A Turtle Technology newsletter

Hi to all our readers, 

Welcome to our Spring Newsletter. What will 2013 bring to your organisation? Some say we'll all be wearing black & white striped Bermuda shorts but soothsayer, Gartner (the world's leading IT research and advisory company) has a different focus and predicts mobile and the cloud will feature more heavily than ever next year.  We're certainly seeing an increasing interest in mobile-optimised websites.  Next year you will also see a renewed focus from us on custom web application development and online shops.

Enjoy the newsletter, let us know what you think and we'll be back in touch in the summer.

-Daniel Scott.

Justifying expenditure on an online shop

Big online retailers are not exploiting their online shopping channels to their full extent. A Smart Company survey reports that most of the retailers tracked, see online sales contributing less than 2% of sales in 2012. In many cases this is due to the momentum required to move these large organisations online. There is an opportunity for smaller businesses to claim an aggressive share of the market by being nimble and smart. We can help you to assess investment options.

 Mobile Websites

Unless there are special requirements, we recommend that our clients build mobile websites rather than mobile apps. Mobile websites are cheaper to build and maintain and content can easily be updated.  Jakob Nielsen agrees, though conservatively. Appcelerator/IDC reported in the world's largest mobile developer survey  that "mobile provides enterprises with an unprecedented opportunity to transform their relationships and build towards competitive advantage--even faster than was possible when Web technologies emerged", but it "will also leave a wake of casualties among companies that underestimate the speed of disruption.".

However some organisations have not woken up to the demand for mobile-optimised websites: try checking arrival times at Sydney airport on their website using your smartphone. We suggested improvements to The Economist too! Let us know your worst mobile website experience - and we'll see what we can do to fix it up…

 Caring for your website

After we go-live with a website, we continue to support our clients. Not only through the warranty but also by providing advice. Here are some of the things you should be doing to use your website to its full potential.

 Press

The Telstra Business magazine, Smarter Business Ideas featured one of our clients on the front page (we built their hugely successful Aquabumps online shop). This magazine showcases a variety of small and medium sized businesses - perhaps you can feature your own business there too…give them a call.

 Images for Web

A couple of our clients asked us about tips for preparing images before using them on their website. So this gave us a good excuse to write a guide on Preparing Images for the Web. This short and simple guide explains different types of image formats and how to accurately crop and resize.

 Umbraco Update

We love to use the Umbraco website content management system. It's so easy for our clients to use that we've never been asked to provide training. But it's going to get better. The guys at Umbraco are revamping the editorial screens to make it even easier for you to use. Look out in the coming months for the update, but here is a sneak-peak.

 And finally…

Check out these mid-nineties websites.  It just shows how far we've come in terms of technology, design, functionality and usability.

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