It’s pretty hard work and it’s left little time for my casual “mojofactory” clients and this blog. But I now that I am settling into the position I am hoping to find time again for the things I love (including mojofactory).

One thing that is essential to my new role is the immediate need to re prioritize my work, keep track of what I’m doing so that I don’t forget something, or someone, important and to get even better at time management.

Given I have been a project manager for many years all of this is second nature to me now, however, now I need to take it to a whole new level. This is where my tools come in handy and I thought I would share these with you in case you are looking for something to help make your day easier to track and manage.

1. iPhone – the tool that keeps me in touch, and online all the time
2. iBlueSky – keeping a record of what it is I have to do
3. Outlook – my calendar! and my email
4. Outlook Tasks for my iPhone – syncronisation with my desktop outlook and my sharepoint/infopath workflows
5. WordPress for the iPhone – I wouldn’t be typing this unless I had it

Without the wonderful tools above, I would never remember where I had to be, what I was supposed to be doing when I was there, or be in constant contact with my teams.

I would love to hear what personal tools you use to make your day more manageable. Comment here and share.

The plan is that the Federal Government will regulate what internet traffic and material can be served to the Australian people via their internet connection. Basically whatever the Government deems ‘inappropriate’ will be blocked, and this is done by simply adding any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist.

Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection – and that won’t be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.

GetUp – an independent, grass-roots community advocacy organisation which gives everyday Australians opportunities to get involved and hold politicians accountable on important issues – has recently released this video spoof that they plan to air on television programs that the politicians themeselves watch, in the hope that it will prompt them to think twice about approving any legislation that will allow the Federal Government to implement their plan.

I love it, and I hope it will educate and help people understand how absurd the idea is.

If you like what you see, and agree that the Internet should not be filtered by the Federal Government, please visit the GetUp campaign for more information on how you can help: GetUp Censordyne campaign

So what can you do to ensure that you make the very most out of that magic 60 seconds?

Show them what you’ve got

It never ceases to amaze me how much money people are willing to spend to create their website, advertise their address only to confuse the visitor by not making it immediately clear that they are at the right place once they’ve arrived. 

You must make it obvious to people what you are offering. In the first few seconds they will determine whether the product they want is going to be on the site, or if they have been duped into going to the wrong place.

Finding what they want

It goes without saying that your website needs to be intuitive, straightforward and to the point.

Think of your site as shopping isles in the super market. Imagine each isle is a single page of your website… make sure the related items are together, and that each page has its own purpose. If you use categorisation to associate products, show only one category per page.

Don’t make people click around to find out about you or your products or services. Summarise on your home page the key products or services which you offer, with clear lead-ins to more detailed descriptions further into your site.

Getting in touch

Make it easy for people to contact you. A recent survey showed that up to 50% of the people that visit the site will navigate away if there is no obvious way they can contact the owner if the product they buy has a problem.

The phone number is often one of the most important pieces of information on a website; make it clear and obvious, throughout your entire site.  A good rule of thumb is that it should be at the top of each and every page, be prominant and large.

Summary

There is more to making your website a success than ensuring your site design covers these three things. However, if you dont get the basics right, your clients will be “gone in 60 seconds” no matter how good your product or price is.

This was one of my favourites from a recent client. It wasn’t actually the “Chosen One” but for some reason I liked it more than the others.

We have settled on using a Magento e-commerce platform because of the need to create a home page on their site… they didnt want to just pop straight into the e-commerce shop. While osCommerce and Zen Carts offer this to some degree, only Magento can provide it natively.

I almost didnt believe it, so I contacted my e-commerce clients and asked them how they were performing. Almost all of them said that their sales were performing poorer than expected, but all of them reported sales growth over this time last year (on average 6%).

So why are e-commerce sites able to buck the economic trend? The answer is that even though consumers were spending less, more and more shoppers were going on-line to do what shopping they were doing.

I did a quick survey of my friends and family to find out if they were indeed spending their hard earned dollars online when they were normally the “bricks and mortar” type spenders.

The results showed that even the older generations were showing a definate move toward shopping online and almost all of them agreed it was because they felt could no longer afford to pay the high street prices, and instead were shopping around “On-line” to find the best bargains.

In addition, many of them felt that now they were becoming “expert online shoppers”, they were unlikely to return to the high streets for their big purchases when the economy returned to normal levels.

This is definately good news for future e-commerce shop owners.

David Jacobs (one of the founders of hpj) wanted a new website that was able to be updated and maintained by his own internal team. The brief also required the delivery of a very flexible design… one that could grow or shrink with the content that was provided.

For example they needed the ability to add or remove sections from the home page while still maintaining the basic layout. They wanted to have a flash header on the home page, but remove the header from all subsequent pages. Oh, and did I forget to mention they needed it to support both English and the Japanese Language.

BAMS offers medical care and to the local communities through its four clinics in the Nambucca Valley and NSW Western Region – at Nambucca Heads, Macksville, Gilgandra, Coffs Harbor and Gulargambone NSW.

Due to the success of Bawrunga over the last few years, there was a need to redesign their website to cater for the various types of new visitors that were coming to bawrunga.org.au looking for information on the organisation. These visitors included Journalists, Media outlets, people looking to donate money, medical practitioners that were looking provide their services and obviously the patients themselves.

In order to cater for this broad range of visitors we needed to rethink the site navigation as well as include Media and Positions Vacant sections.

The type of content the site is now required to contain was also much more dynamic (particularly Positions Vacant) than had been previously available. This meant that the staff at Bawrunga needed the ability to maintain the website themselves. We therefore implemented a WordPress solution that enabled them to keep the site constantly up to date very easily and without any specialist knowledge.

The primary purpose of the http://compliance.blakedawson.com website is to market and sell their SALT product. SALT is an innovative, award-winning, online legal compliance training and reporting system developed by Blake Dawson, one of Australia’s premier law firms and an acknowledged international leader in the use of technology.

The brief requires us to deliver FLASH to show off photos of images of their previous work. As part of the redesign we have decided to add a Biography for the two owners and also client testimonials, so that any potential new clients visiting their site will understand that they are in good hands.

Because the owners are interested in keeping the site up to date with new images and client testimonials themselves, I am going to deliver it through a CMS (WordPress).

We’ll keep you posted on progress.