More than 50,000 small businesses will benefit from $14 million in Rudd Government funding to help them go online or upgrade their internet presentation.

The funding is being provided from the Rudd Government’s $10 million Small Business Online program which has been boosted by another $4 million to extend it to more tourism small business operators.

Across the nation, 95 per cent of small businesses are connected to the internet, yet only 57 per cent have a website.

The funding will help small businesses – especially tourism operators - take full advantage of the National Broadband Network (NBN) by helping them install and upgrade websites.

Small Business Minister Craig Emerson and Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson announced that grants ranging from $50,000 to $700,000 had been offered to 47 small business support groups including industry associations.

The groups will use the grants to help small businesses develop the skills to go online or upgrade their existing internet operations so they can better engage in e-business to reduce costs and improve market opportunities.

Among the groups to be funded are the Darwin Region Business Enterprise Centre ($320,000); the Margaret River Wine Industry Association ($140,000); the NSW Business Chamber ($495,000); and the Gulf Savannah Development group – which supports businesses from Cairns to Broome – ($200,000).

Dr Emerson said the NBN would provide fresh opportunities for small businesses to lower their costs and extend their market reach.

“The NBN will be a powerful tool for small business and helping 50,000 small businesses go online or improve their online presence will ensure they are ready for these exciting opportunities,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said he was pleased many small tourism operators would receive support.

“In the 21st century, tourists want to know a lot about the quality of the accommodation on offer before committing to travelling to a particular location and giving them a virtual tour online will help improve the attractiveness of tourist destinations,” Mr Ferguson said.

“The business support groups being funded will be specifically targeting the tourism industry, in line with the Government’s announcement of the National Long-Term Tourism Strategy.”

A list of successful applicants and more information on the Small Business Online program can be found at www.ausindustry.gov.au

Tags: Small Business | Web site

It is surprising the number of easy to use tools to help you decide a colour scheme that best suits your and your customers’ needs.

To get an idea of the range of colours used you can get a website analysed for its colours. This site http://redalt.com/Tools/I+Like+Your+Colors allows you to put in the url of any site and the main colours are returned from the various CSS style sheets.

The best tool for colour schemes is adobe’s free site http://kuler.adobe.com/ , designers can create a palette and save it for others to see and use. The designers tag their schemes so you can search for  a scheme with key words. Another feature of the site is you can analyse photographs to extract the main colours. There is a good introduction here http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-cs4-design-premium/using-kuler-color-themes/

This site has a slightly easier colour wheel than adobe http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Tags: color | colour | scheme | template | design

Have you installed Joomla and found all the folders locked? If you log into the administrative area and find under  Help/System Info/Directory Permissions you can see which files and folders need to be writable.

If you search for an answer you’ll find people suggesting you change these folder permission to 777 which leaves your site vulnerable. Here is a script the help you do this faster (and change them back). http://docs.joomla.org/How_to_solve_Installation_errors_Extension_Manager

But you need to ask yourself why are they locked in the first place? You’ll also find the folders are owned by 99 (nobody) and you can’t  change this to the site owner.

What is happen is the scripts in Joomla install are being run as the owner but when apache is running as root and it tries to change things it is not able to.

This is a solution if you have root access to your server (if you don’t get your web site provider to do it). Install suphp – suphp makes scripts run under your specific user account, as opposed to the Apache user account. If you have a server running WHM to install suphp is as easy as ticking a box.

To change ownership of the public_html folder log into your site with a shell access and do a chown

Chown  –R owner:group  directory-name ie Chown  –R 545:545 public_html – only do this is you have suphp running as public_html needs group ownership of 99 without it. –R is recursive and changes every folder and file in the tree.

Next you need to set the permission to 755 for folders and 644 for files. You can use the script above or you can use this

For Directories

Find “directory”/ -type d | xargs chmod 755 <enter>

For File

Find “directory”/ -type f | xargs chmod 644 <enter>

PS this is only works on file with no spaces in their name.

That it – own your site you can install and uninstall as it should be.

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Here are some hints and tips on the basics of SEO for Joomla. If you use these tips then your Joomla installation will be completely search engine optimised. These are our top twenty tips on how to configure your Joomla website. Follow the steps and config your Joomla installation from the ground up

1. Install and configure a SEF component for Joomla - we use sh404SEF
2. Change the title of Joomla to use title alias -and use upto 140 characters for your site title.
3. Research and Identify 30-40 keyword phrases using Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool)
4. Analyse your keywords and test their ranking. Investigate and get to know your Google competition. Learn to use http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
5. Optimise frontpage title for your top 3-5 keyword phrases in no more than 300 words.
6. Sprinkle these top keywords through meta tags and content on frontpage
7. Divide up the other keywords into 3-4 groups and optimise other pages for these keywords.
8. Unique page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, page content.
9. Divide up the page content with appropriate page headings using H1, H2, H3 etc tags
10. Use appropriate page names  ie: website-design.html & website-development.html and include Meta tags for each page
11. Name any graphics so the name reflects the content and make sure you add the ALT tag
12. Make your site authoriative by increasing the number of pages
13. Ensure your site has been found by Google by search for your site name.
14. Get to know Google Analytics and Webmaster Console - these are free and great tools to help you optimise your site.
15. Submit your sitemap to search engines
16. Check if your site works with all browsers
17. Add your buisness to Goole Maps
18. Try to get as many sites as possible linking to you.
19. Use social media to link to your site (Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, Youtube)
20. Keep track of your ranking for your key words

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Instead of going through every menu item and every link on your site why not get a robot to check for you? There are a number of ways to check link integrity and one of the best is  WC3 Link Checker.  Go to this site and type in the URL and the whole site will be checked and it only takes seconds. The results returned allow you to see both valid and broken links. For an average site I would suggest leaving all of the checkboxes unchecked except the "Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth" which i would set to 10.  What this means is, that the checker will follow links recursively from within your site down to a level of 10 sub levels.  This should suffice for most website installations.  Reports come out in a line by line format and you can see on any line what the error was and what the link was.  Going back to the page where the bad link is reported is quick and easy for you then.

Why should you check your links?  Well, Google and other search engines hate links that are broken.  so if you are running a dynamically run website with internal links submitted by external users you should be checking your links often and fixing them as they crop up.

Now, go check your site for bad links.

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