Our world is becoming more visual by the day as more images are shared, messages are quickly conveyed, and a brand story is told. When Canberra Web is designing or updating your website, we will spend as much time consulting with you about the imagery of your site as we will about the text and the build.

Unfortunately, high-quality photos for your website can be as expensive as they are important. Luckily your digital marketing experts right here in Canberra are going to share four ways you can save your web design dollars and visually promote your brand, with stock images:

1) When They Don’t Have People in Them

We’ve all seen those cheesy corporate stock photos of a group of people in a bland office posing unnaturally. These photos can be spotted a mile away as stock images and they are the reason stock photography has a poor reputation. Don’t take the risk of trying to pass off a stock image as your team, when your ‘team’ could already be appearing on someone else’s website.

2) When They Don’t Have Your Products in Them

Just as the value of your team is found in the unique individuals you have curated for your business, your product or service is just as unique to your brand. Therefore, don’t try and pass off a stock image as your own product, you’ll lose your unique selling position, and only you can convey your product or service.

3) When They’re There for a Reason

Yes, images are a valuable storytelling tool, but choosing a stock image just because you’re short of images for your website is not going to help you market your brand. Make sure the stock images you choose are relevant to the story you’re telling on that page. Plus, while you’re searching free stock image sites, keep an eye out for photos which feature your corporate colours to tie everything together.

4) When They are Customised

That brings us to the best way you can use stock images to your advantage in website design, through customisation. Don’t be afraid to crop or Photoshop a stock image to make it more focussed and relevant to your brand. Overlay text on a stock image to make your content more visually appealing and connect the dots for your readers about why the image is there.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the task of choosing images for your website design. For web design Canberra businesses can rely on, contact the experts at Canberra Web.

Want to build a killer new website to launch your online presence with a bang? Here are some tips for first-time web builders to make your website the ultimate marketing tool.

Tip 1: Set your goals

Setting yourself some smart and measurable goals is an important first step. Before your new website is up and running you will need to identify key targets. A good way to start this is by asking yourself some important questions. Is your aim to increase sales? Or maybe you are just trying to increase awareness of your business or personal brand? Take a good long think about what you would like to be your ultimate end result.

Tip 2: Suss out your competition

Checking out your competitors in the field can never hurt. Before you start commencing the build of your site, take to Google and write out a few things your competitors do well, for example, how the website should look or feel or the way they set out their menu navigation on their website. As you begin to build a pile of notes, you will start to notice reoccurring patterns which you can use as a launching pad to formulate ideas for your own creation and stand out from your rivals!

Tip 3: Be prepared

Sitting down and contemplating how big or small you want your site to become can never hurt, and this all stops with content. Development of content is the biggest factor that can slow down a website development process. Want a workable site with minimum turnaround? Then be prepared! Regardless of whether you are selling products or marketing services - have photos and descriptions ready at hand. Ensure that have as many translatable ideas ready for the designers before the build, as you could potentially save weeks of your time!

Show a little faith!

Lastly, and most importantly, have faith in who in your web designer! Ensure the relationship between you is fluid and collaborative. It is important to remember that web designers are experts in their field, and in trusting them to do their job, they’re more likely to exceed your expectations and build the site of your dreams! For more information about web design Canberra businesses can count on, contact CanberraWeb.

How to make your website more functional

While having a website design that is unique and contemporary is important to attract your online audiences attention, if your site is difficult to navigate it can cause visitors to leave early, otherwise known as a high bounce rate. Unfortunately, this may result in loss of sales, especially if you have an e-commerce website, because the longer your audience spends on your site often increases your chances for sales opportunities.

When you have a website built, it's important to incorporate features that make it functional and easy to navigate. To assist you in this process, we've highlighted some of the things to consider.

Timely loading speed

There's nothing worse than having to wait ages for a website to load. A vital factor in having a functional website is ensuring your site loads quickly. In fact, when surveyed, 40% of web users said they would leave a site that took more than 3 seconds to load. If your customer or user is left waiting, you'll often find they won't bother staying unless they desperately want the products or services you sell.

Page linking

By adding links between pages you can make your website more functional, so your online audience can navigate it with ease. Often online consumers will want to find out more about products or services, so linking these pages to your contact page means it's a simple and streamlined process for visitors to send an enquiry.

Make it easy for the user to go back

If users have ended up on the wrong page by accident, they will quickly want to go back immediately. An easy way for your customers to trace where their path went wrong or return quickly is with an ever-present drop-down navigation menu or with breadcrumbs, which show the pages a user accessed to get to where they are. Users can easily click on these to get to where they'd like to go, adding more fluency to your web design.

Another tip is to regularly review your links to check for any that aren't working and either fix those links or create page redirects. That will eliminate any instances of users landing on a 404 page, which can result in site abandonment.

These are some of the essential features that will increase your site's functionality. If you need help creating a functional website, our team at Canberra Web have the expertise to assist you. We specialise in building user-friendly, fully responsive websites on a broad range of platforms including WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Open Cart, Mojo Shop and Woo Commerce. Contact ustoday to get started!

You may have some ideas for your established website which will improve its look or functionality, or perhaps you’re just starting out and you have some great ideas for a new website; but have you considered that those brilliant ideas can become a major challenge without the expertise and understanding required of how web hosting and web hosting companies work?

With that in mind, here are 5 important features that a great web hosting company should provide.

PHP script

In simple terms, this is the script used to develop both static and dynamic websites. Given that this is the most popular website script currently on the market, it’s not surprising that most web hosting companies will offer this.

SQL script hosting

Not sure what this is? SQL is used to communicate with a database, and because it's needed to update data, or retrieve data from a database, it’s essential that the web hosting company you choose can provide SQL script hosting.

Additional domain names

If in the future, you’d like to have additional websites as your original site grows and expands, it’s important that you ensure any prospective web hosting company can provide multiple domain names to web hosting accounts.

CGI scripting

Although this is the PHP script of the past, CGI scripting is still necessary at this time when it comes to successful web hosting. Although many web hosting companies offer CGI as their default script, it's always better to select a company that offers both CGI and PHP scripts until CGI eventually becomes obsolete.

Monitoring tools

There’s no point in having a fantastic looking website if you can’t access statistics and monitor the performance of your business. Monitoring tools are critical to the growth of your business as they will enable you to quickly identify any areas that need improvement, and most professional web hosting companies will offer some form of monitoring tools.

Your website can not only look amazing but will function perfectly by simply contacting an expert in web hosting Canberra businesses can rely on.

Canberra Web is your local web hosting company who not only host but design, build and maintain superior websites. So, while Canberra Web’s expert team provide you with the highest level of service, you can focus on managing your business. But best of all, this premium service is available at an affordable price; what more could you ask for?

Being able to easily navigate your way around a website is an integral aspect of website building. For a potential customer, there's nothing more off-putting than being unable to find the information you need on a website. Here are some of the reasons to take navigation into account when it comes to your business' website.

Professional presentation

If there is no clear navigation on your website, it will seem unorganised to potential customers. The lack of structure can give an impression that your business itself may be inefficient, which is the last thing you want viewers to think.

Having a navigation bar on your site, or tools which make navigation easy shows that your website is accessible and holds all the depth of information your customers may need.

An easy and enjoyable experience

Visitors to your site want to be able to get straight to the point of their visit- they don't want to have to figure out the way your site works! With simple to follow navigation, viewers can feel at ease on your site. This means they may spend more time enjoying your site and come back again. Good navigation also means viewers can speed up their search efforts.

Higher conversion rate

When using quality navigation on your website, visitors are able to reach the information they came there for easily. Navigation encourages exploration, leading viewers to see more of your products or services. The more they are able to see of what services you're offering, the more likely they are to sign up, make a purchase or book your services.

Good quality navigation goes hand in hand with SEO, enabling proper indexing by search engine spiders. This means your site will come up higher on more searches when quality navigation is in place, leading to more click-throughs.

At Canberra Web, we place emphasis on creating high-quality navigation when building your website. We offer a wide range of services to get your website working for you. Call or email us today to see how we can assist you with the best web design Canberra has to offer.

I was recently asked by a potential client why I recommended Joomla! to be used for building their website.

Let me explain the benefits of using Joomla versus using anything else, and by anything else I mean comparing building a website using some type of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver, or building a website with a comparative type of software package.

Joomla! is a Content Management system

which means that it is built to ensure that website pages can easily be maintained and updated. This includes for example, adding new pages or removing pages. This is the main advantage above building a website in straight forward HTML that would normally be the end product of using some type of HTML editor.

But why Joomla? Why not something else like a Microsoft based product or another commercial product?

• Joomla is Open Source, which means that there are no licensing fees payable, that you have often pay for a Microsoft product or a commercial product
• Because Joomla is Open Source, there is a huge pool of community resources available to provide support. The Joomla community is huge worldwide as well as in local countries, there are often local user groups which are very well supported often even in small countries such as South Africa. There is an enormous pool of people supporting the product. The forum on the Joomla.org site has over 200 000 members all providing support and input into making Joomla! a better product.
• There are millions of sites worldwide (about 10 Million if you do a guestimate using Google) that runs on Joomla. It is therefore extremely popular and widely used which also means that it will never be difficult to find developers and people to support it.
• Because it is so popular, it also means that by now there have been quite a few books written about Joomla! from various perspectives to assist both the developer as well as the end-user.

Some other good reasons to use Joomla!

One of the most attractive features of using Joomla! is the fact that is so very easy to extend its functionality. You can build anything from a brochure website to a full-featured shopping cart or interactive membership site. This is because there are over 3500 add-ons and plugins available to extend its functionality. This ranges from shopping carts, image galleries, video plugins, forums, blogs, project management tools, etc etc

The Joomla templating system

Makes it easy to change the look and feel of your site without having to redo the whole site from scratch. You can literally change the whole graphic design/look of the site in a matter of seconds while retaining the content.

 Features & Benefits

• Ability to edit formatting, such as changing fonts, sizes, colours etc..
• A complete file manager allowing you to insert, remove, resize and create pop up images as well as insert flash animations.
• On-site and off-site linking functionality providing the ability to create links to other website's as well as links to other pages within your own website.
• Video (YouTube / Vimeo etc), Google Maps and affiliate code insertion.
• Insert and manage PayPal "Pay Now" buttons, enabling you to accept payments through the website.
• Spell-checking functionality. 
• User friendly table creation for page layout.
• No software required to download or install.
• Easy to use, no training required, although we do provide training to get you started and additional support if you require 
• The ability to upload any file type (for example, PDF, Word document, Excel file etc) and offer it for download by your website visitors.
• Content Management System can be accessed from any internet connection allowing you to update your own website on the fly.
• There are no on-going fees to use the system.
• No reoccurring fees or licences, the system is yours included in the cost of the website.

Many people struggle to differentiate between a web application (web app) and a website 

A website refers to a location that hosts a page or several pages that are often on a particular topic, e.g. a business or organisations products and services. A website is accessed via a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) online from any computer connected to the internet. Websites are typically made up of static pages with low interactivity.

A web app can exist on the internet or on local intranets. When available on the internet, a web app is often hosted as a separate page on a website. In comparison to a website, it is more difficult to build a web app as it is more resource intensive being made up of lots of dynamic pages with high interactivity. 

In order to build web apps it is essential to understand at least two or more of the following languages if you want to implement server-side scripts that process data:

• Java
• Javascript
• Dynamic HTML
• Silverlight
• PHP
• AJAX

Our programming experts at Canberra Web build more than websites, we create superior web applications that transform your online business or organisations interactivity which in turn greatly improves the user experience. What we do at Canberra Web is endeavour to make sure that your websites image works hard for you with customised applications tailored by our team! 

6 ways to decide: WordPress or Joomla?

So as we race into 2020, it's no longer necessary to recommend getting a great website up and running.

But if you've decided to upgrade, or you're just making those crucial decisions about how to get online in the best possible way, there are plenty of options.

So let's discuss two of the best content management systems (CMS) for creating, editing and publishing your content, and ask yourself the simple question: WordPress or Joomla?

1. Performance
   
   Some believe WordPress is the slower option, and there is some evidence that suggests this is the case. But a well configured WordPress site will perform as well as Joomla! - it just has to be set up right.
   
   
2. Security
   
   If you were judging purely on widespread usage, then WordPress seems like the best bet. There are almost 80 million WordPress sites out there, while comparatively less Joomla! sites have been built.
   But Joomla! also takes security very seriously, with any vulnerabilities that are identified quickly patched up. With both, the key is good configuration and management.
   
   
3. Support
   
   Again, the fact that WordPress is used so widely means that the team has greater resources when you need support. That's great news for novices, due to all the support content and also a bustling community willing to help
   Joomla! users, on the other hand, will also be able to get answers to any questions they have, while these days it's all too easy to hire a professional to affordably sort out your issues.
   
   
4. Potential
   
   Now we're talking about extensions that add functionality, and the plugins available to WordPress users are endless. Sometimes, however, the fact that there are so many makes finding the quality ones more difficult, while Joomla! users report less problems in this area.
   
   
5. Upgrades
   
   WordPress is famously easy to update with the click of a button, but Joomla is also impressive in this area.
   
   
6. Usability
   
   Getting up and running with both CMS options is straightforward, but WordPress really is easy when it comes to managing content - even for the novice user. Joomla is slightly harder to get your head around, but you still don't need any knowledge of complex web languages.

The verdict

If what you're looking to do is to run a blog, a simple news or marketing site, or a small eCommerce store, WordPress is a great option. But Joomla! is perfect for slightly more complex sites that require more flexibility, with the trade-off of trickier usability.

To help you make the decision, Canberra Web are the experts in building both WordPress and Joomla! sites. We've done WordPress designs Canberra clients swear by, but the same is also true for Joomla! - so get in touch today to explore your options.