Free Advice To Get You Online

Squatters and Property Title Claims

Business & Legal Advice

You really don’t need to be any sort of expert to know that Australian property prices are incredibly high, even compared to other affluent countries around the world. The dream of owning one’s own home seems to grow further and further for the average Australian citizen, but what if there were an alternative? Getting familiar with this little term might help: “adverse possession”.

While this type of talk might be little more than hyperbole for the typical person, it’s a rather interesting law and one can gain understanding of it, though not expertise of lawyers, which is worth learning more about.

What Is It?

Simply put, adverse possession relates to a person gaining title over a property that they have been living at for a certain length of time. The truly interesting thing about this law is, the “squatter’s” title to the property might actually grow greater than that of the real owner.

Read more

4 Key Elements to Developing Modern Web Design

Web Design

There are numerous plans you can follow when it comes to building a website. However, the basic points remain the same. If you want to generate higher traffic, it is very essential to focus on a few critical factors when developing good looking and effective web design.

You should take in consideration whitespace, great images, clear calls-to-action, search functionality and other elements that can make a lot of difference. Some of these key elements are described below:

Right Use of Spacing

When it comes to an effective web design, it is very important to manage space effectively. It helps in dictating flow, readability and navigation of the page. More designers now use space in an effective manner to increase web traffic and increase user engagement.

The key is to use spacing between lines of text, expanding open space and maintaining spatial relationships. There should be a consistency in spacing and the amount of space between lines should remain the same throughout a page. The right usage of space is also essential in creating a focal point. Any image or text which is surrounded by white space will seem larger and heavier than other material on the page.

Read more

Do These 3 Things Only If You Want to Get Banned from Google AdWords

Web Marketing
get-banned

While to normal people, this may sound as nothing big, but believe me when I say that getting banned from Google AdWords might be a living nightmare for advertisers and online business owners. No one will be happy to have worked day and night to drive traffic on their websites only to receive the horrifying mail from the Google carrying the news about the dreaded ban.

In some cases, the ban serves as a warning and allows the advertisers to reinstate some of their accounts. However some bans are of more serious nature and may lead to the companies never being allowed to advertise on Google again. Terrifying right?

So in order to save you from ever experiencing this, we have put together a list of common reasons and mistakes that will definitely be legal landmines for your online business and put you at a risk of getting banned from Google AdWords. Read on and learn:

1.     Free of cost but not really:

Ever had the experience of downloading an eBook that says free download only to be directed at a page that’s says free version is too slow, why not buy the premium one? And then true to their word, the free download is so slow that you could actually wake up from a nap while the book downloads.

Another offending example involves downloading software for your PC only to find out that you had to fill 100 something forms in order to get what you came for.

Read more

Generate More Traffic by Observing Your Competition

Web Marketing

One of the major goals of SEO practices is to help business owners generate more traffic for their website and almost every SEO practice revolves around this concept only. If you are looking for ways you can boost your site’s traffic, one simple strategy is to pick out one of your leading competitors and have a look at what they are doing, what keywords they’re using, business directory they are registered and how they are doing it.

If you feel that despite using the right keywords you are still not being able to get the desired amount of traffic, analyze the keywords your competitors are using, the ones that are apparently getting them so far ahead in the competition.  A large number of tools available online cannot only just help you in identifying the keywords of your competitors, but they also tell you the exact number of searches that are being done for each of these keywords. Once you have picked out those keywords, start incorporating them in your site’s content.

Other than keywords, another thing that you can observe is the sites that are linking themselves to your competitors. Getting high quality links from other websites is considered as a highly effective SEO strategy that helps with improving search engine rankings. However, a thing to remember here is that these links need to be high in quality and the only way your competitor’s sites is going to want to link itself with you as well is when you have high-quality content as well.

Read more

SEO Content: Viral or Unique?

Web Marketing

Quite a lot has been said about the importance of content in the world of SEO; content is king, quality over quantity, etc. Several factors are to be considered if you want to come up with posts that really do help generating more traffic. And most of these factors most of the time, if not always, aim towards making those posts go viral.

Viral content is any content, usually on social media, that is shared so much that it almost becomes an internet sensation. In today’s terms we would call such a post as a post “that broke the internet.” There is no argument that when you have a post that has gone viral (for whatever reason) it is single handedly going to make that post appear at the top of every search engine.

A digital marketing company like Slinky that provides SEO services understands that inbound links have a huge impact on the ranking of your website on a search engine. And when you have a post that goes viral, it ends up generating millions and millions of inbounds links which explains why that post has such high rankings on search engines.

Creating viral content is not easy; you need to come up with something so amazing, so spectacular that people feel almost compelled to share it. And that can take a lot of time. In most cases viral content is usually created randomly; there is no fixed formula for it.

Read more

The Innovation of AdWords for Smartphones

Web Marketing

I believe it would be unfair to say that the mobile era is coming and soon it will take over everything. The truth of the matter is; it is already here.

Gone are the days when we used to wait till we got home to put in our search in the Google machine. Every year, a large number of searches are conducted on Google and more than half of them are done using a cell phone. Google verifies that a large number of web traffic is coming from tablets and Smartphones.

When millions of people use their cell phones to search and check web pages then why not marketers be given a chance succeed in the same forte? Thanks to Google now, they have brought some very interesting and innovative changes in their AdWords campaign that will help marketers think and work in the most updated way.

In the latest Google performance summit of 2016, we get to hear some really interesting news from Google and how it is reshaping and reimagining AdWords to accommodate the smart phones era.

Let’s have a look at some of these highlights:

1.     New mobile Ad formats for a number of industries:

Keeping in mind some of the most searched items on mobile, Google talked about mobile ad formats for four niches, namely: shopping, finance, travel and automotive. While this was all great and fantastic, we all had the same question in our mind – what about all the remaining industries? Google being smart, unsurprisingly confirmed that there will be mobile formats for other industries too. Text ads will be made user friendly for the mobile users so the customer’s would be able to reach an answer faster–which is the ultimate goal of Google.

Read more

5 Benefits of a User-Friendly Web Design

Web Design

Considering the fierce competition in the digital market, you can never be too user-friendly for your audience. But according to a digital agency slinky.digital it can be very difficult to implement unique marketing strategies to attract your targeted users.

Slinky Digital says that developing an effective web design for your site is one way you can get the attention of your potential buyers. Although there are countless technical and promotional benefits of a good web design, some of the most common web design etiquette include:

1.      Increased Activity on Your Page

You will be able to engage more visitors to stay on your page. Since the basic objective is not to only attract visitors, but to turn them into customers, you need someone to go through the different pages of your website, read your content, know about your services and take the necessary actions as suggested on the site.

If your website does not have a strong web design, most people who get to your page will leave immediately. A website needs to be build to create sufficient interest on the user’s part.

Read more

My Not So Fair Share – Trends in Family Provision Claims

Business & Legal Advice

The personal and often emotional issues that arise when people’s expectations are not met by the decisions of a will maker often give rise to thoughts and actions premised on entitlement and occasional avarice. However, the usual “pub talk” that follows can be a slippery slope of disaster and it is worthwhile occasionally reviewing what the Court’s attitude is towards the genesis of a family provision claim rather than just relying on commonly held beliefs.

Courts will frequently ask the wills lawyer to present the nature of the estate such as its size and the composition of its assets and liabilities as well as the financial position of the parties. In Darveniza the Queensland Supreme Court awarded $3m out of a $27m estate to a son who had performed significant amounts of work in the deceased’s business relying on certain promises of provision.  Similarly, in Mead the Western Australian Supreme Court ordered $25m paid to the daughter of a relationship between the testator and his former wife, from whom he was divorced.  The estate was agreed to have a value of at least $1Bn and the testator, who was in his third marriage at the time of death had some obvious issues with the daughter and left her approximately $3m inside a trust that made it almost impossible for her to actually receive the money. The case is currently on appeal.

Read more

5 Common Mistakes in Web Design That Drive Visitors Away

Web Design

Website owners do their best to attract, hold and retain the interest of their users. They promote their webpage on various social media platforms, invest in web design and hire the best professionals to generate optimum results. However, more often than not, the website fails to capture enough attention.  In most of the cases, this is due to a simple mistake on the web designer’s part.

Mistakes that seem very small on the surface can significantly impact the appeal of a website. Usually, the fault is so subtle that it is hard to even pinpoint. However, it can drive hundreds of visitors away every day. So, what are some of these understated errors that are doing so much harm? Let’s check them out!

1.     Broken Links on Site

This is one of the strongest reasons for why people usually leave a website. If a visitor wants to reach another page on your site but the link is broken, it can leave a very bad impression. Any bad links, hyperlinks that redirect to the same page, links that do nothing or lead to error pages can be very frustrating for the users. The best way to get rid of such errors is to constantly keep a check on your web pages. It is also important to include a ‘Contact the Webmaster’ option, in case any emergency arises. This way, users will have minimum difficulty in navigating through the pages.

Read more

Overly Accommodating – The Utility of Life Interests

Business & Legal Advice

Once the weapon of choice for wealthy land Baron to provide for a surviving spouse while keeping the land asset in check, a life interest is used by lawyers as a tool to balance different interests between beneficiaries. An example of a modern use of the tool is to counter the surviving spouse remarrying, where there is a competing need to provide for a spouse as well as a need to preserve or quarantine the asset for the benefit other beneficiaries.

In those circumstances the life interest is regarded as beneficial to secure the property so that the children can be raised in it; and subsequently it can also be passed to them once the interest of the surviving spouse has ceased.

The use of a life interest is also prone to some down-sides in the form of its inflexibility and are frequently the victim of inadequate drafting, particularly the life estate agreement.

Read more

Slip-ups that sabotaged your AdWords Campaign

Web Marketing

We often believe our competitors to be our biggest enemies. In truth though, it is our own lack of knowledge and ignorance that often drives us to the edge of failure. To gain more traffic, high exposure and heavy leads we often get blinded by greed and fail to comprehend things with a logical reasoning.

While many of the advertisers and businesses might already have learned this the hard way, to save others from the same fate, we have listed down some of the common AdWords mistakes that have sabotaged many campaigns already and might do even more damage if this blog is not taken seriously.

Following are the slip-ups that we should avoid:

1.     Using the wrong approach with keywords:

There are so many things that could go with keywords that we cannot even blame the person making the mistake. But in order to achieve your desired goals, one must learn to do everything right.

  • It is very important to group your keywords. Throwing all the different keywords into the same ad will never show the desired results.
  • There are three categories of incorporating keywords into Ads, broad match, phrase match and exact match. All three provides a different result. Many advertisers make the AdWords mistake of using one approach while expecting the result of the other.
  • Negative keywords are actually a blessing in disguise as they help you exclude all the keywords that might not be related to your product thus helping in refining the research and driving the right customers to the landing page.

Read more

How to Discover Related Keywords Using Just the Google Homepage

Web Marketing

There’s a lot of tools out there for discovering keywords, keywords related to the keywords, building up a keyword network strategy, and so on. Here, you can do all of that for free using some Google search operator hacking.

We start with the tilde operator (~). (Ask a nearby Linux geek to find it on your keyboard if you’re stuck.) The tilde means “synonym” to Google; it will highlight the synonym words in bold when you use this. Next, we use the dash operator (-).
The dash means “opposite” to Google; in other words, leave out all pages which contain this exact word.

Read more

7 Tips to Help You Stay On Top of Your SEO Game

Web Marketing

For a field that is constantly evolving, keeping up with all the new trends and updates in SEO marketing can be a little difficult. In this post, we bring you 7 things that no matter what year they are used in will guarantee you great results whether you are looking at your sites on-page optimisation or off-page optimisation.

1: Polish Your Keyword Selection Skills:

Keywords are not everything, effective keywords are everything. And unfortunately this is one area that most people struggle in. Looking at just the keywords that are being used by your target audience but are not leading your business to financial success will give you some pointers that would help with your page’s ranking, but that is all they are going to do. So to come up with truly effective keywords you need to selectively look at those search queries of your consumers that are bringing you financial gains.

2: Bring Out the Mobiles:

With more and more people using their smartphones to conduct their researches, going mobile with your business page is another one of the very effective SEO strategies. Make sure that your websites are mobile friendly that means they are quick to load and all the content that they contain can be viewed by smartphones.

Read more

Are You Getting a New Web Design? 6 Things to Consider

Web Design
web-design

You have committed your time and money to creating a new website for your business. If you think all you need to do is to choose a web designer you would be wrong. If you want a website that’s highly successful there are plenty of things you need to do. Before you have your web designer builds your website, there is plenty to carefully plan, because if you plan poorly it’s going to cost you time and money, and you’ll be disappointed. Let’s look at 6 things you should consider.

  1. Establish the aim, target and theme of your website –  What will you do on your website? Sell products/services, provide information, etc. You also need to know who your target market is because that will also determine what your theme will look like. If you want a site that’s successful, you need to know your target market.
  1. Know what it will cost – You will want to know how long it will take to launch your website and what the web design is going to cost you. You’ll also want to know what it will cost monthly if the web designer takes care of the monthly maintenance.

Read more

Skills You Need to Become a Successful Web Designer

Web Design

Web designing has evolved into a competitive market niche and it can be quite difficult to excel in this area. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the success of a website. The designer has to focus on multiple elements while delivering a project on time. If you aim to become an accomplished web designer, some of the most important skills you should acquire are:

Written Communication Is the Key

To be a successful web designer, this is one of the most important skills you need. The success of your website largely depends on the quality of content you use. The best web designer should not only know what banners to put on a web page, but also know the effective use of words to ensure readability of the content.

Read more

How to Make Google AdWords Work for You

Web Marketing

With web marketing on the rise today and sometimes the only means of advertising for many, it is hard to stand out from the crowd and catch visitors’ attention, especially since everyone is strategizing with the same tactics and using the exact keywords.

Digital marketing experts will say, despite all the other free-of-cost options, AdWords is your best bet. Those who say it didn’t work for them must know that they might be doing something wrong. Let’s keep that discussion for some other time, and for now, focus on all the ways you can make Google AdWords work for you:

Read more

4 Top Web Design Trends for 2013

Web Design

When it comes to affordable web design, it seems 2013 is going to see some changes in the trends. Let’s have a look at 4 top web design trends for this year.

  • Typography – Front & Centre

    Web designers are focused on the weight each component, like JavaScript or images, has on the site they are building. In the last couple of years there have been huge improvements to web type, which means that typography usages is likely to become the central design element. Layouts and typography based on content can be made responsive much easier.

  • Designs That Are More Responsive

    Responsive websites aren’t new, but what is new is the methodology behind the responsive web design. 2012 we saw a focus on responsive designs for new devices like the iPad mini. For 2013, the focus is more likely to be focused around the responsiveness of the website itself rather than the numerous devices on the market.

Read more

Google and Privacy: Much Ado About Nothing

Web Design
google-privacy-policy

So it turns out that self-confessed Google junkies really don’t give a flip whether Google collects data on them or not. No, in fact, some of them say “yeah, bring it on!” This is the counter-reaction to the reaction to the new Google privacy policy. Another one is this guy, who points out that Google underestimated his age by half.

Look, people, it’s this simple:

  • You can opt out any time.
  • You can get five computers with three web browsers on each and delete cookies and search as 15 different strangers if you’re that paranoid.
  • Google is only collecting data and saving it to target marketing. That’s been the cornerstone of capitalism since the invention of money.
  • All this data will consist of is your interests, and guess at your gender and age. It doesn’t steal your credit card or anything.
  • Some of us (blog writers, for instance) have interests that aren’t going to make sense to a tracking algorithm anyway.

OK? Can everybody quit panicking?

How Could We Lose Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy In the Same Month?

Web Design
dennis-ritchie-and-john-mcc

Never heard of those two names? If so, we’re sorry for you. You would have to know that Steve Jobs died. Everybody (at least in the tech blog world) knows that he’s the founder and longtime CEO of Apple Inc. He made the front page of newspapers and the cover of magazines the world over when he passed away this last October.

But two more giants in computing passed away last October also, and they were barely noticed.

Dennis Ritchie founded the C programming language. He was also one of the founding fathers of Unix. He was one half of the partnership of Ken Thompson, with whom he basically invented the modern operating system and the modern programming platform as we know it today.

Read more

An Analysis Of How Hackers Penetrated The US Pentagon

Website Hosting

We love a good caper story as much as the next mystery fan, and this perky after-crime report is a good look at cyber-security matters and how they fail. In How Hackers Stole 24,000 Files From The Pentagon, the breach is traced to some very obvious methods.

Briefly, they slapped together a bogus PDF document that got sent at about 7:30AM “because the best time to send those types of things is right before someone’s had their coffee.” See, right there, it’s the human factor, not tech. Victim opens document, document installs malware, target system has 24,000 documents on file because they subcontract for the US Department of Defense, and that’s that, it’s break time.

It also goes to show just how little progress we’ve actually made at information security. As long as we have the concept of a zero-day exploit, we’ll still have computer networks that aren’t any more secure than a cardboard box, no matter how many clever measures we take.

What Does Responsive Web Design Mean?

Web Design

“Responsive” is the new word going around the web design campfire. It was first coined by the web design blog “A List Apart” and has become the term being batted around the meeting table every Monday morning.

OK, but what does responsive web design mean? For a web design to be responsive, that means that it must respond to how it is viewed. In other words, it should serve different content or styling depending on if a visitor is using a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a full-screen desktop to view it. And these days, you have to throw in people browsing on anything from a gaming console to an Arduino-powered wristwatch.

A side-order of other buzzwords: “Multi-device layout patterns” – the template for a responsive website. “Dynamic CSS” – Cascading Style Sheets that warp to fit whatever screensize you view it on. “Viewport” – the screen space you have available. And you’re likely to see “responsive web design” abbreviated as “RWD.”

Read more

Adobe v HTML5

Web Design

The story of the Internet has always been a battle between the old guard corporations and the new guard users.

So, Microsoft has had to battle against Free and Open Source software, IBM had to battle against the PC clones, Apple had to battle against the PC, proprietary Unix had to battle against BSDs, and so on. remember DEC? The Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the computing world with the PDP and the VAX throughout the 1970s. But time goes by and progress marches on.

What’s bizarre is that corporations don’t seem to learn from history. Adobe, which has already had to fight for its survival when the free image-editor Gimp has risen to challenge Adobe’s flagship cash cow Photoshop, now finds itself at odds over its second most-lucrative business, Flash. HTML5 is coming, inevitably, and there’s very little that Adobe’s proprietary Flash platform can do that HTML5’s canvas element can’t.

Read more

How To Use Passion In Web Marketing

Web Marketing

When we spotted the post In Praise of Passion over at Boing-Boing, it got us thinking. As Internet marketers, we all know that our digital strategy should include website design, search engine optimization, advertising, and so on. But how many of us think about whether we’re inspiring passion?

Some ideas for generating passion around your business:

If your service solves a problem, state how devoted to solving that problem you are. Talk about it a lot! Explain how it’s the central driving force for you being in business. If you run a graphic design agency, you can make your motto something like “Ending Ugly Web Design, One Graphic At A Time!”

Read more

Some of the Biggest Names Behind Linux

Website Hosting

Some clients, upon encountering Linux web hosting, tend to remark that they’re surprised to see a big company running Linux.

Being a Free/Open Source Software system, people get the idea that it’s all done by volunteers. Right away they picture some hippies in sandals and tie-dye shirts, flashing peace signs and saying how they’re going to “stick it to the man.”

This is a ludicrous idea, because in fact, Linux *IS* “the man!” Linux’s desktop market share is still in the low single digits as far as end users are concerned. The place where Linux has won is the enterprise (as well as content management systems). See if you recognize any of these corporations:

IBM
Has long been involved with Linux. They host the IBM Linux Technology Center, install Linux on many consumer and office machines that they sell, have partnered with Linux brand names such as Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), and routinely install Linux on their mainframe computer line. The current top of their line in mainframes, the IBM zSeries 800, sports a Tux sticker on every unit sold.

Read more