June 2008 News

In this issue of Web Widgets News, June 2008...

• Shopping Carts now available on Starter Hosting Plan
• Updated Forums
• Wellington Small Business Expo - 25-27th June
• New Payment Gateway - PayMex
• Websites of the Month

Shopping Carts now available on Starter Hosting Plan

You can now get access to most of our ecommerce and bulk emailing features on all our web hosting plans. So if you have been putting off using our shopping cart, then now is the time to add this feature to your website. However, please note that if you expect more than 10 orders a month, then you would still need to upgrade to our newly named "Business Plan".

Our new approach to services is that we want you to make use of all that we have available, so that your hosting plan will grow as your business grows. Hence the new names of our hosting plans are now:

• Starter Plan (replaces Basic Plan) - Perfect for new websites
• Business Plan (replaces Ecommerce Plan) - Perfect for websites with an active audience
• Growth Plan (replaces Ecommerce + Plan) - Perfect for mature websites in their growth phase
• Extreme Plan - For those winning websites that have gone "viral"

We will be running new reports in the near future to identify anyone who needs to increase to a higher plan. If you want to decrease to a lower plan, please first check your website traffic and file space and monthly orders totals, then contact Support requesting that your plan be revised.

If you require more information on our hosting plans, click here

Search Engine Optimisation

Our websites are automatically optimised to be friendly to search engines, by ensuring natural URLs and automatically generating nicely formatted meta tags. However, it is still required that you put the right words in the right places.

The best place to put your key phrases are in your page titles and the first paragraph of each page. You should also dedicate a different key phrase to each page. If you have a lot of content or key phrases, then you should consider expanding them into a series of pages, where you can dedicate one page per phrase. Our FAQ and Gallery page formats are perfect for this.

Paul will be replacing Emma as our SEO expert. With over 550 websites hosted by us at present, Paul retains his number one position for our highest traffic website for several years, and it continues to grow at an exceptional pace. Back in early 2004 his website had a familiar number of unique visitors - around a few hundred per month. Through active and continuing SEO work on his website, he has grown this number of unique visitors year by year from 400 to 4,000 to 10,000 to 25,000 to 40,000 and now sitting around the 50,000 mark - that's 50,000 unique visitors every month to just one website. 

If you would like to access Paul's SEO expertise, please make a request here. Prices start from just $300 for a SEO kick start to your website. Paul can also discuss ongoing SEO work and pay per click advertising campaigns.

http://www.webwidgets.co.nz/seo-request.html

Forum Updates

Our forums have been updated to be more SEO friendly and to give you more control over content ordering.

We have also introduced a paging facility, to make it easier for users to review older messages in larger forums.

We have also now added a threaded forum feature. This is good for online debating, group managed FAQs or web based learning.

Our forums can be used behind a password or for public access. If the public have access, they will need to click a confirmation link in an email before their messages are made public, so this is a good measure to keep your forum free of spam. Within the Web Widgets CMS you can also actively monitor your forum and remove any messages or block users or certain words.

We will shortly be adding a forum feature to galleries, advertiser pages, news, products etc. This is especially good for tourism style websites. Stay tuned.

More Information on Forums Here

Small Business Expo Wellington

Web Widgets will be exhibiting at the Wellington Small Business Expo from 25-27th June.  If you would like free tickets to the event, please click this link...

http://www.businessexpo.co.nz/Wellington/Exhibitors/registration.asp

New Payment Gateway - PayMex

Web Widgets now support the payment gateway, www.paymex.co.nz .  PayMex is an online wallet style of payment gateway similar to PayPal, but based in New Zealand. From the perspective of a merchant, by choosing the PayMex payment option, you can gain access to the many PayMex customers, and also accept payment by credit card from all other customers.

PayMex and PayPal, have no setup fees, no monthly fees and competitive transaction fees, so they are a great option for new websites starting out. To access your funds, you just log into your online wallet and make a withdrawal to your bank account.

http://www.webwidgets.co.nz/payment-gateways.html

• www.originimports.co.nz - Web Widgets Ltd were commissioned to design a simple website, importing a large list of products from Excel and photos from CD. Products had multiple price groups, offering discounts to certain member groups, and minimum order quantities. This B2B trade supplier uses passwords to protect the shopping cart from the general public, but this also minimises SEO capability. A featured product gallery page is then used to provide good SEO for key brands that shops may be looking to source.
• www.eclipsetours.co.nz - John met us at the recent Small Business Expo. His original website was badly designed for SEO purposes, having been converted from a printed brochure. All text had originally been saved as an image, which was unreadable by both search engines and people, in some cases. For only a small fee, we were able to keep the exact original design of the website, yet convert all the image text to typed text, thus improving readability and SEO ranking.
• www.snowywaterslodge.co.nz - This website is an example of DIY use of our standard editable banner templates to achieve an effective result. Simple, clean websites let the pictures and content tell the story, and ensure easy navigation for the user.
• www.momentum09.com - This website had "accessibility" requirements, to ensure the website could be read by the visually impaired. Apart from the banner which is an image, the entire website uses a CSS menu and relative font size which can be resized by user or easily read and navigated by text-voice software. 

Have you got a suggestion for website of the month?  Please let us know.

Best regards,
The Web Widgets Team

www.webwidgets.co.nz
Phone: 09 6220797