Blog

By Stefan Sojka

This blog is about how you can boost your keyword search ranking in Google.  It is also actually helping to boost ranking of this Website at the same time as it is telling you!

Blogging is a great way to add content to your Website – good, relevant, helpful content.  Search engines like to index more content on a Website, as it helps determine if your site is better than the next one and so should be higher up the ranks for the certain keywords your site or blog might be about.

Since I want to get found for, say, 'Website design Sydney', or 'Web design Sydney', it makes sense that I should blog about this topic and related topics.  It is an opportunity to tell people what you know about your business and your industry, which in turn lets people see that you are knowledgable and authoritative, and helps Google and other search engines index you better.

The best way to do this is to make sure that your blogs are topical and relevant – so this blog posting is about how to get better ranking in Google – by writing blogs!  It’s ironic, but by blogging about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for ‘Website design Sydney’, I am informing my readers and boosting search engine ranking at the same time.

So, like your blog, which will be all about your business, the posts in this blog covers many topics related to Web development, Internet marketing, business Websites, Internet culture, marketing tips and technical advice.  All of these add content and information, and help Google decide that this site is worth putting up the list a little more – in other words, is worth visiting.

If you do it right, chances are that other Websites will start linking to your blog articles.  This further increases your on-line footprint and lifts you higher up the listings.  It also boosts the overall quality of your industry’s presence on-line – because someone like you has taken the time to write something helpful and informative for your fellow industry members and customers.

Blogging is a great way to communicate and is also a really good way to add value to your Website in more ways than one.  Information, advice, expertise, link-building, search engine ranking – everything is given a little boost every time you post a blog.

Happy blogging, and if you are based in Sydney and are looking for a Web developer who understands Website marketing and internet business, give us a call. :-)

By Stefan Sojka

About 13 years ago I made a big mistake.  I bought a PC.  There I was, a true Apple Mac devotee, surfing the net, making music, building Web pages and running my business, when it was time to upgrade.  At the time, Apple Macs were relatively quite expensive, compared to PCs, and a friend offered me a second-hand Pentium 90 for $500.  Compared to the three or four grand a new Mac was going to cost, I jumped at it.  I crossed to the dark side.

PCs are cobbled together Frankenstiens, built from a terrible collection of misfitting parts, all with different protocols, standards, compatibilities, etc.  And their operating system is one made by a man whose primary objective was not to make the best operating system in the world, rather to just get his operating system into as many computers in the world as he could.  Windows, an overlay to MSDOS, is a mess.  No wonder the 'blue screen of death' became such a well-known phenomenon.  Clunky, buggy, insecure... and that's just the software – the hardware – with all its associated third party software just adds exponentially to the complexity, and in turn, to the problems.

Since that fateful day of purchasing the PC, I have become a slave to the system.  Endless patches, upgrades, re-boots, blue screens, error messages, downtime – so much down time!  Not only that, but I was set on a path of never-ending spending on new bits and pieces.  My Apple was a single unit – the PC was a box full of junk, each piece of junk requiring replacement at regular intervals.

All of this is fine, if you are a boffin – boffins (nerds, geeks, whatever) love pulling things apart and replacing things.  They love the latest gadgetry – they even love it when things crash, because it gives them a chance to prove how much of a boffin they are as they join newsgroups and search technical documentation in their quest to resolve the problem.  I am not a boffin – I use computers because I want to get things done.

I might have saved three grand on that fateful day I bought my first PC, but I think over the last 13 years, I have probably wasted at least $100,000 in downtime, lost productivity, fees paid to boffins, lost focus (as I spend half my life talking to boffins) and my environmental footprint, with all the wasted junk I have bought, re-bought and thrown away, is about the size of King Kong.

It's time for me – and the world – to wake up.  We don't need PCs – we never did – Bill Gates only made us think we did – because he wanted to control the world.  PCs will always be poor imitations of real computers.  They will always be cobbled together, they will always be ever more complex as each operating system upgrade adds layer upon layer of disguise to try to look like an elegant machine.  All you get is a window to a vista of sophistry.

Looking forward I have decided to replace most of my PCs with Apples.  Apples are not perfect, by any measure, but at this point in time, their elegance, design, reliability, performance and productivity outstrips the PC.  Those funny adverts are true – that's why they work so well.  Microsoft are running scared.  The era of forcing people to bend to your will and hand over all their money for something that will give them more trouble than it's worth is over.  This is the Apple/Google era.  Software in clouds, not shrink-wrapped.  The Internet is complicated enough – managing our lives these days is hard work – the last thing we need is for the devices we use continuing to be the bane of our existence.

I'm switching back.  I'm going home.  Apples are good for you.

By Stefan Sojka

It's like... the numbers never added up.  When average house prices went up by more than an average person could earn in a year, something was terribly wrong.

If everything is over-priced and everyone over-borrows to pay for it all, the only way to keep up is to rip the resources of the planet off.  No-one factors what nature provides – they just take it for free.  Nature is the only real input that feeds the system – minerals, human toil and animal/plant harvesting.  But even pillaging the planet can't be done fast enough to cover the ridiculously stratospheric numbers conjured up in financial circles.

The worker is not much better off than the planet – the debts can't even be covered working 20-hour days, 7 days a week.  Not even interest payments on the house can be covered at that rate, it seems.

You can't dig enough tin ore fast enough to feed the beast of the stock market, no matter how many guns are pointed at the poor Congolese peasants.

So of course the system will collapse.  Thankfully it was the financial system first, not the natural system – you can't eat money.

New models must arise – and are arising.  It's just that governments, business and the general public are hypnotised into thinking "this is the best system we have."  The faulty logic being that communism failed, therefore we must have the best system in the universe.

Just because we have Mac and PC operating systems, doesn't mean there is not a far better way to run a computer than both of them.

That's my socio-political rant for the day! :-)

By Stefan Sojka

Can you believe that it is nearly Christmas – AGAIN??!!

Here we are half-way through November.  The Christmas decorations are up – the parties are being planned – and some have already been held!  Is it just me, or is time really speeding up?  We have a bunch of Websites on the go right now – and of course everyone wants everything finished before Christmas – so we can all sun ourselves on the beach, sipping cocktails, knowing that our Websites are working!

Fortunately we have a new Website building and management system, with Content Management, CRM, blog, news, FAQs, statistics, templates, newsletters – everything a business needs in a single Website to get up and running, attract new business and manage existing business really well.

So, yes, Christmas is fast approaching, but we are steadily working away on designing, building and managing a number of great new Websites, ready for a huge 2009.