upgrades. Additional savings are expected in later versions as well, since a lot of people upgraded to 3.2.1 from 3.1 instead of 3.2.
This was one aspect of the move to partial downloads that I hadn’t really considered. Had you considered this benefit when you first found out about partial download upgrades?