Zimweb blogs

ZimWeb saves UK company thousands of pounds!

Rob — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:26:49 GMT

We are one of the first Perth based companies to save our client thousands of pounds by embracing the migration from conventional hosting to the latest computing solution, “cloud hosting”. ifyouski is a UK based online travel consultancy specialising in skiing holidays, who have cut their hosting costs by a massive 76% by switching to Amazon EC2 hosting.

We saw an opportunity for our client to save thousands of pounds and be more cost effective by purchasing their computing requirements at the rate at which they use it. We are confident in the latest innovative way of hosting and have proved successful with Amazon EC2 and ifyouski. Cloud hosting allows us to save our client time and money, making us and them more efficient.

ifyouski.com experiences highly seasonal traffic on their site due to the nature of the service they provide, and can have an excess of up to 20 000 unique users per day during high season. This figure is obviously dramatically cut during off season and so their hosting needs are minimised during this period.
By switching to Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), ifyouski is able to use and pay for the hosting they require instead of a flat rate all year round. Based on the same principle as buying electricity, you only pay for as much as you use. We effectively rent (rather than physically purchase) from an enormous server provider which minimises time and risk, as well as being far more economical for ifyouski.

We have successfully moved another of our travel consultancy clients, South African based toescapeto.com, over to Amazon EC2 for more efficient hosting, saving the company 10’s of thousands of rands.

Change in the online travel industry?

Rob — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:58:57 GMT

At the beginning of July Google announced that they are muscling in on the online travel industry. They're buying a company, ITA software, who supply airfare information to the travel industry. Their clients include Orbitz, Kayak, and Microsofts very own Bing. Some analysts see Google getting into the industry as a result of what Bing are offering. My feeling is that travel has been an excellent fit for the web & Google sees a massive opportunity. It can take advantage of it's current search and mapping technology and apply it to the travel industry; in addition it's now got a stepping stone into the industry by acquiring ITA software.

Opportunity?

According to their press release, they've got no plans to sell tickets directly to consumers. The main threat is to meta search engines which collate travel information; Orbitz & Kayak for example which are essentially comparison sites. I think the shake up will benefit airlines and hotels directly rather than these aggregation sites because they'll be the ones that will get the bulk of the referrals (rather than the meta search engines).

According to Google: “Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.”

I think this will lead to further innovation in the online travel space, when Google gets involved you can be sure that they'll start shaking up the industry. Watch this space!

See the official Google blog for more info.

Google search engine factors

Rob — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:46:23 GMT

We find that there are a lot of misconceptions about search engine optimisation and we occasionally get our clients querying us about somewhat trivial pieces which an "SEO expert" has mentioned are crucial to their search engine rankings.This just adds to clients confusion, who can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of SEO information out there in the first place. The key is to keep the client informed, and we often find that a lot of our work as web developers is one of client education.

I thought it would be a good idea to briefly mention what we feel are the key factors to search optimisation, with a Google flavour ;-)

Good relevent content including keywords that are related to your site
Inbound links from site that are well ranked and are relevent or complimentary to your site
Outbound links to relevent & complimentary websites i.e. industry bodies
Content that is fresh and changes on a regular basis. Blogs, forums and any user generated content
Speed of the site (this is also a usability factor)
Keyword friendly URL's
Good title tags and meta descriptions (also usability factors)
Age of the site

Yes, there are others, but in a nutshell these should be a focus. Matt Cutts is a Google engineer focusing on search engine optimisation & he's got some great videos on the web. Here he discusses how Google indexing works. If you have the time take look at the Matt Cutts blog.

Taking advantage of Google Caffiene

Rob — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:27:49 GMT

Google have announced an update to the way they index webpages; they've termed this new iteration "Google Caffiene". How does this effect your site? Well, Google now indexes your site a lot quicker than before.

This is how it used to work: Google crawled your site, collated all that information & after a good couple of weeks or months that appeared on the search engine listings. So, there was a significant delay from when the site was indexed to when it was made available in the search results.

Buy things have changed. With the new indexing, Google have reduced that time from crawling a site to when it appears in the search results. To quote Carrie Grimes from Google "you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before".

Here at ZimWeb we think this is great news. What it means is for those of you that update your site on a regular basis, is those changes will be picked up and indexed by Google a lot quicker than before. That will benefit those that have blogs and actively use social networking sites like Twitter & Facebook because content will be indexed in real-time when your site is crawled. If you're keeping your content fresh and relevant this will benefit your business.

Here's a link to the posting on the official Google blog.

Hurrah, good news all around.

Zimweb is hiring

Rob — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:33:50 GMT

We are looking for a developer wants to work in a small, focused team environment on exciting projects using cutting edge technology. The successful applicant will be active in development & deployment of web based systems & database driven websites. Zimweb offer a competive salary as well as incentives for the right candidate.

Experience & skills required

Ideally 4 years+ web development experience
Good knowledge of Microsoft ASP.Net using C#, in addition VB.net will be highly regarded
Experience using Sitefinity CMS & Telerik controls will be highly regarded
NET 3.0/3.5
Visual Studio 2008/2005
Good XHTML knowledge and understanding of web standards.
Good understanding OOP.
Transact SQL knowledge essential.
Working knowledge of javascript & CSS
MCP/MCTS preferred.
Individual must be willing to learn and be self motivated.
Excellent communication skills, good team player

What we offer:

Competitive remuneration paid dependant on experience.
Performance based incentives
Exposure to some very exciting and unique projects, including some offshore development projects.
Experienced and dynamic team and the opportunity to learn from and work closely with senior developers.
Direct contact with clients.
Opportunities to progress your career through Microsoft Certifications.

If you're interested please contact us on (0)8 6460 4086 or info@zimweb.com.au