Days of wasting paper to print off multiple résumés are over. These days with easy access to the internet, one can have their résumé available online. This means less trees will need to be cut down and more prospective employers can stumble across your résumé.

Live Link Websites can create a professional online résumé for you and upload it to your very own domain name. If you don’t have a domain name just yet, let us know and we can look at registering that for you as well.

Below are a couple of designs we currently offer for professional online résumés:

Design One Design Two

If you’d like to get your own professional online résumé with Live Link Websites, head over to our order page and fill in the contact form. Put in your details and we’ll do the rest!

Order Your Online Résumé

Sometimes it can be necessary to change the hosts file on your computer so when you go to a website, you are directed to another server. One such reason for this might be that you are building a new website on a new server whilst keeping your existing website online for the time being.

Changing the hosts file on your computer will mean that only you and anyone else who has done the same process with the same information will be able to see the website which is hosted on the different server.

Although some people may feel nervous making such changes, it’s actually very easy to do and won’t do anything bad to your computer, internet connection or website. But just to be safe, always make a copy of the hosts file before changing it.

Mac OSX X

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type in the following code,
   sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
3. Type in your Mac login password if prompted
4. Start a new line at the bottom of the file, and add the hosts entry, I.e.
   100.0.000.00 yourwebsite.com.au www.yourwebsite.com.au (ensure the IP address is changed to that of the server your website is hosted and the domain name is changed to reflect that of your website)
5. Save the hosts file by pressing ‘Control + X’
6. Clear the DNS cache by typing in this command,
   dscacheutil -flushcache
7. Close the terminal

Windows 7 and Vista

1. Click Start
2. Type in ‘Notepad’
3. Right click ‘Notepad’ and select ‘Run as administrator’
4. Click Continue on the ‘Windows needs your permission’ UAC window
5. When Notepad opens, click File > Open
6. In the filename field, type in:
   C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
7. Click Open
8. Start a new line at the bottom of the file and enter the new entry, I.e.
   100.0.000.00 yourwebsite.com.au www.yourwebsite.com.au (ensure the IP address is changed to that of the server your website is hosted and the domain name is changed to reflect that of your website)
9. Click Save

To undo the change you have made to your hosts file, follow the exact same steps listed above, remove the new line you have entered and save the file.

As you may have heard, Google Chrome is receiving an update called Chrome 62 in October. This new version of the popular browser will bring about many changes, one of which being the browser will regard ANY website that doesn’t have an SSL Certificate installed to be insecure.

This means anyone using Google Chrome and visiting a website that doesn’t have an SSL certificate will be shown the website is insecure. By seeing a website isn’t secured by an SSL certificate, many visitors may end up leaving the site before they’ve even begun reading anything.

What an SSL Certificate does is encrypt the data travelling between your website and your visitors, ensuring that malicious third-parties can’t get their hands on the sensitive data your customers may be typing into your website, such as passwords or credit card details.

Non-SSL-secured websites can be identified as they start with http://, while secured websites start with https://. SSL-protected websites receive a green padlock as well as either a green “Secure” label or the company’s own name, in the Chrome browser’s address bar (depending on the type of SSL certificate the website has opted for).

Speak with your web developer to find out more information about setting up an SSL Certificate for your website.

Got A Question? Get In Touch!

If you’re looking for a more convenient way of accessing your emails, look no further than Gmail. Powered by Google and accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection, Gmail provides a much better way of reading your emails than other email software.

Where some software needs to be installed and configured on a computer or smart device, Gmail requires no installation and you don’t even have to configure email settings if you don’t want to.

To use Gmail all you need to do is go to https://gmail.com. This will give you the option to create your own account and email address. After less than a couple of minutes of inputting what you want your email address to be, setting your password (make sure it’s a safe one!) and other such quick and easy steps, you can start sending and receiving email in no time.

Personally I find using Gmail to be such an easier way to access emails. Being a web developer, I setup email addresses for clients and can only really provide the settings which are required to start receiving mail via email software such as Outlook or Windows Mail.

Often, some people can become confused by the hurdles that need to be jumped over in order to setup an email address with these kinds of software. By setting up your own Gmail account, you can make it so it relates to your business such as johnsbakery@gmail.com or your web developer can create an email address based on your domain name such as john@johnsbakery.com. Afterwards, the developer can setup email forwarding so any emails going to john@johnsbakery.com get redirected to the Gmail account.

Then all you have to do is go to the Gmail website to retrieve your emails. If you wish to respond via Gmail and don’t want to use the @gmail.com address to appear on replies, you can configure Gmail to use john@johnsbakery.com (for example) as the reply address. This can be accomplished by following these steps as seen on Google’s support page:

Step 1: Add an address you own

• On your computer, open Gmail.
• In the top right, click Settings.
• Click the Accounts and Import or Accounts tab.
• In the “Send mail as” section, click Add another email address.
• Enter your name and the address you want to send from.
• Click Next Step.
• Enter the SMTP server (for example, smtp.gmail.com or smtp.yourschool.edu) and the username and password on that account. (this information can be provided by your web developer)
• Click Add Account.

Step 2: Confirm the address

• Sign in to the account you added. (steps to access webmail can be provided by your web developer if you aren’t already using email software)
• Open the confirmation message you got from Gmail.
• Click the link.

Step 3: Change the “From” address

• In the message, click the “From” line. (If you don’t see this, click the space next to the recipient’s email.)
• Select the address to send from.

If you have any questions about using Gmail to get the most out of your emails, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

When was the last time you opened up a hard copy of the Yellow Pages and looked for a business? A few years ago, just the other day, you’re reading it right now? Whatever your answer is, you’ll know it’s not the easiest way to find a business or service.

The internet has been around for a good while now and almost everyone in the world is accustomed to searching for businesses or services via the web. Heck, the word Google isn’t just the name of a very popular search engine anymore. Google is officially recognised as a verb, not only to most internet users in the world, but also in dictionaries!

google

/ˈɡuːɡl/
verb
search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google.
“on Sunday she googled an ex-boyfriend”

Why Should I Have A Website?

This question is very commonly asked these days and the answer is simple: websites are an easy way to find information about a particular business, product or service.

Has anyone ever handed you a business card with their contact details on it? Have those business cards ever included in-depth information about what their business provides? I would be very surprised if it did! A website is kind of like a business card that you don’t have to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars getting designed and printed. Not only can you easily provide your contact details to anyone who has access to the internet, but you can also give summaries of what your business provides, display a portfolio of your work, sell products directly online, provide newsletters and heaps more.

In other words, having a website for your business is probably the best way to gain interest in your business, product or service. If you’ve got yourself a website and optimised it efficiently for search engines to find, anyone who has access to the internet will be able to come across your website and potentially become a new customer.

How Live Link Websites Can Help

Live Link Websites has been around since 1997, very close to the time the internet became fully available to the public around the globe. That means we have over 19 years experience designing and building websites.

Being a family business located in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast, not only can we provide outstanding, fast, efficient service, but we’re also available for face-to-face meetings in and around the local area.

How Do I Get A Website?

A website can sometimes be a fairly daunting thing to tackle for a small business owner. That’s where we like to make things easy for you. If you wish to get a website designed and built for your business, product or service, all you need to do is get in touch with us.

Let us know what you’d like to advertise on your website, what you hope to achieve from having an online presence, if there are any special functions you’d like to see on the website, and if you have an idea of design for the website or if you’d like us to handle that aspect.

From there we’ll liaise, and bounce ideas back and forth with you. It’s that easy for website design Caloundra!

If you’d like to get a website designed and built by a family owned, local website designer, please get in touch with us via our online contact form, or give us a call on 07 5449 9821. We look forward to being of assistance!

Imagine you’re out and about in a shopping centre looking for something very specific. Where do you go first? The store that has a well-known name, or the small store you’ve never heard of?

Most people will go straight for the big brand name stores because it’s what they’re familiar with.

How about if the small store presented itself in a very aesthetically pleasing way that also looked very inviting? You’ll probably be more inclined to stop by and check it out and possibly even walk away feeling pleasantly surprised.

It’s All About First Impressions

Unpleasing, cluttered and unuseable websites don’t do favours for your business.

You only get one chance at first impressions so it’s very much in your favour to make sure it counts.

Think about a shop window you walk by on the street that is very dimly lit, has a clutter of random items in it’s storefront, plastic letters that once spelt out the business name but are now peeling off, filthy windows with cobwebs everywhere and an incredible amount of clutter inside. Are you going to go in? No!

Now picture a storefront with a clean and sparkling front window that has the business name presented immaculately in a pleasing-to-the-eye colour, a range of a specific products laid out behind the glass that perfectly displays what the shop is selling and a clean and simple layout inside. Do you think you’ll stop to have a look? Most likely, yes!

​​
B&B Italia in Tokyo is a great example of how a clean, pleasing-to-the-eye storefront can spruce up a business.

The exact same goes for websites. An average person takes approximately 1/10th of a second to judge whether or not they like the look of something.

That’s about 50 milliseconds or 0.5 seconds! Hence why it’s incredibly important to make sure when a visitor enters your website, they not only like what they see but can instantly understand how they’re meant to move around the pages.

Mobile Compatibility

Once upon a time it was all about making an impression via desktop computers or laptops. Now with the expanding tablet and smartphone user base, websites should also cater for smaller screens.

I myself always thought I’d prefer to do my browsing and online shopping via a computer. But when you’re out and about and don’t have access to a laptop or desktop computer, it’s so handy to whip out your phone and search for what you’re looking for.

By 2017 it is estimated that over 90% of internet users will be accessing content via their phones or tablets. So unless you’ve sorted your website out to be mobile-friendly, you could potentially be losing quite a lot of customers.

Remember, in the 0.5 seconds it takes for a person to judge your website, they will also take into account if the font-size the website is using is easy enough to read. If a website isn’t compatible with a mobile device then chances are the text will be extremely small and require a user to zoom in to read it.

New Beginnings

With the start of a new year come the start of new habits, promises and changes.

If your website looks to be lacking in the visual department, is perhaps a bit too cluttered to make browsing easy or doesn’t display suitably on a mobile device, it might be time to inject some youth into it and let your website flourish amongst the ever-growing internet audience.

Should you deem it necessary to give your website a face-lift or go for a website renovation, you can get in touch with Live Link Websites and ask us more about it.

In this modern age of computers and the internet, there are a multitude of paths open to anyone who wants to build a website. Some are free and some aren’t.

Free or not, you still need to have a captivating design that will give your visitors a great impression of your website along with some really great and informative content.

The Layout

Deciding on how your website is laid out is probably the first and most important step you will take when setting up a website.

Is the navigation going to run horizontally across the top of the page or will it be vertically positioned along one of the sides? Do you want it to be a full-width design to run left to right and fill up everyone’s screen no matter the size of their hardware? What colour scheme will you use?

These questions are a few examples of what you should be asking yourself when designing your website.

Navigation

The benefits your navigation can provide a visitor are plentiful. It needs to be easy to find and easy to understand. Depending on how you’ve decided to lay out your content, a horizontal menu could be much easier to use. But the same goes for a vertical menu. It’s all very reliant on how your page looks overall.

Standard navigation on websites today seems to be a horizontally running menu at the top of your page. It’s up to you if you’d like it to appear above or below the header of your website. It could even run in-line with your header if you have a small logo.

Demonstration of a horizontal menu VS. vertical navigation. In my opinion, the horizontal looks much more easy to use.

It’s incredibly important to keep your navigation simple as well. Keep your website split up into categories and sub-categories so visitors can navigate easily. If you want to place heaps of content on your website from all different genres, do your best to categorise your content into some main categories that can then have sub-categories intuitively placed underneath them. Also strive to keep your category names as un-wordy yet descriptive as possible.

Page Width

If your website is benefiting from a lot of HD, large images, then having a full-width design would be a good way to keep the rest of your design looking uniform. Full-width designs are usually a great way to keep them responsive and appear efficiently on smaller devices such as smart phones.

That being said, large images can also make a set-width design pop out, but make sure the whole thing is still responsive or has the capabilities to display a different version of the design that is suitable for viewing on smaller screened devices.

Colour Scheme

When choosing a colour scheme, try your best to keep it to three colours. Choose one colour to be your ‘primary’ colour and then two ‘complimentary’ colours. These should be the only colours you use when putting together your website’s design. Colour wheels can really help you decide on what you’re going to use.

A colour wheel displaying how to find complimentary colours.

By using a colour wheel, you can more easily work out what colours compliment your primary colour. But in the end, it’s at your discretion what colours you use. Sometimes complimentary colours don’t really do your design justice. If you’re stuck for choice, there are some pretty great websites out there that provide you with colour schemes to browse through or create yourself.

Also you’re not solely confined to using only three colours. You can deviate and choose some different shades of the colours you’ve chosen as this still fits in with the rule of threes.

The Rule of Threes

Excerpt from Wikipedia – “The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things. The reader or audience of this form of text is also more likely to consume information if it is written in groups of threes.”

This concept can also be translated over to design. Generally when things are in threes it is more aesthetically pleasing. Take for example an advertisement you see on TV. The spruiker isn’t screaming at you to “BUY! BUY!” They’re more often than not spouting such phrases in threes and from constant exposure to such methods, it’s what our brains come to expect. Therefore most humans feel quite comfortable when seeing things in threes thus giving a design more of an attraction.

Graphics

It can be quite hard to create your own graphics that are not only pleasing to the eye, but also convey the message you want to people to receive when looking at them.

Software such as Adobe Photoshop can help you manipulate images so they become what you’re after. But if you don’t have the budget to fork out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for such software, there are some great websites that provide similar software for free. One of which is actually a free browser based version of Photoshop itself. If you type the right search term into Google you’ll find something that suits your needs.

However, for those of you who’d prefer to have access to ready made images straight away, Google image search is a God-send. Just make sure you have permission to use such images before adding them to your website.

Content

I know, content isn’t part of the design. But then again, without great content, your beautiful masterpiece of a website design will be all for naught. Visitors only take a couple of seconds when visiting a website to know if they want to stay and read, or find something else.

Without informative and relevant content sitting on your Home page, you will more often than not lose that visitor who just clicked through to your website.

If you have any further questions about website design, or would like Live Link Websites to help with a design for your own website, please get in touch today.

If you’ve built your own website using something like WordPress or Tumblr for example, there are a lot of things you can do yourself to improve your SEO. And the best part of it is they are free and incredibly easy.

• Make sure the URLs of your pages match the keywords you want people to find you with. I.e. You want to attract people who search for ‘hand made clothing’ so you can change the URL of your page to be hand-made-clothing. If you are building your website yourself from scratch then all it takes is a change of the documents name. When using a system like WordPress, it’s just a matter of editing the permalink of your page/post.
• Put some really good keywords and search phrases in amongst the content of your page/post. But don’t put too many in as Google can penalise this kind of behaviour which can be known as ‘keyword stuffing’.
• Use a particular search phrase or keywords on your page/post as H1 or H2 text. You can easily do this by using the formatting toolbar of whatever software you utilise for your website. Using text like this increases the importance of the content contained in the H1 or H2.
• Always make sure you give images an ‘alt’ tag. To do this in code, just find where you have your image and add the code so it looks similar to the following:
  <img src=”mypicture.jpg” alt=”My Picture”>
  It also helps if you name your images appropriately, so instead of using ‘mypicture’ it could be named ‘hand-made-clothing.jpg’.
• Set up a social media account. The more the merrier but don’t go too far with the amount of social media channels you create if you can’t handle keeping them up to date on a regular basis. Facebook and Twitter are great ways to get your website out there and be noticed by others. See our article about How Social Media Can Help Your Business.
• Employ the use of free SEO software and websites to find out what you can fix to better your ranking. There’s a great WordPress plugin called Yoast WordPress SEO. It gives each of your pages a ranking and then goes on to let you know exactly what you can do to make your pages more search engine friendly. Such a simple to use tool and better yet, it’s free! Download the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin.
• Create an interesting video about your business that will catch your visitors attention, but at the same time, not bore them. Post it on YouTube and Google will love you for it seeing as Google own YouTube. Not only will a video keep visitors entertained but YouTube also acts as another form of social media. People can follow your channels just like on Facebook of Twitter and people can also rate your videos so you know just how popular you are.

Go ahead and try out some of these tips and if you’d like any further help with bettering your SEO or if you’re receiving worrying phone calls from overseas companies claiming that your website is suffering from poor SEO, get in touch with us at Live Link Websites.

 

Online social media has been around for a long time, but a lot of businesses aren’t taking advantage of the benefits they can provide.

Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc. can all have great impacts on your business. When you think about how many people use social media, you can really get a feel for how many more people you can expose your business to.

There are many great ways having a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account (among many others) can increase your business. These methods of connecting to one another so easily has almost become a way of life for today’s generation. Wake up, check Facebook. Have lunch, update Twitter. Sit on the toilet, browse your Google+ connections. And so on.

If you already have a large customer base, imagine how many of them would be using some form of social media. Now imagine how many friends they might have. Then think about what would happen if they shared an update you posted so all of their friends could see. That’s free advertising for you right there.

Here’s How Social Media Can Help Your Business

Search Engine Ranking

As your social media base grows, your ranking among search engines may also grow. Not to say that this is a sure-fire method, but if you put in the time to grow your customer base via social media, you will start to reap the benefits a popular page can have on search engine rankings.

Bring in More Customers

Create giveaways via social media campaigns. Giving people something for free or at a discounted rate in exchange for them clicking a few buttons to share such an offer is a great way to increase your customer base. Once you’ve received a good amount of followers, then you can start creating new campaigns to keep them interested.

Further Develop Your Brand

If you already have a well established business, exposing yourself to social media can help increase the interactivity your customers have with you. Social media will allow your existing customers to connect and socialise with your business on a personal level.

Free Links

Placing links on your social media pages is a great way to re-direct customers to your website as well as further expose your website online. Most social media websites appear amongst search engine results. So if you’ve written an informative and keyword rich post, chances are you could be seeing it appear amongst search results using those keywords included in your post.

The more you expose yourself the better. Plus it’s free an easy to setup any of the popular social media account. Try it out today or get in touch with us if you’d like some help setting up a social media page.

Over 80% of internet users own a smartphone. And the majority of those users will prefer to whip out their phone to look something up online instead of wait for a computer to start up.

Even if your website is purely there to give your business an online presence, when someone views it on their phone and it’s not responsive (another term to indicate mobile friendly websites), chances are it won’t look very nice. Worse than that, if your website content is scaled down to fit onto a phone screen, everything will become that much harder to read.

This will result in users getting frustrated and skipping to the next website. A website that is responsive.

My website is not responsive. What could go wrong?

Apart from potentially frustrating your customers and new users, Google are starting to punish website that aren’t user friendly.

As time goes on, more and more website will be mobile friendly. If your website doesn’t keep up with other mobile friendly competitors, Google will start to rank them higher than you.

What are the benefits of mobile friendly websites?

Due to the high percentage of smartphone users in the world, it will eventually become absolutely necessary for websites to be responsive.

However, besides the growing population of smartphone users, having a responsive website can also provide greater ease of use to your customers.

Take, for example, a car transfer service. Their customers aren’t always going to be beside a computer to make their bookings. They could be walking down the street, at a restaurant, at an airport etc. So when they use their smartphone to look for car transfers services, they will either want to find a website that legibly tells them a company’s phone number or better yet, provide them with an online booking form.

If your website provides a service similar to this but is not responsive, when a customer views your website, they will have to zoom in to their phone, hunt around the page by swiping their fingers here and there and sometimes, try to fill in a booking form that is too small to touch or just doesn’t support their kind of phone.

Internet speeds are growing and websites are loading much quicker than they ever have. An internet user will expect to find what they want on the internet very quickly. So if a website isn’t giving them what they want fast enough, internet users can easily and happily try the next website.

Don’t Let Your Business Lose Customers

If you already have a website but haven’t had it optimised to be mobile friendly and responsive, chances are it can be converted quite simply.

Alternatively, there are thousands of beautiful, modern, easy to use and responsive templates out there that can be configured to suit your business’ online needs.

If you need a new responsive website or an existing website converted to be mobile friendly, get in touch with Live Link Websites to see how we can help.