We're a Moving Target
We are counting down the days now to the big shift – everything is falling into place nicely and we are looking forward to showing you around our new premises next time you visit.
As we said in our February newsletter, our new home is the 4th floor of the Pacific Brands building at 123 Victoria Street, and we will be there from April 12.
Please note that our landlines will be unavailable from 3pm on Friday April 9th, as Telecom switches the numbers over to the new building, so please bear with us if you need anything urgently that Friday afternoon. Our mobiles and email will continue to function as normal.
This month we also welcome several new Lemons to the team – Simon Attrill has joined our developers, and Andrew Beaumont is the new face working with the tech team. Integrator Tim Medcalf will be joining us after the move and we hope to announce the name of our newest designer very soon.
Graham and Sue
Surprise Visitors to your Site by Creating Custom 404 Pages
From time to time visitors to your site will click on an old link or a link that takes them to a page that doesn’t exist or may have moved.
When they do that, they will see a 404 error page – either the default Google error page if you don’t have a page set up on your site, or else a standard 404 page that will point them back to your home page.
From time to time you may have come across a website with a very cool 404 page where the designers or website owners have been more creative with their 404 message.
See some examples of great 404’s here
So here’s the challenge – what’s the best 404 idea you can come up with for your website?
If you would like us to design a great concept for you, give your account manager a call or drop them an email. We would love to see lots of hairyLemon client sites with great 404’s – maybe even so good that other sites will link to your 404 page (or we can submit your 404 to the Huffington Post!)
Joomla Tip of the Month - Using SEF URLs
If you already have a Joomla website that we have built for you, you may have noticed that your site has what we call SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLS. In other words, the website addresses for the pages on your site read like English and make sense, rather than consisting of numbers and punctuation that give you no clue as to what is on the page.
If you are still using one of the older content management systems like Asset Now, you will know that your URLs are not nice and clean and logical – in fact they are probably a good example of “dirty URLs”. They are likely to have a string like this /index.cfm/1,307,0,0,html after your domain name.
Some of the benefits of working with SEF URLs include:
- Improved user-friendliness – easy to type in and remember, easy to send to others
- Optimisation for Google – if you can’t understand the URL, chances are Google can’t understand it either and your pages may rank lower because of it
- Your URLs are shorter - which means they are less likely to “break” in search
- You can include keywords in the URLs - which again will improve your search results
So how do you get them on your website? Talk to your account manager about what is involved in upgrading your site to Joomla – of course there are many other benefits of doing this.
Note: hairyLemon provides the SEF URL Joomla extension as part of our Joomla base install, to ensure best practice for our clients.
If you are not currently using Joomla! as your content management system and would like to explore the possibility of shifting your site across, please talk to your account manager today for a quote.
Two New Lemons on the Tree
Simon Attrill - Developer
Simon joins hairyLemon with 10 years software development experience. He has a degree in computer science and a post graduate diploma in ICT specialising in web development.
Originally from the UK Simon has embraced the kiwi lifestyle. Simon’s two young daughters keep him busy and entertained. And in his spare time he enjoys tramping, snowboarding and the occasional white water kayaking trip.
Andrew Beaumont - Techie
Andrew joins the hairyLemon Technical Team after around 1.5 years experience in the IT industry. In 2008 he completed a Diploma in Systems Technology at the Computer Power Institute where he obtained several industry-respected qualifications.
Music is his main hobby, where he enjoys both listening to and creating original pieces. Although most of his time is spent behind the computer screen, Andrew also likes to get out and explore the greater Canterbury region.
Check out the rest of the hairyLemon team
Clients in the Limelight
As always, March has been another month with many new client websites going live.
Nature's Flame
This month we transferred Solid Energy company Nature’s Flame across to a fresh new Joomla site from their previous content management system, Asset Now. The site was turned around to a tight deadline to coincide with the opening of their new $34 million wood pellet plant in Taupo. Wood pellet fuel is in increasing demand internationally as a low emission, sustainable fuel, and Nature’s Flame has contracts to supply European power plants, home heating customers in Italy, and electricity generators in Japan.
The new Nature’s Flame site is easy for visitors to navigate and the Joomla CMS means it can be quickly and easily updated by Solid Energy staff.
ENI Engineering Ltd
Christchurch based sheet metal fabrication company ENI Engineering Ltd came to us with a request to create a new website to coincide with the installation of 8 additional “ring of fire” burners for the Crusaders at AMI Stadium. ENI also needed a range of corporate identity material, so we designed and produced A5 notepads, business cards, with compliments slips, letterhead, a banner for the flares at AMI stadium, caps, cups, polo shirts, ladies shirts and sipper bottles for the company.
Our design team are frequently called on to produce additional marketing collateral for clients, and they are all trained in print design, so if you have any requirements for additional marketing support, please give us a call.
Our Johnny - Design Department Cover Boy!
It would be very un-PC of us to refer to any of the Lemons as “beefcake” but this month, designer Johnny Lineham was surely the next best thing, getting his pic on the cover of the March issue of Kia Ora, Air New Zealand’s inflight magazine. (Co-incidentally, Johnny’s 15 minutes of fame was courtesy of Lemon clients Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism, who brought down a group of travel media on famils to the Garden City – great job with awesome coverage in this issue!)
Never one to let an opportunity go by, Johnny decided to put up the tee-shirt he was wearing in the pic up on TradeMe – with half of the proceeds (if there are any) to go to charity of course!
Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2009
2009 was not the best year for business anywhere in the globe, so we were happy to again make the top 500 in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific with just under 80% growth. Internet companies were second highest on the list after software developers, and the highest ranking company came from the Internet sector.
51 other kiwi tech companies made it too, which says something about our industry being in good heart despite a very turbulent year.
To explore the possibility of shifting your site across to a Joomla Content Management System, please phone +64 3 348 5885 or email your account manager today for a quote.
