October 2009 News

In this issue of Website Builder News, October 2009...

  • Free Training Sessions (Last chance for Dunedin and Chch till mid next year!) 
  • One on One Training
  • Change of payment gateway for Web Widgets Ltd
  • Photo Cropping Online
  • Shopping Cart Updates
  • SEO Tip of the Month
  • Changing hosting plans, plan credits/adjustment fees.
  • Authenticated SMTP service
  • How to help us promote Website Builder and get a 20% rebate
  • Websites of the Month

 

Free Training Sessions NZ Wide

Our free training sessions will teach you how to use our website builder to build your own website or online shop. The course covers all the basics with some tips on bulk emailer, shopping carts, and search engine optimisation included. We also have advanced courses available for a small fee.

  • Auckland - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours - 21st of October 7pm evening - FREE
  • Auckland - Website Builder Introduction incl shopping carts - 3 hours  - 17th November at 9am - FREE
  • Auckland - Search Engine Optimisation - and web design - $50 - 17th of November at 1pm.
  • **Christchurch** - Website Builder Introduction 2 hours - 27th October Evening 6pm - FREE
  • **Christchurch** - Website Builder Introduction 3 hours incl shopping carts - 28th October Morning at 9am - FREE
  • **Christchurch**- Search Engine Optimisation, and intermediate web design - $50 - 28th October at 1pm
  • **Dunedin** - Website Builder Introduction 3 hours incl shopping carts in detail - 29th October at 9am - FREE
  • **Dunedin** - Search Engine Optimisation and intermediate web design 3 hours - $50 - 29th October at 1pm
  • More Locations and Times - Book Your Training Here

Please invite any friends along to our training events. Remember you will get 20% referral discount off your hosting ongoing for any who go live with their website.

 

One on One Training

One on one training is a great way to enhance your website at a discount price. Sit down with one of our professional web designers for an hour and see what evolves. This is a great way for intermediate users to increase their skills, or for novice users to sped up the process of creating their website. For just $100 your website will be greatly improved. The same fee also applies for SEO or any other professional help you need. One on one available at our Onehunga Auckland office only. Phone to book a time.

 

Change of payment gateway for Web Widgets Ltd

For those of you who pay us by credit card, please note we have changed our merchant account provider. We are no longer using ANZ egate. We are now using Westpac WIPS. Westpac offered us a significant discount, whereas ANZ/Eftpos were planning on increasing our fees after 3 years good service. Go figure! It definitely pays to shop around for the best deal once you have a good transaction history.

 

Photo Cropping Online

You can now edit your images to resize or crop them. Cropping allows you to select just a small area of the photo you want to keep, and everything else is deleted. 

Please remember that any changes made to a photo will effect everywhere that photo has been used. If you want different variations of a photo, then give it a different filename when you upload it. Please note that if you upload a photo with the same filename as previously used, then this will replace your original photo, but the thumbnail will not regenerate. You can regenerate thumbnails as an extra step after publishing your website.

The image manager, accessible from under "manage files" has also been updated a little. We hope you like the changes.

 

Shopping Cart Updates

Pricing and/or buy buttons can be hidden from people who have not logged in. This is good if you want to make your catalogue available to the general public, but only allow purchases by stockists or retailers.

Supplier names, codes, prices can be added to the product database at the end of the pricing section of each product.

 

SEO Tip of the Month

Start a spreadsheet to manage your search engine optimisation campaign. Put each key phrase on a different line. Use the Google "Keyword Tool" to grade traffic for that key phrase, put this number into a column called traffic. Do a search on each key phrase, and mark your current position for each key phrase in a new column, for the 3 major search engines, Eg google, bing and yahoo.

It is good SEO practise to dedicate each page of your website to a different key phrase, so you should also note the filename and/or URL of the page in your spreadsheet. Copy and paste your meta title, keywords, meta description and also the first paragraph of your pages into additional columns. Spend your effort on the phrases that are not ranked in the top 5 and those with the highest traffic.

Let it sit for a month, then come back and add new columns compare the new search engine rankings for each of your key phrases. If you improved, congratulations, if some went down, take a close look and them and consider what might have gone wrong.

Remember that every key phrase is a different channel on which to advertise. There is no magical connection between phrases. It is best to add more pages with more phrases, than to overload a single page.

 

Changing Hosting Plans or Cancelling Plans

When you change hosting plans, your aniversary date will be changed, and your account balance will now be adjusted on the same day you make the change. A credit will be given for any unused portion of the current hosting plan, and then you will be charged the new hosting rate effective from the date you make the change.

If you cancel your website, you will also be given this same credit for the unused portion of your hosting fees. You can use this credit for domain name renewals, or save if for another website, however if you require a refund, then a $20 admin fee will apply. After 90 days, we may write off small credit balances to avoid sending you statements every month.

Any commissions that you earned from referrals, may now be subject to automatic reversal if the referred customer changes hosting plans or cancels their website. You may then get a commission based on their new hosting plan.

Please note that as we don't send monthly statements until the end of the calendar month, you may still need to pay for your current month hosting fees at the end of the month in which you cancel your website.

 

Authenticated SMTP service / Mobile Email

Although we always promote web based email services like Gmail or Google Apps, you may still prefer to use Outlook or Windows Mail. If you are using such a service on a notebook computer, you probably suffer from issues when you are sending email while travelling away from home.

The solution is to use an authenticated email service. It is best to use the one provided by your ISP, but you may choose to use ours. To confirm the settings you should use, please login to the CMS, then click on your red domain name button, then email, then view details for one of your mailboxes. You will see updated instructions for configuring your email accounts.

Please note that if you require any over the phone support for email configuration, then a support fee of $20 will apply. Free email support is limited to providing you with the standard setup instructions which we can fax or email to an alternative address. You should really have access to a training IT professional at your end, if you do not have these skills yourself.

 

Help us promote our Website Builder (20% referral discount for your troubles)

There are many ways for you to help us promote website builder. If you would like any brochures or business cards, please contact us and we will send you a bundle. Please let us know how many you require.

If you would like to promote website builder from your website, you can now easily add an affiliate page using the "add page" button. This page will allow you to write your own introduction about how wonderful our service is and will include a link with tracking codes so that you will receive the 20% referral discount automatically.

Alternatively, please encourage your friends to just sign up directly for a free trial, or to come to one of our free training courses. Once they have signed up for a free trial, please don't forget to contact us and let us know so we can link your referral.

Or if you are finding work a bit slow in this recession, why not start your own business selling websites. Did you know that we really like customers who want to resell our services and add their own value. If you have SEO skills, business skills, graphic design skills or just super enjoy building websites with our free website builder, then we encourage you to start a business doing it. You will not be stepping on our toes at all. We want to support you in your business endeavours and will give you access to special advanced training courses and support, so that you can in turn provide better support to your customers. Using our affiliate scheme or our official reseller scheme, you can also make ongoing revenue from web hosting. But we encourage you to correctly place a commercial value on the time you put in to helping your friends start websites. We hope we are providing you with a great new opportunities during this recession. 

White lable reseller accounts also available for a setup fee.

More information about affiliates and reselling here

 

Websites of the Month

Here's a selection of some of our recent Go Lives. DIY websites are always a mixed bag, so we encourage you to view several example sites if determining if Website Builder is right for you.

Do you want a more professional look and feel for your website? A more professional look will instill greater trust in your customers, and encourage them to stay longer on your website or make a purchase. Please use our online quote or contact us.

The following websites were either designed by us, or professionally transfered to our CMS by a third party web designer.

Do you have any feedback on our newsletter or CMS products? Please let us know.

 

Best regards,
Reuben Jackson (CEO)
Web Widgets - Free Website Builder

www.websitebuilder.co.nz
Phone: 09 6220797

Posted: Mon 12 Oct 2009

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