WebCare has just launched a new website for Mrs D’s Cookies - an Adelaide-based baker of gourmet wholesale cookies. If you run a cafe, coffee shop, snack bar, hospital, canteen, hotel or sports club, then contact Mrs D’s Cookies today on 08 8351 5066.The cookies have the truly tantalising taste of a traditionally baked cookie. Mrs D supplies a wide range of homemade cookies which contain only the freshest of ingredients, are high in fibre and are preservative and additive free! Decadent delights with health in mind.

So - for the No 1 wholesale cookies supplier in Australia - visit Mrs D’s Cookies website today.

This new website provides Filipino and Asian  goods and grocery shopping delivered door to door. The site was  initially aimed at Asians living in remote outback Australia who can not access goods and food that they would normally have in their native country. But now there are lots of customers who just want the convenience of the door to door shopping option.

Are you wanting to take a well-deserved break over Christmas and New Year (or any other time of the year for that matter)?  What are you going to do with your ecommerce site?  You don’t want orders to be sitting around until you get back, and customers getting angry because they haven’t received their order when they expected to.

There are a couple of things you can do so that this won’t happen:

1. Drastic Action: Take the site down - so people cannot access the site at all, except for a notice on the front page. In your Zen Cart website, this can be done from your admin section :

Configuration –> Website Maintenance.

Turn “Down for Maintenance’ ON (ie set it to “True”).

You will probably want to change the message so that it says something about being away, rather than being Down for Maintenance.  You can’t do this via admin - so you may need WebCare to do this for you (though once it is done, you will be able to use it every time you go away). Cost will be $35.  Just send us through the message you want to display.

2. The Minimalist Option. Add text to your home page that says in big letters “We are having a break. We will process all orders when we return on XXX. Happy New Year!” (or something like that).

Then the orders will still be able to be placed - and your customers will know to expect the orders after the specified date.

In Zen Cart, you should be able to edit your home page text via the admin system:

Admin–> Tools –> Define Pages Editor

Select the name of the page where you want to post this message, and make sure that the text editor is set to HTMLArea.

Have a great break!

Backing up your website to your computer (ie your local drive) is an important thing to do for three reasons:

1. You might do something to your site that stuffs it up!

2. Your host server might crash/go down/get corrupted/you don’t pay your bill and your account gets deleted!

3.  You might do something to your site that stuffs it up!

Your web host should always have a back up of your site to restore from, but sometimes this can take a while.  With your own back up of your website - you are in control. If something major happens to your host, you can upload your site to a new host, delegate your domain and you can be back up and running very quickly.

The most reliable way to back up your website is to do it yourself to your own computer, and do it as often. Using an FTP client makes this a pretty straight forward process (OK, it might seem a bit tricky the first time you do it, but after that….).

Back-up Website Files

Step 1:
Download an FTP client. Two free FTP clients are Core FTP and FileZilla (see Resources below). Follow the instructions to install the downloaded application.

Step 2:
Open your FTP Client and enter the user name and password for your account. Enter or click on the “Connect” button to access the account. Navigate to the directory that holds your website files and folders.

Step 3:
Select all of the files and folders in your website directory. Click and then drag the selected files to a designated folder on your hard drive. This is typically in the left hand pane of the FTP screen. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the files to the folder on your hard drive. Your website files begin to download to your hard drive, where they will now be backed up.

Restore Backed-up Files

Step 1:
Open your FTP Client and enter the user name and password for your account. Enter or click on the “Connect” button to access the account.

Step 2:
Select all of your website’s files and folders from the location where you backed them up.

Step 3:
Click and then drag the selected files to the directory that you want to restore your web files to. This is typically in the right hand pane of the FTP screen. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the files from your hard drive to your website’s directory. Your website’s files will be uploaded to your domain and your website successfully restored.

In your hosting account, you will find two stats packages - Awstats and Webalizer. I prefer Awstats.  The best package though is Google Analytics. This service is free through Google, but some code needs to be installed on your website (which we can do for $35).

There are some basic concepts you need to understand to make sense of these stats.

No of visits - no of visitor sessions during that month - so this is the total no of visits to your website.

Pages - No of pages that has been viewed.  So, if one person views 3 pages, then it is 1 visit and 3 pages.

Hits - completely useless info - counts the no of files that have been accessed (each page may be made up of say 5 -10 files).

Bandwidth - the total amt of data that has been downloaded.  So, if each page is on average, 100kb, and you have had 100 visitors accessing (on average) 3 pages each, then you would expect the bandwidth to be 30,000kb (30MB).

The other bit of info that is important is No of Unique Visitors - this is the no of actual people that have visited the site during the month (no of visits will allow for someone who makes a repeat visit - which would count as one unique visitor, but two visits).

If you are in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, and you want to learn to drive, call my friend, Ezra, from the Forward Driving School and he will give you a free quote. Ezra is a fully qualified driving instructor and teaches across the whole of eastern Sydney area. See below for a list of the suburbs!

Ezra will provide you with high quality, professional, supportive driving instruction regardless of your age!
Forward Driving School has some amazing Special Offers such as:

Driving Instruction Per 1 Hour Lesson - Only $55 (inc GST)

Special Offer No 1- Pay for First lesson & Get the Next One for FREE

Special Offer No 2 - Pay for 10 lessons and it’s only $500 (inc GST)

These prices include pick up and drop off at your Sydney eastern suburbs location.

The areas that Forward Driving School provides driving instruction in are:Vaucluse, Rose Bay, Darling Point, Dover Heights, Double Bay, Point Piper, Woollahra, Watsons Bay, Potts Point, Rushcutters Bay, Elizabeth Bay, Bellevue Hill, Bondi Junction, Bondi, Bronte, Tamarama, Queens Park, Clovelly, Coogee, Randwick, Kensington, Centennial Park, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Moore Park, Maroobra, Eastlake, Hillsdale, Botany, Chifley, Mattraville, Daisyville, Mascot and more!

If you decide to learn to drive in Sydney with Forward Driving School you will:

•    Learn the right way from the beginning
•    Gain the proper driving skills that last a lifetime
•    Develop the necessary skills to defend yourself on the road
•    Complete all topics to pass your RTA Driving Test first go
•    Learn on a brand new, dual-control Toyota Corolla; perfect size to suit all

Call Forward Driving School on 0412 466 016 to book your first lesson or to ask any questions.

If you are experiencing any of the following issues:

• Don’t have time to type up your notes
• Need someone to proof-read your work
• Need a flyer or brochure
• Need to prepare a slide presentation
• Need to analyse your sales
• Need to conduct a customer survey

Then you need the services of “Help! for Small Business”. Hayley can assist you with all of these tasks. Document pick up is available in central and south west Adelaide. Completed products are supplied electronically in the medium of your choice (email, CD, USB etc).

The price is approx $1 per page and this is negotiable for higher volumes.

For more info, call Hayley today on 0407 187 770.

Question:

I have listed an item for seven days had 1 bid, and another person has contacted me and has asked if they can buy my item for x amount which is more than the other bid  on ebay and  if I could end the item and he would buy the item off me for a higher price. Now I don’t know if I can do this or not ? I still have 5 days left until the auction has finished. Is this advisable or common practice? Would it give me bad feedback?

Melinda’s Reply:

Accepting an offer outside of the auction process is against ebay policy - but some people still do it. Once you have a bid it is much more difficult to end the auction early - you need to report to ebay why (eg item damaged or stolen).

So - you can accept the offer and end the auction, but remember that ebay has a copy of the email offering to buy your item outside of the auction, so they can easily find out what really happened.  It wont affect your feedback (as there is no complete transaction) - but it could get you suspended by ebay!

If you have a got a bid already and another person wanting to buy it with 5 days still to run, it must be a good item!  You may end up getting more money if you let the auction run.

For a bit of good sport, get sniping! What is sniping?  It is placing an auction bid (usually on eBay) in the last couple of seconds of an auction and thus depriving other bidders of the opportunity to re-bid (of course, if the other bidder has set their maximum bid at a higher price than your snipe bid, they will still win the auction).

You can snipe manually - that is watch the auction (and don’t forget when it is finishing, or answer the phone, or get distracted by the kids!) and time your bid so there is only say 6 seconds to go.  If you are on a dial up connection, you will need to allow about 30 seconds!  This method is fraught with dangers (internet drops out, computer crashes, you time it wrong, you forget!), but it is fun

The alternative is a sniping service like Auction Sniper. Set up an account (and you will get three free snipes to start).  You will need to give them your eBay username and password (so you really want to make sure that any company you deal with is absolutely trust worthy) so they can bid on your behalf.

Then, find an auction you want to snipe on, copy the auction number (top right hand corner of the listing on eBay), paste that into Auction Sniper and sit back and wait!  With the appointed no of seconds to go (usually 4), Auction Sniper will bid to your limit.  If you win, you pay Auction Sniper a fee. If you dont, better luck next time!  Auction Sniper will also monitor activity during the course of the auction - and if your max bid price (ie your snipe bid) is exceeded at any time, Auction Sniper will notify you.  Pretty cool, huh!

A client of mine recently introduced me to a very cool keyword research tool.  It is very cool for a few reasons:

1. It is easy to use.

2. Because it combines the data of quantity of searches (for a particular keyword) withthe level of competition - and for your research to have any meaning, you really do need both of these things.

3. Data is in both numbers and charts - Google keyword  tools only provide graphics and I find that it lacks relatively on the bar charts.

4. It shows you trend data for the keyword.

5. It provides benchmarks for what makes a good keyword (no of searches, level of competition). This makes it absolutely easy to see if you are onto a winner!

6. The data is provided by the very well respected Wordtracker - so you know it is reliable.

The tool I am talking about can be found here:

Wordtracker’s GTrends

 It is a version of Wordtrackers free standard tool, but it has the extra competition info plus some other great bits!  Here is how it works.

1. Type in your keyword (or keyword phrase):

2. You will then see the top 100 most popular searches using that keyword (or phrase), sorted by search volume.

3. Click on the graph icon, next to the keywords you are interested in to get more in depth info.

4. Devour the results!  And then repeat for all keywords you are interested in.

From this chart you can see that the amount of competition way exceeds (by a factor of 10) the recommended level of competition (less than 30,000), although the no of searches is about twice the recommended level. This would be enough for me to stay well away from this term! The data also shows that this is a new term that has reached its zenith in mid-2008.

5. If you are interested in pursuing this keyword, you can click on one of the research links to take you further into mining the data.

So, overall, this is a fantastic little tool - it will give you all the basic data you need to research a market, and to start optimising your website for good keywords.

You may end up wanting something a little more comprehensive, but as far as free starter tools go this is excellent!