Posts Tagged ‘News’

Only a third of NZ businesses have a website

Monday, December 6th, 2010

According to the latest data from MYOB Business Monitor, only 34% of New Zealand businesses have a website and only a fifth of businesses sell products online.

In this TVNZ report, MYOB general manager Julian Smith told TVNZ that the results of the survey are both surprising and disappointing with the majority of Kiwi businesses missing the opportunities presented by the internet.
“Despite the explosion in use of the internet and the rapid development of the online economy, Kiwi businesses are little more than scraping the surface of what will be the most important piece of business technology in this half of the new century,” he said.

Smith says even the local fish and chip shop does need a website as the key factor for any business owner is being found.

“The way we shop today is very much just popping on to Google and tapping in a quick search. It’s really key for a business to think how they might use the internet to support them.”

MYOB says a business can just use a directory listing online but the evidence shows that a good online presence is a strong driver of business growth.

According to the survey, 44% of businesses with a website have more sales or orders in the pipeline, compared to just 30% of businesses that don’t operate online.

New Zealand has also been slow to adopt more sophisticated online tools and trends, with only 14% of businesses using social media to support business aims.

The survey, however, showed a marked generation gap in the use of social media, with 22% of business owners under 40 using social media tools to promote their business, compared to 11% of those in the over-40 age range.

The survey also provided an insight into how Kiwi businesses are actually using the internet:

  • 12% writing blogs or online newsletters to promote their business,
  • 14% using social media,
  • 22% advertising online,
  • 29% monitoring competitors online,
  • 35% conducting online research and monitoring industry trends.

Smith says Kiwi businesses who are just starting to think about a website need to put it on their priority list.

Read the full story and watch the video at TVNZ.

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Posted in Business, Web design | No Comments »

Google launched real-time search

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was bound to happen someday but now it’s really here: Google just launched a real-time search integrated into search results. It updates as things happen around the web in real-time. Live Twitter updates, news articles, blog posts, Yahoo answers, new web pages, all these now stream in the actual search results on your query.

Here is a demo video from Google:

So what does real-time search mean for your business and your online marketing?

Now it’s more important than ever to be active on the web, making the most of your website and including social media in your online marketing strategy.  You need to consistently produce high quality content that is not only optimized to get found in the top search results, but you also need to produce content that will appear in the real-time stream.

While it may take many months for your website to rank in the top 10 for certain keywords, you now have a chance to grab the attention of your prospects via Google real-time stream results.

If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace you really should consistently post new updates.  The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand, but now you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience.

With the arrival of Google’s real-time search, inbound marketing truly is the way to go.  The best you can do with your website is to transform it from a static pages into a small publishing house that produces fresh, interesting content that your prospects are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere on the internet.

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Posted in SEO, Web design | No Comments »

Social Media Revolution

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

If you still think social media does not concern you or has no impact on your business, watch this video and think again.  The way we receive information and make decisions about where to spend our money is changing and social media plays a vital role in this change.  While it may take a while for this world-wide trend to have full impact in New Zealand, it is only a question of when will it happen.  The real question is: will you and your business be ready for change or will you be left behind?

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

Welcome to our new website

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Previous and current version of our websiteHello and thank you for visiting our website.

It’s been a while since our last major upgrade and we feel it was about time for us to come up with something new.  Not that our last website was bad, in fact we have still been receiving a lot of comments from our clients and prospects about how they loved our website design.  The thing is - we love to be one step ahead of everyone else.  In fact we were the first web design studio in Hawke’s Bay which implemented a number of ideas and practices our competitors have copied over the past few years.

So to introduce something new, fresh and elegant, this is the new look of Digital Arts on the web.

We have a few brand new services that we are launching this month that we are very excited about. The most important is our new, state-of-the-art Email Newsletter system and a special Email Marketing package. In short if you order the email marketing package we will write up your email newsletters for you each month, create your database of subscribers, email the newsletter off, monitor the results and give you a detailed reports on how the mailout preformed.  All this for a very, very reasonable amount. If you’ like to find out more, please click here to see the details.

We have also added a couple of new dedicated servers for our web hosting services, improved our spam filtering on most of our servers and there are other bits and pieces in motion as well.  If you’d like to be posted on our new products and services, as well as receive some useful tips and trick every now and then, please subscribe to our newsletter, we’d love to keep in touch with you.

So to conclude our complete website makeover - goodbye old site,  welcome new web site!

All the best,

Michal and the team at Digital Arts

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