Sauce Software Blog

Last week we were reminded that a mix of traditional marketing and online marketing can produce great results.

Chris Shapland from Shapland Swim Schools and Hilton Sentinella from Rha Advertising produced a campaign which launched their franchise business online. A TV ad which played for one week promoting the Swim School then directing the viewers to book online. The result was a 90% increase in registrations from last year via the online registration form and 40-80% conversion rate, the lower conversion rate was because that  particular swim school had filled all the places.

Just by “going live” online doesn’t mean magic will just happen, you need to work it, test, measure and improve.  There are so many ways to start marketing your business online. It is all out there for you to grab today.

An example of a CSS document

You may have heard us web designers talk about it or stumbled upon this term before without much of a clue as to what is.

The definition:
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. (courtesy of wikipedia)

Still don’t get it? Basically, it is a document attached to your website template that helps us designers build your website. With CSS, we specify colour, backgrounds, positions, padding, lines, fonts, spacing - basically everything to do with how a page looks.

Now with SauceOpen, the editor that you use to manage your content has buttons to allow you to change colours, font-sizes etc. BUT this is not tied in with the CSS, rather the thing that makes a piece of text “green”, for example, is created directly on the page (in line HTML styles).

CSS vs inline styling

With CSS, it is applyed site wide. So you can specify all images to have a border. On the other hand, with inline styling, it is only specific to that instance. If you make this font green, it will only occur on this page and no where else.

Tags: code language, CSS, web design

Why integrate, when we can use a big single system to do everything?

The answer is simple - smaller niche applications do a single role much better than huge applications do every role. What’s better for blogging; blogger or geocities? Would you use hotmail or cpanel to organise do your email?

But it’s very annoying to go around to every site - updating blogger when you want to talk about some news, logging in to gmail when you want to send an email, logging in to your webstore when you want to update product prices - all these logins, passwords and starkly different interfaces can get overwhelming quickly!

Bring in the power of integration - what if all of your blogger posts would automatically show on your main website frontpage? What if you could post on blogger using the same administration area as you do when you update your webstore? What if, whenever you logged in to your website administration section, you were also logged in to blogger, so you could get there and do the more advanced functions at the click of a button?

You wind up getting the best of both worlds! One centralised interface, one username and password, one place to log in - unlimited access to the various applications and frameworks out there. And it’s virtually unlimited - any application with a published API can theoretically be added to the mix!

Tags: Development, integration, interoperability

In November 2007, Ipswich was named the world’s most livable mid-size city. In their latest newsletter Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale says:

Among the many announcements made as part of the Ipswich City Council Budget for 2008-2009 was a commitment to further embrace technology to market our city online. Ipswich needs to move with the times and develop new ways to market our city and its attractions on the world wide web.

The new rules to market your business online:

• Develop a site personality; stay tuned in with your customers. As customers start to rely on you for useful information and trust your opinion, a website can evoke a familiar and trusted voice, like that of a friend. This doesn’t happen overnight of course, but over time with constant engagement as you are listening to the language used in your market.

Continue reading “Local Economic Updates and New Rules”

Tags: Marketing, sales

We designers love spilling our creative juices over new opportunies to design for our customers. Design makes a huge difference, and with the internet growing raipidly, web users are spending less time browsing.

There are a few people who think webdesign is about pretty pictures - well its not! The copy, the skeletal structure of the page, and the order of information all is part of designing for a website. And the graphics and colours are used to highlight and tie it all together nicely.

Tags: web design