Professional Development has undergone its 4th and latest redesign. We are proud to release our latest website that sells, and you can find it at www.professionaldevelopment.co.nz

 

This is the sister site to www.websitesthatsells.co.nz and will offer direct access to some of the other services Professional Devleopment provides through its home grown content management system, CMS Command.

Tomorrow (Wednesday Nov 15th) at 9.00am we are having our weekly BNI meeting for business networking. We also have a guest speaker, Dr David Tweed (http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/learning/colleges/college-business/exec-ed/execed/our-people/david-tweed.cfm) who will speaking on the topic of "Business performance measurement and business failure". If you would like to come along for a free coffee and to hear a great speaker at no cost, then come along to the Manawatu Golf Club at 9am.

This week we had our 2nd wave of radio advertising out with a clear message, "You NEED a website that Sells". Pretty pictures alone will not sell your product, and being the best kept secret on the Internet is certainly not going to give you a website that sells. You need to be found on Google, and you need a clear meesage with persuasive content and calls to action. With our 12 week guarantee of greater qualified visitors, we can develop the best foundation from which to launch or improve your business online.

Its been a long time between Blog posts, but its always good to pick the ball back up again. It can be the little things like functionality updates that can go a long way to helping add value to our systems. One of the latest updates worth mentioning is a recent update to our CMS WebCommand with the e-commerce and Orders modules. Now administrators have the ability to search deep within orders including orders containing specific products. By searching through a range of options from date, order numbers, reference, and customer, you can easily find and process an order that may otherwise be difficult to find in a sea of orders.

Now 10 days on since GST was increased, and all of our e-commerce clients are happy to report no problems from the 1st of October.

Professional Developement ensured that all e-commerce clients as of 1 second past midnight were updated at no extra cost and as part of our commitment to ensuring our systems are kept up to date.

Did you know Microsoft Outlook has a 2GB limit? When it reaches this limit, some rather unexpected things start to happen. Your email stops receiving and as I found out, it stops all together! The result is total frustration, an instant halt to email communications, and a feeling of helplessness while you search the web for solutions.

I think I have found that solution, Mozilla Thunderbird. Unlike Outlook, Thunderbird is free. Thunderbird does have filesize limitations for the mailbox, however it is 4GB per folder created in your Inbox instead of 2GB for your entire Inbox like Outlook.

Installation of Thunderbird was a breeze, and mapping accounts via IMAP ensured I had all my emails back plus the ones I had missed while down. The Lightning plugin also gave me a fully functional calendar with appointments that are compatible with Outlook.

I recently created a new signature, and by linking to the following images, Thunderbirds signature works a treat.


The best part of Thunderbird I have found is the inbox search feature which gives back results on the fly as you type so I can easily find email.

Next step is to review Gmail as that is probably the next migration. Shows that there are viable (and free) alternatives to Outlook. I for one will not be looking back.

At the SMG Lan playing UT2k4 with all the old school boyz :)

National has announced in the latest budget that GST will increase to 15%. The good news for our e-commerce clients is that under our Service Plan, we will change the GST code in our websites to reflect the new value at no extra cost!!

If these newfangled RSS feeds for our News and Blog features aren't enough, we'll do it the old fashioned way — notification emails! The latest feature on Professional Development's WebCommand sites is notification of new posts on news and blogs dispatched via email. This is all automated, and of course, the user can choose on their profile whether or not they want to receive messages. We hate spam just as much as you do. ;)

Different forms of advertising have the ability to reach your market in different ways. The key is to keep it simple and choose a medium that will reach your target market. For Professional Development it is about finally spreading the word about our software after 7 years of development to a market that is looking for a simple yet effective way of managing their website(s) with a system that aligns itself with undoubtedly one of the greatest marketing tools out there, the Search Engine.

Within 8 weeks, we have gone from obscurity to noticeable with 3 traditional forms of marketing, 1 not so traditional, and finally entering into Social Networking (better late than never) combined with the basic marketing and networking we have been doing in the past.

So what marketing have we done that has increased our profile? Sign-writing the car was always a no brainer, but to do so was a big step for us while trying to settle on our branding right down to the font and colours we use. To add a special bling to the car, Stuart and the team from Right Tyre Services kitted us out with a set of Crypt Mags and Pirelli Racing Tyres. Recently we started advertising with GiggleTV, a type of in-store screen medium that plays funny video clips with your ads in-between. Our latest marketing venture, and undoubtedly the biggest, is a billboard at the entrance to the Palmerston North International Airport. Big thanks (scuse the pun :) to Grant and Malcolm of CMN Ltd, these guys are legends with Billboards. Im glad the Palmy wind wasn't at full strength as even the moderate breeze made for an interesting time trying to hand a 6m x 4m sail :) Got there in the end and it looks fantastic! You can't miss it if you are driving into the Palmerston North airport.