As a key provider for hospitality industry supplies and outfitting, Advantage Commercial Kitchens is a central to Melbourne's thriving hospitality scene. With a massive number of kitchen appliances for sale as well as a custom outfitting service, ACK requires a site that is as functional as it is intuitive and informative. In the lead up to exhibiting at the Fine Food show in September, their website was due for an upgrade.

We've maintained ACK's sales inventory functionality for a couple of years now, and 2016 provided us an opportunity to refresh the site to meet today's standards across multiple platforms. This update included both a visual and organizational overhaul. In an attempt to simplify sales and enquiries for the site's massive inventory, we went for a straightforward clean look and feel and a reduced product list for sale, rolling out a visually appealing and easy to use quote feature for the remainder of the product range. Our collaboration with ACK resulted in an effective site that works across all platforms and lets the products do the talking.

In addition to visual streamlining, Truss CRM provides ACK with a solution for their sales needs. Integrating brilliantly with Xero and Unleashed, ACK's custom-built CRM allows for fine control over business rules, streamlined quote generation and approval, saving ACK's management time, and helping drive more business.
Widely known across the hotel industry for their project management wizardry, Yardley Hospitality provides consistent excellence in providing products and service for their customers. Inger and Paul Yardley's sterling reputation is confirmed by their ISO 9001 accreditation as awarded by TQCSI, and their hundreds of returning online customers are testament to this qualification.

Jack Marlow and Yardley have been longtime collaborators, featuring a site that allows for product sales and inquiries. Beginning in 2015, Jack Marlow began work on a comprehensive site refresh for Yardley, updating the site's look and feel to meet up with modern standards. The site's re-design aims for a fresh and modern feel, emphasizing clean organisation for Yardley's numerous product categories.

In addition to visual upgrades, Yardley's new custom tailored CRM provides functionalities critical for Yardley's maintenance of thousands of products and user subscriptions. With custom functions built for inventory, shipping calculation, user accounts, marketing mailouts, automated responses and statistics generation, Jack Marlow has Yardley covered on all of it's day to day needs. 

Please give a warm welcome to our new Support Specialist, Matt Easterbrook!

Matt has come to us from quite a different background to the usual helpdesk suspects — he spent eleven years producing high-quality caffeinated beverages for people just like the ones he now works with. After moving here in 2012 (from NZ, bro!) for the improved working conditions in hospitality, he has since built a family and decided that the unforgiving hours of cafe work were no longer a priority for him. With such an extensive history in customer service, his personal approach to support and attention to detail is outstanding. He loves helping and teaching people new things, and looks forward to building long-lasting relationships with all of our clients.

We've had Matt on the team for just over a week now, and he's absolutely nailing it. Along with main man Dan, we think we've got the best support in the business.  

As the sun sets on another year we're taking the time to look back on the last 12 months.

Here are some thoughts from the team:

Since we pushed our first Jack Marlow website live in 2009 we've had the opportunity to develop some fantastic long-standing relationships with our clients. 2015 was a really great year for us going back to some of our older clients and making sure their websites are up to 2015 standards, are fully responsive and reflect their business in 2015.

Not only is the web a completely different animal these days but many of our clients have expanded their businesses, changed their focuses or restructured! We've got a few more redesigns and re-brands to launch in the new year which I'm itching to announce but for me the highlights of 2015 were working on and re-launching the Riverina Tourism websites, Lower Plenty Dental and Hemden all with stunning looking and fully responsive websites.

Elise Kumar, Front End Developer

Being the newest member of the Jack Marlow team, 2015 was a thrilling ride for me. I got the opportunity to acquaint myself with long time clients like Rivkin, Lower Plenty Dental, Riverina Tourism and Ud...
Direct Systems provide geophysical services and equipment to the mining and civil industry around Australia as well as for international and offshore projects. They needed a website to showcase their past projects and advertise their equipment and services to new and existing clients. To accompany their fresh new site, they also required a br...

Weekenda.com specialises in weekend and holiday accommodation within 2.5 hours of Sydney. Their new responsive website allows their visitors to easily search for properties in their preferred area - we've hooked into Google Maps to give visitors its functionality and familiar interface without needing to leave the weekenda.com website.

Are you 100% confident your Registered Training Organisation will be ready to lodge your 2015 AVETMISS data in January? Have you validated it? Is it clean and tidy?

No? Didn't think so. Look, that's okay - you're far from alone.

How not ready are you? Let's find out.

To make sure you don't get stuck behind a wall of errors trying to lodge your data in January, there are three main areas to consider. These may seem obvious, but each one has its own unique catches:

  1. Getting the data in
  2. Getting the data right
  3. Getting the data really, really "right"
  4. ...

During Mental Health Week, the ABC is running groundbreaking TV and Radio programming encouraging all Australians to start talking about mental health, to seek support and to give money to fund research to find better mental health solutions.

In 2014 we worked with the Society for Mental Health Research and the ABC to help make the Mental As campaign a reality. The 2014 campaign raised over $1.5 million for Mental Health Research, with the funds awarded to Early Career Researchers in May of this year - we're very proud to have been part of that.

...

It's always exciting to work with new clients and to be a part of a business's first online steps. But there is a real pleasure in working with long-standing clients and redesigning and re-visioning an older project.

We first launched the Hemden website back in early 2010 and over the past five years...

As an RTO, your compliance load increases every year. With this in mind, it's important that you be certain that your software will tick all the boxes.

We're pleased to announce that Truss RTO now appears on two key regulator lists to assure you that it does:

NCVER's AVETMISS Compliant Software Register
The National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) is a not-for-profit company owned by the Commonwealth and state and territory ministers responsible for vocational education and training. It's responsible for the maintenance and administration of the AVETMISS data collection standards that all Registered Training O...