The Advertising Standards Board has set the regulatory cat among the social-media pigeons in a decision this week, ruling that posts by users to a company's Facebook page are advertisements by that company. Read on!
Read MoreHere at Chilli Chocolate Marketing we manage websites for a great and diverse group of clients. Some of the sites we built ourselves, some we didn't; some we host ourselves, some are hosted elsewhere. This has brought us into contact with a wide range of website-server tools and management platforms. We're sometimes asked what we prefer, or "what's good". Well that all depends on the requirements of course - use the best tool for the job, as the saying goes. But as a general rule we advise each of our clients to use website tools that are well-known and widely-used. That means that the client isn't tied to using one particular web host or website company.
If your website is running on some custom platform that no other company in the world uses, then you are locked in to your present web hosting arrangement. If anything goes wrong, there's only one place to turn for help: the person or company who originally made your website. That's not a good situation to be in, especially if that person is unavailable or is too busy to help.
We're big fans of open-source Content Management Systems not just because they're easy to use and powerful; we're fans because they're freely available and how to operate them is close to common knowledge in the website community. If your website is built using such tools, then you are able to pack it up and move it to anywhere such tools are supported if you need to - and that's pretty much everywhere. If your website is built and dependent on closed proprietary tools from one provider, that means you're tied to that one provider and only that provider can help you.
If you have any questions about this sort of thing, feel free to ask. Your website is your most important marketing tool, and we're happy to help!
--Simon
Watching Facebook go from an insignificant little upstart to an industry-dominating juggernaut has been fascinating, as has watching something as inherently geeky as Internet social networking become an accepted and normal part of life and business. Facebook has become an integral part of how some of businesses, including some of my clients, portray themselves to the world.
I don't think that's always a good idea.
What can you do when marketing is getting more people to visit your online store but the visitors are leaving your website without making a purchase? Lots!
Read MoreOne day we realised we were running a collection of client websites hosted across different servers, connected through different Internet service providers, running different versions of different types of software, charging different (high) amounts, and even located in different countries.
So what did we do about it?
Over recent months we have worked on a number of projects with a fixture of Adelaide's home-improvement industry, Homeplus Improvements. We have been able to assist Homeplus Improvements with a number of behind-the-scenes technical details - the sorts of things we touched on in our post "Know your domain details" - in order to launch a new website to support Homeplus Improvements's salespeople and sales activities.
Has it worked?
Based just south of Adelaide in McLaren Vale, Chilli Chocolate Marketing is a boutique marketing agency with a particular focus on email marketing, customer retention, and relationships.
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