A customer visiting your website is opening the door to your business.  Ensure they can see what you are offering immediately. A Flash intro page can be an irritating obstruction to someone who is taking a first quick look.

Support your brand proposition

When someone looks into your site, the look, the content, and the functionality should all be consistent with your overall brand positioning. If you are exporting, "international' is automatically a brand attribute. You should aim for a site that is of a quality similar to that of your best international competitors.

Have content that connects

Provide the information your customers want.  Sounds obvious, but many sites require customers to dig to find basic product information.  Content should be concise, scannable and above all pertinent.

Make them feel at home

Make sure it is easy for customers to see your credentials.  They have to feel confident about doing business with you.

Keep them with you

Useful tools such as currency converters or support blogs,  ensure it is easy for customers to stay on your site.

An exemplary website is the foundation of your online presence. But wait, there's more!  New ways of connecting with customers emerge every day from iPhone applications to Widgits to serious software, to integrate stock and accounting systems with your ecommerce site.  We help you choose the innovations that will deliver the greatest benefit to your business.

Please give us a call.  We want to help you take your business to the world.

• It's generally reliable - the companies involved hire brainiacs to make sure nothing breaks - you no longer need to trawl through frustrating help files and forums to work out why your software isn't working because they do it for you.
• It's generally free - companies often offer cloud services for free (think Google, Flickr) and support their operations with advertising.
• It's device and location independent - if you have internet access you can get to your data anywhere, anytime on anything.
• It's secure - (good) companies invest heavily in security because their reputations depend on it, so you can rest assured that (good) cloud services are pretty secure.

Disadvantages:

• Reduced control: You have you trust that your service won't go down but most good cloud services allow you export and backup your data anyway. Also you generally have less customisation options compared to stand alone desktop applications.
• Privacy: You are housing all your data in another company's computers so there are some surrounding privacy issues here.
• Connectivity: Simply put, if you can't access the internet you can't access your data. However some services now allow you to synchronise your data to your computer so that you can view it offline.

Our favourite cloud services:

Dropbox.com.

2gb free storage that can be accessed anywhere in the world with options to upgrade to more storage at a cost.

Flickr.com.

Everyone knows Flickr and it's a quintessential example of the cloud in action - storing, viewing and sharing your photos and videos anywhere in the world, for free.

Google…everything.

Google is virtually synonymous with cloud computing as almost all of its products exist in the cloud. Be it Gmail, Google Docs, or Google calendar, almost everything you do with Google takes place on their servers and is accessed through your browser.  Interestingly Google offers no dedicated file storage, despite being the company that made cloud computing famous. There are of course hacks to get around this, but that's for another post…
Xero, Saasu, Workflowmax, Bootcamp etc: There are a great number of business products and tools in the cloud and they are indispensable in the modern workplace.

Spotify, Grooveshark: These are outstanding cloud based music delivery services that allow you to access and stream virtually any song you want for free.

So...

Cloud computing is the way of the future and with the current progress towards cloud based operating systems there will possibly be a time when we're so used to it that it will feel strange to install software on your computer. We will increasingly fulfil our computing needs through our browsers and I welcome the transition!

Some further viewing

A nice explanation

Two interesting counter arguments
This one is pretty funny - Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) saying why he hates "the cloud"

Frank Gillet explaining some misconceptions and giving a perhaps more realistic marketing-less view

Optimise page content

Search engines are becoming smarter by the day.  Good content that provides answers to what searchers are looking for, will help you rank more highly.  For your after-hours clinic, for example, you might have information on health and wellbeing issues for your community listed on your site.  This might include useful 'accident and emergency' information, such as a checklist on when to call an ambulance versus ringing the clinic for an appointment.  Make sure your key search terms are appropriately integrated into your copy.

Good content is built on through optimal use of website coding.  Here are our top three tips.

Page Titles:

Use keywords in your page titles as these provide Search Engines with a snapshot of page content. Each HTML page has a separate title at the top of the page beginning with <title>. You can include variant spellings and abbreviations that wouldn't sit comfortably within the content.

H1 tags:

Search Engines also rate the content within H1 tags. <H1>Subject of your article</H1>.  These tags can be used once each page and provide to opportunity to provide a brief overview of the content on a page with key search terms strategically interwoven.

Image Alt tags:

Images on a website cannot be 'read' by search engines so they look for the Alt tag to provide a description of the image. The best practice is to provide descriptive text around the image content and purpose, adding in key search terms wherever appropriate.

Once you have your basic SEO in place, you can increase your searchability (and improve your service to those who visit your site) by strategic use of links to other high quality sites.  Plunket, for example, has useful online information for parents around "What to do about hiccups, colic & crying" - a classic 'after hours' concern for first-time parents.

Finally, there is no easy way to push your site up the search engine rankings.  Ignore those emails that offer 'thousands of inbound links'. Links that are not relevant to your site are likely to result in lower rankings, not higher.  Attention to quality content, and links that deliver real value to your audiences, are the best guarantees of long-term success.

Put on a 'tertiary-level international student' hat and find five websites in the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK that work.

Our reviewers

Our reviewers, David, Stephen and Liz, are all recent graduates.  David (a graduate of Auckland University) and Stephen (a graduate of Lincoln) came from China to New Zealand to do their degrees.  Liz, a graduate of Victoria University, spent a semester at the famous Rhode Island School of Design in her final year.

Our reviewers - Stephen, David and Liz

So what were they looking for?

• David and Stephen say Chinese students like to look first at information on courses - so they want sites to make it easy for them to get that information - and for their parents to understand the living conditions at the university.
• For Liz, as a study abroad student, she was looking for a great place to learn - which would also deliver a fun experience.
  
  It was harder to find inspiring websites than they expected - but they found three USA sites we liked - and one UK site.  The site they liked the best was the site of the Australian government site for the international student market.  It's impressive.

The reviews:

Johns Hopkins - www.jhu.edu

• What we liked: a beautiful and imaginative entry, very good copy, and a great interactive area which uses its people well:  http://apply.jhu.edu/hi/ Some good multimedia: http://apply.jhu.edu/media/multimedia.html The image we formed on the basis of the website is that Johns Hopkins is prestigious, cool, modern and fun.
• Tweaks: Navigation wasn't as intuitive as we wanted -  accessing information on courses could have been more user friendly.  There was a great 'viewbook' for undergraduates on life at Johns Hopkins - but it was a huge 10.44MB download.

Rhode Island School of Design

• What we liked: The videos on the site - cheap as chips to produce - allow you to see and hear students and teachers. You get a real sense of the quality of teaching and the classroom/studio experience delivered at RISD - and the results the students get.  Liz: "When I was tossing up last year between various universities in the USA and Europe, the RISD website was the deciding factor for me.  The videos gave you a sense of the close connection students can expect with senior staff."  Stephen and David: Access to student portfolios online was important so you could see what people achieved.
• Tweaks: The site has a 'parents' tab on the homepage - but the information a parent would want wasn't immediately accessible.  Downloadable newsletters didn't fit the bill.
  
  Accessing information on papers and courses is virtually impossible from this site(and on most sites we visited). Liz: "I had to enrol from New Zealand and in the end gave up and just waited until I arrived in Providence to find my papers. This meant I missed out on the popular classes."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• What we liked: The site is rich in information with reasonably easy access to information on courses, and a great section on student life that would inspire both potential freshman entrants and their parents ("MIT guarantees housing for all four college years…").  At mitworld you could see videos of MIT lectures online.  The production values weren't great, but it's all about content - and the tiny bit of the content we understood was gripping. http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/737
• Tweaks: The homepage had a rather cheesy video presentation of graduates saying 'thanks' to tutors, Mom and Dad etc.

Warwick University

• What we liked: From a field of largely dull UK university sites, Warwick University was at least attractive, well written and easy to navigate. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/ The landing page for Warwick was particularly clear - with International the second tab on the menu.  But…
• Tweaks: Stephen clicked on International - which took him to an introduction to ….Warwick's 'international strategy'.  After a bit of looking around he found a link through to Warwick's international office website which had information relevant to him as an international student.

Study in Australia

• What we liked: A search at Google Hong Kong threw up a number of options as we started to type in the word 'study'.  'Study in Australia' was the first prompt that emerged, taking our team straight to 'the official Australian government website' www.studyinaustralia.gov.au.  We really liked this very welcoming site.  You choose your language on the entry page, (a plus) and then the site sells you on Australia with core information supplemented with videos, student blogs, and a choice of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn channels.  Great use of Twitter - in a page of tweets we find links to 'meet a Brisbane student ambassador in your home country', to check out the blog of a nursing student at University of Western Australia, to learn about the Australian University Games, and to find out more about Short-term programs … a great way to see Australia AND earn credit back home without missing a semester! This site is clearly designed and written with the various international student audiences in mind.  David and Stephen also liked that it was clear that this was the official site produced by the Australian Government
  
  Attracting students, nationally or internationally is a challenge - and creativity alone won't get you there.  Yale, for example, produced a very creative 'admissions video' this year.  Check it out - we'll be interested in your reaction!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGn3-RW8Ajk We thought: nice idea - but toooo long.

Canada?  Well we didn't find anything exciting - so if you know of an outstanding Canadian website - let us know.

This is the space taken up on the web server, usually in the form of images or other media. This is the most common change required to a websites' hosting plan as a website grows over time and takes up more space.

Memory

Refers to memory/ram on the server that your website uses while it is running, not images or files as such.  All websites require memory to run. How much? will depend somewhat on the content management system  your website uses and also amount of content on the website. Many websites will fly under the radar for memory usage, there are usually other factors such as hard disk space or general scalability / performance / security which play a bigger role in selecting a hosting plan.

Bandwidth

A measurement of the amount of information being transferred to and from your website by users. Just like your home broadband, your website may only have a certain allowance per month. So a busy website with plenty of images will result in much higher usage. Most hosting plans now offer unlimited local (New Zealand) bandwidth and limited International usage before the price starts going up.

Interesting facts about Garth:

He was born in the Philippines, lived in Kazakhstan and the UK.  He likes a good (good) pun, the internet (duh), and cheese toasties with Whitlock's onion relish.

Welcome to the bka team Garth . We're glad to have you on board.

• Listen and see what is out there.  Sign on to Twitter and Google Alerts (it takes about a millisecond) and follow some people in your discipline.  Become a 'fan' on Mayo Clinic's Facebook page and see the mix of patient 'posts' alongside links to videos on topics such as Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.   Check out some blogs.
• Once you have a feel for the possibilities, think what would make your professional life more interesting or rewarding or easier.  Do you want to be in more regular contact with colleagues on a particular topic?  Do you want to communicate more effectively with patients?  Do you need to promote your practice?  Is there a public health issue for which you want to create an advocacy group, or brainstorm solutions? Social media can play a part.
• When you're ready, develop a social media strategy.  What do you want to achieve?  Do you have the resources to make it happen? Who do you want to talk to (or with?)  What do you want to say?  How big a 'face' do you want? You can create closed communities with fellow professionals (the privacy settings for Facebook or Twitter allow you to limit who is able to engage with you) or you can create a social media space that allows you to engage with patients and the public.

Being open has its risks - you don't want your Facebook hijacked by a patient with an irrational hatred for your receptionist - or you - for example. Some forms of social media allow you to moderate what appears - comments posted to blog sites, for example.

Any social media venture lives or dies on the value it delivers to its target audience.  It might take a while to find your social media voice, and whether what you have to say will be of any interest to your wider professional community.  The best way to find out whether you can own a piece of territory in this new frontier is start exploring.

And here is another that helps really explain what a browser is ... and what it isn't:

In short - A browser is a piece of software that sits on your computer that allows you to access websites. Think Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Each has its own idiosyncrasies and annoyances and many internet users fiercely extol the virtues of their preferred browser over the rest. It's important to select a browser you like as it's likely to be the most frequently used app on your computer - and increasingly so, with the rapid evolution of online applications and "the cloud".

As website designers and developers, we need to be very aware of how each browser renders information online and test our sites extensively. This potentially adds lots of time to the HTML and testing phases and gets certain bka team members tres grumpy. Putting roundy corners on buttons for example can double HTML build time as many browsers (IE6for example) simply can't cope.

Image credit: ie6funeral.com

Storing these files in your cache makes browsing the web faster because it usually takes your computer less time to display a page when it can access some or all of the page's elements or even the entire page from your local machine.

From time to time though, the cache needs to be cleared as its either slowing your system down or preventing you from seeing the latest updates on the page.

This is how to do it in Internet Explorer

1. On the Internet Explorer Tools menu, click Internet Options. The Internet Options box should open to the General tab.
2. On the General tab, in the Temporary Internet Files section, click the Delete Files button. Hey Presto 
   
   
   

To clear your cache in Firefox 3.5

1. From the Tool menu, select Clear Recent History.
2. From the Time range to clear menu options chose the desired range or to clear your entire cache, select Everything.
3. Click the down arrow next to "Details" to choose what history elements to clear (e.g., check Cookies to clear cookies). Click Clear Now.

To clear your cache in Google Chrome

1. Click the Tools menu .
2. Select Options.
3. Select the Under the Hood tab.
4. Select Clear browsing data.
5. Select the "Clear browsing history" checkbox
6. Use the "Clear data from this period" menu to select the amount of data you want to delete.
7. Click Clear browsing data.

To clear your browser on Safari

1. From the Safari menu, select Reset Safari.
2. From the menu, only select Empty the cache and Remove all cookies, then press Reset.

Hope you find this useful.