Blog

In partnership with BRB Creative, this week we've launched the new Artlounge website. Their old website was several years old so along with a new content management system they've got a fresh new look.

In a previous post I discussed Google and Bing. Google does what it does so well that I think it unlikely that Bing (or any other Search Engine) will seriously compete with Google.

But what about things that Google doesn't do as well?

When you do a Google Search, Google of course does not search the entire internet for that query. Google searches its index of the internet, and the information that appears highest in your Search Results could be days or months out of date. For most searches that probably won't worry you too much. Although it can be frustrating waiting a number of days for Google's "spiders" to re-index your website after you make changes to it. But what if you're interested in finding something that ...

To celebrate such a successful year for us all here at Jack Marlow, we'll be closing up at 3pm tomorrow (Friday, December 16) and heading out for some Christmas cheer. 

If you require support during this time, please leave us a message on 1300 932 243 and we'll be sure to get back to you.

The Jack Marlow office will be open every day (excluding public holidays) over the Christmas period for any support queries. No rest for the wicked!

Some of us are taking a short break, but if you have an urgent request, a member of the support team will be here to handle it.

2011 has been quite eventful for us; rapid growth, a (huge) new office, new staff, exciting projects and, of course, ongoing improvements to the Jack Marlow CMS. We hope you...

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm returning to Docklands briefly tomorrow night (5:30-7:30 PM) to run a workshop at Servcorp's swish offices at Level 2, 710 Collins St.

I'll be covering a lot of ground, from the basics of how to generate traffic in the first place right through to how to keep your existing customers coming back for more.

How to Make a Website That Works - Turning Visitors into Customers.

• Integrating your website into your marketing mix
• How to get more traffic
• How to keep people coming back
• How to turn traffic into business
• How to make sure that business becomes repeat business

There's room for up to 12 participants, still...

It's moving day here at Jack Marlow HQ!

Having outgrown our current office space, it's time to leave the wind and water views of Docklands, and make our way to fabulous Flinders Lane. We're all pretty excited about setting up camp in the heart of the Melbourne CBD (and having access to lots and lots and LOTS of coffee shops!).

We are still hard at work while desks are being dismantled around us, so there will be no interruption to support services during business hours, and absolutely no interruption to network services at all.

Thank you to our clients for your support thus far - we look forward to growing with you. Especially now that we have the floorspace to do it. FOUR TIMES the floorspace, in fact!

A change is as good as a holiday (apparently), bu...

It’s been a VERY busy couple of months here at Jack Marlow - we’ve rebranded and relaunched our own website, we’ve moved our network, and are in the throes of moving offices. Somehow, during all of this, we’ve also managed to launch some pretty amazing websites! 

Let’s have a closer look at a couple of them...

First up: WCIG. Westgate Community Initiatives Group Inc is a not-for-profit employment services provider ‘committed to affirming the right of every individual to a meaningful role in society’.

So here we are. This is our new site. We're pretty excited. We hope you like it.

In a little over six weeks, we've turned around a ground-up rethink of who we are, what we do, and how we can do it better. I think we're doing pretty well.

Our old tagline was "a human approach to web development" -- which has always been what we try to do, but I'm a big believer in using less words.

So we've kept it simple. We make websites - that work.

• We're plain speaking
• We get results
• Our CMS is a doddle to use
• Our clients are getting real res...

Hi. I'm Kieran Morrissey.

Two and a half years ago, I started this business with Mark Stevens. As well as being a 50% shareholder and director, I built our network, wrote the software we build our websites with, and have handled our more technically challenging projects.

Last week, I bought the other half of the company.

Since the beginning of 2009, Jack Marlow has built hundreds of websites, grown from three to six (sometimes seven) people in the office here, and we now haul a pretty serious volume of data, traffic, and business for our clients each month.

Since the beginning of 2009, Twitter has grown from 75 million users to 200 million, the ASX 200 has bottomed out, gained nearly 50% then lost 10%, Justin Bieber was unleashed on an u...

Internet Explorer 6 is a web-browser which was released in 2001. That's 10 years ago! 10 years might not seem like a long time, but the internet has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Internet Explorer 6 was a great web-browser in its day (and it really was much better than its predecessors!), but that day has long passed.

Last week, Microsoft launched their IE6 Countdown website: it contains some shiny graphics and information about how and why you should move away from Internet Explorer 6.

If you're still using IE6 I strongly recommend that you upgrade to a later version of Internet Explorer, or switch to another browser. Mozilla Firefox is very popular, but my preferred browser these days is...

If your life is anything like mine, chances are you use a large number of online services which each need a password for security. You may have dozens and dozens of passwords, and it's pretty much impossible to remember more than a few different ones for your most frequently used services: let alone the ones you log in to only a few times a month or year.

Password Reuse.

A common strategy for dealing with password overload is to use the same (or very similar) username and password combinations for every service. That way, there's not so much to remember.

I know that it's tempting but this probably the worst thing you can do. I've even spoken to people on the phone who have given me a password that they want to use for their we...

Although Twitter is often dismissed as a tool used to tell people about their lunches, the use of twitter during the worst of the flood event was incredible. Information was available on Twitter as it was happening and was used to coordinate evacuations and rescues. Although some hoax information was spread through twitter, on the whole twitter was a fast and efficient way for people in crisis to obtain information and communicate.

More disappointing was the use of this disaster for self-promotion. I saw several people offering to donate in return for “retweets” on Twitter or “likes” on Facebook; understandably, there was also a lot of backlash for that sort of behaviour.

Another brilliant example of how technology has helped with the crisis is...

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google or another Search Engine indexes your website (looks through it and stores information about your website for when someone does a search) it will follow all of your links to read all of the information on your pages.

A good way to ensure that the search engine sees all of the pages on your website is to provide a sitemap to the search engine. A good Content Management System will build and update a sitemap for google to read automatically.

All websites running the Jack Marlow software have a sitemap for Google which  is updated whenever you update the structure of the site. Find out if your content management system automatically ...

2010 is winding up and, like many of our business partners, clients and friends we're absolutely run off our feet! 

2010 has been an absolute cracker of a year for us; new staff, exciting projects and some major upgrades and improvements to the Jack Marlow CMS.

Here's to a relaxing break and a prosperous and enjoyable 2011.

Holiday Trading Hours

The Jack Marlow office will be closed from noon on 24 December and will re-open at 9am on Monday 10 January.

During the holiday period we'll be monitoring voicemail so if anything urgent comes up please leave us a message on 1300 932 243 and we'll be sure to get back to you.

This is my latest Blog Entry

Would you use the words “This is a billboard” on a billboard? Or start a brochure with “welcome to our brochure”? Probably not – pretty much everyone knows that a billboard is a billboard and a brochure is a brochure and pretty much everyone knows that a website is a website.

Following on from my 1 Minute SEO blogs on headings and link text you’ll remember that the words you use in headings are important as are the words you use in links.

Don’t waste valuable word space on links that state “click here”. Links are often brightly coloured and eye catching – if you use words which relate to the destination pa...

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google “spiders” (reads through a website and follows all of the links it can find) your and other websites it may associate the words used in a link with the destination page. When you link through to internal pages on your website make sure that you link using the keywords that are relevant to that destination page.

You can also use this to help build up associations with terms you may not use frequently, but which your prospective customers might use to refer to your products or services.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

The first page your visitors see is your homepage and you only have a limited amount of time to capture their attention.

Additionally, Google and other Search Engines will see your homepage as being the most important page on your website: it’s the page which people will link through to and will probably have the highest “Page Rank” (a ranking of how important the page is).

Text on your homepage can be crucial for telling both your customers and the search engines about who you are and the benefits of dealing with your company.

Remember that you don't need to have your company name in your main header: Use that spa...

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google reads through your website it will try and work out what your website is about – this is so that Google can match your website up with search queries that your potential visitors might be making.

Make your important words stand out

Google, and your visitors, will pay more attention to text which stands out: headings, bold or italic text will call out to your visitors. Think about what your potential visitors are looking for and make sure that those questions are being answered in a way which is easy to find and see.

A good content management system will allow you to easily add headings and other formatting to the...

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

While “Flash” (A kind of software which produces animations) and image based menu and navigation systems can make your website look good, they can seriously impede your website's ability to be read well by Google, and consequently your position in search engines may suffer.

Google and other Search Engines read the text on your website and may associate the words used in links with the content on those other pages: A flash navigation system won’t be able to be read by Google and google won’t be able to read the words on any image buttons you’re using.

If your potential visitors are using

Over the next few days Google is rolling out a new search feature called "Instant Preview".

What is Instant Preview?

Using Instant Preview, anyone searching Google has the option to see a popup preview of what each website looks like as they move their mouse over the search result, without leaving the page. This means that a potential visitor will be able to get an idea of how your website looks before they even click through to your site!

For the first time, the way your website looks is going to have a big impact on the number of visitors you can expect from Google.

The Good

If you've got a great looking website and you ha...

A Web Browser is a program you use to browse the internet. There are a number of different Web Browsers available for free and while the basic functionality is the same (with an address bar and the ability to view websites) some of the advanced functionality is different and each browser has a different interpretation of websites.

The intricacies of “browser bugs” aren’t important to anyone that’s not a web developer and even in our office here we have different opinions about which is the “best” web-browser. The important thing is to make sure that your visitors all have a great experience, regardless of which browser they prefer to use.

Internet Explorer (46.5%)

Internet Explorer is still the most popular ...

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

 “Meta information” is information you can use to describe your website beyond the content on your site itself. Your Content Management system should allow you to add in Meta Information for your website, and for the individual pages on your website.

The three “Meta Tags” that pertain to SEO are called “Meta Title”, “Meta Description” and “Meta Keywords”.

What is the ‘Meta Title’?

The SEO Title appears in the title bar of your web browser, and appears as your site title when your site appears in a google search.

Placing keywords in the SEO Title o...

I keep hearing people say that they want to be "Number One" on Google or that someone-or-other is going to get them to Number One.

But - number one for what? There are no search results on the Google homepage: before you see a list of search results you need to enter some search terms. There's no point being number one for searches that are completely unrelated to what you do, or are so esoteric that nobody will ever search for them.

If someone is promising you "Number One" on Google without talking about search terms?

Run.

If they do tell you they can guarantee you the number one spot for a particular search term?

Run anyway.

Nobody can guarantee ...

We're too busy to blog properly so we figured we'd just spam everyone with job ads :) Normal transmission will resume shortly...

Jack Marlow is looking for a motivated "hunter" to sell our innovative Content Management System (CMS) powered websites to SMEs. This is a great opportunity to deliver state-of-the-art, feature-rich websites including unique marketing tools with real benefits for potential customers.

Jack Marlow is a boutique web development company embarking on a huge growth phase and we want you to be a part of it!

The successful candidate will be:

• A self starter with at least 2 years sales experience (preferably selling websites, ecommerce or internet marketing solutions to SMEs)
...

Want to join the Jack Marlow Team?

Jack Marlow is looking for an enthusiastic and well-organised people person to help our support capacity keep up with the rest of our business - and we want you to grow with us!

The successful candidate will spend the first few weeks receiving on-the-job training in handling support calls and tickets from our clients.

After a few weeks, you will then step into a team leader role, and help us build a team of casual support staff. From this point you will be responsible for rostering the support team, monitoring its performance and workload, handli...

For people who know me, this may seem a disingenous thing for me to blog about, because I've long decried (often loudly) how fundamentally stupid an idea mandatory filtering is. In short, it's a money-pit for government and industry that doesn't actually solve any of the problems it sets out to solve, creates problems for law enforcement that didn't exist before, generates a false sense of security and complacency, and provides governments with a dangerous apparatus to control the flow of information.

But enough of that.

If you're an Australian business, with your website hosted within Australia, mandatory internet filtering in the minimal form proposed is no cause for direct concern. Don't panic, don't run for the hills, and certainly do...

In the late '90s my Grandmother spent a few hundred dollars on a website to sell her self-published book. I recall spending hours with her crafting meta-keywords and submitting her site to Alta-Vista and Yahoo!

It's easy to forget just how much Google changed online search. These days it's difficult to imagine a world without Google Search (and Google Mail, Google Maps, Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Trends... ).

Earlier this month Microsoft launched Bing, a replacement for Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search, formerly MSN search....) . Bing claimed to be a "decision engine" and I think they hoped or expected Bing to be another Google - the beginning of a d...