Professional Development are proud to announce the development of a Customer Relationship Management system called ALO.

This morning equipment failure in the Sky Tower saw web services affected for a number of providers including Clear and ICONZ. As a customer of ICONZ, unfortunately Professional Development Ltd websites were affected and offline while the technicians quickly repaired the problem. Our servers and software still ran without problem, it was simply the connection. Apologies to our customers for this unforeseen event. Although some events are beyond our control, we appreciate our clients contacting us so we can quickly diagnose any issues.

We are conducting training with a client atm on social media tools within their website and how to use a blog effectively

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.

Sometimes its the little things that can go a long way in marketing. Take for example your email and adding a signature. When you add a signature to your email, be sure to include your web address along and perhaps a link to your physical address through Google Maps with the usual details such as phone number, fax, address etc. With your web address added, you will be surprised how many people will click on it to check your website out.

We have finally updated our signatures after using the same signature for the last 8 years!! Definitely time for an update. A lot can change in 8 years and now we have Social Networking like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and tools like Blogs. These never existing 8 years ago. To take advantage of these tools, we have added them as part of our email signature also, with links straight to applicable pages. A great way to promote the business further. Feel free to join up to our networks as a friend :)

I often get asked, What is the price for a website? That is a bit like going to a car dealer and saying, how much for a car? It all depends, what level of design you would like, or what features and functionality the website has, does it have e-commerce features, or how much marketing you want to put behind the website. So many factors to take into account so bit by bit I have decided to write about some of these factors, and the reasoning behind them. With any luck this should help you with your own decision making processes. One of those decisions might be to advertise traditionally like radio, newspaper or even TV, or Internet Marketing like a website, email marketing programme, or even Social Networking.

Traditional Marketing can compliment Internet Marketing. For example, ensure that you print your website on all brochures and advertisments.

Now as a Web Development company, I already have a tendency to lean toward a website as one of the most cost effective forms of advertising, and heres why; where else can you get International 24/7 advertising with the ability to reach your target market for around a $1 a day? Which advertising medium allows for instant updating of your advertising content at anytime? If you printed 1000 brochures and decided to make a small change, what is the impact of that change?

The reality is that value for money, executed properly, you simply cannot go past owning a website as part of your Internet Marketing strategy.

Well, Microsoft said it couldn't be done, and ATI (aka AMD Graphics) also say it can't be done and is not supported, but with good ole kiwi perseverance, I have managed to get 1920x1080 running flawless complete with overscan on a 24inch High Def monitor over Windows Server 2003 for a recently installed ATI HD4770 video card. The black borders are gone because I have also got the CCC Control Center working that allows setting underscan and overscan to 0%. Now for the kicker, its running dual screen flawless with the 24inch using HDMI input, and a secondary LCD running at 1280x1024 over VGA although this could just as easily have been DVI.

I spent hours trying to find drivers or information of people with success achieving this, and all I found were forums of people in the same boat with the same problem. ATI and Microsoft wont create drivers for these cards for Windows Server 2003 because it is not a desktop environment. Well hello, some of us like to use a Server as a desktop with all the benefits that come with doing so including saving on an extra computer!!

For all the Boffins out there, heres how I did it. After trial an error of different drivers, I found that installing the XP 9.1 standalone Catalyst driver (9-10_xp32_dd.exe) first was necessary. None of the latest drivers including 10.2 at the time of writing work. After rebooting the Server, I then installed the matching 9.1 Catalyst Control Center obtained from Guru3D.com (9-10_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu-[Guru3D.com].exe). Once the Control Center is installed, you can select DTV, Scaling Options, and adjust the overscan to suit to rid the black borders for a borderless high definition + dual monitor experience on Windows Server 2003. Sweet!!!