News & Media

One in five teens between 12 and 17 maintains a blog, according to a US survey, and now corporates are catching on -from telecommunications company Verizon, to analysts Gartner Group, to small Sydney consultancy Step Two Designs. There is a sound business case for blogging. It gives customers, suppliers and staff an inside view of how you think. After all, people buy from people, not some faceless corporate entity.

Why does Montana Wines appear on the first page of Google’s search results for “New Zealand wines,” while Matua can’t be found until page two? And why does Trelawn Place come up number one in a Google search for “Queenstown bed and breakfast”, whereas competitor White Shadows Country Inn is number 11?

An online community for writers and publishing professionals is a raging success by the old dot-com criteria – heaps of traffic (140,000 visitors a month) and average visit times of over seven minutes. But it’s a dud as a business venture. It has operated at a loss every year.

Why do we code in PHP rather than ASP? For reasons including price, capability, its “open source” and platform-agnostic nature, popularity, speed, security, and efficiency.

Usability. Boring but crucial, it’s about making your website easy and intuitive to use. Users shouldn’t need to learn how to use your site. Put stuff where people expect it.

We recommend writing web scripts in PHP, not CGI / Perl. PHP is much better suited to the Web and takes less “overhead,” meaning that scripts will run faster and the server will be able to handle more simultaneous users on your site. Here’s Why…