If your business has fewer than 50 full-time employees, you may be eligible for financial assistance from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) to partially cover the costs of management training courses completed between 1 July 2010 and 30 September 2010.

This is an interim scheme to continue helping business owners and managers to improve their management capabilities while a new network of regional partners and capability voucher system are established by NZTE.

Details about the NZTE Management Training Assistance Scheme are available at www.nzte.govt.nz/training.

Welcome on board to those new clients of Deepweb, here are some of the work that has been done recently for new and existing clients.

• Forestwalks – Updated template and system to use Wordpress.
• Triton Suites – Russell Boutique Motel.
• Cooks Lookout – Updated design for this motel with an Amazing view.
• Emergency Nurses Conference – Being held in Whangarei this year.
• Kerikeri Netball Centre – Wordpress driven site to allow the Centre to process results and fixtures
• Sunset Cornish Rex – Cat Breeder in Kerikeri

Internet Explorer 6 is an old browser, in internet terms it is a dinosaur. Released in 2001, it has been the mainstay of peoples internet experience over the last 9 years.

The masses are often reluctant to change unless something pushes them along.

Firstly, Firefox gave users a good alternative browser to use (Better in my opinion)

Then came regular security issues, each time a further section of the browsing public moving to another browser. Most recently was the security hole that caused a breach in Google and over 30 other companies.

The key thing to note about this last issue was the speed and loudness of some governments urging people to look at other browsers to prevent further problems.

Some say that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the first choice in some countries.

However, there are still about 20% of the internet population using Internet Explorer 6.

I have now just read of Googles impending chang in in policy to cease support of IE6 from the 1st of March. This specifically deals with Google Docs and Sites, but shows a willingness to help push the remianing 20% into more modern browsers.

I support this as it has the following benefits:

1. Wider support for the new HTML5 (IE6 would not be able to offer this new technology)
2. Improved browser compatibilty with web standards
3. Speed

It would be great if those 20% could not use Google at all, that would really send a message!

If you want to know more you can visit IE6 No More, a site dedicated to helping it disappear as soon as possible

If you use IE6, why don’t you upgrade?

Well as usual, the run up to Christmas was frenetic with lots of things to get done before the break. It has been quiet for the last few days as many clients in this part of the world are either on holiday, or are in the Tourism industry and are working hard during the peak of the season.

So I thought I would list up the latest clients into the Deepweb stable, welcome to all…

• Kerikeri Bed and Breakfast Group – Group of 7 local bed and breakfasts
• Kansai Fishing – sail assisted fishing vessel
• Whangarei Heads Tourism – Accommodation and Activity providers
• Reubens Cruises – Ferry service and other cruises
• Auckland Escape – Out to Kawau Island and other water tours
• Bounty Inn – Paihia accommodation
• Elvis the Voice – Elvis entertainer
• Far North iSite – Visitor Information for the Far North
• Bed of Roses – Kerikeri Accommodation
• One on One Swimming – Swimming Coach in Wellington
• RCToys – Remote Controlled Toys
• Breakaway Retreat – Accommodation on the Whangarei Heads

I have recently moved a site over from an ASP content management system to Joomla.

One of the tricky things was creating the redirects for the pages on the old site to the new.

Normally this is easy enough when you are redirecting a static page to another static page. Unfortuntely the mod_rewrite in Apache that is responsible for doing the rewriting of the URL’s cannot manage parameters after file name in the standard way, ie:

I wanted to send oldsite.com/index.asp?id=1 to newsite.com/news

However, everytime I used the standard redirect:

redirect 301 /index.asp?id=1 http://www.newsite.com/news

I ended up with a URL like : http://www.newsite.com/news?id=1

So I found a great resource here >> http://bit.ly/5WLc8q

It broke down the workings of the redirect and included the followign example

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/content/page? [R=301,L]

Once I used my own page references it worked great.

A big thanks to Alex Juel ( http://twitter.com/seoholicc ) for this tip!

Kick it to the Kerb?

That would be nice, as most web designers have come unstuck when a nice design fails spectacularly in IE6.

But unfortunately, there are still lots of people (over 30% in most cases) that are still using it, that is too large a number to upset with messages about compatibility and the like.

Some new designs from template makers will not work properly in Internet Explorer 6 and they provide warnings and encourage users to upgrade.

If you target corporate users, this is not a wise choice as some will still use IE6 across their organisation and IT are not keen to roll out IE7 or 8.

I have even recently visited a primary school that is still using IE6 in all of it’s classrooms.

For designers, testing in multiple browser brands involves installing the different browsers and testing as you go, however, my suite of browsers include:

• IE8
• Firefox 3
• Firefox 2
• Google Chrome
• Opera 9
• Opera 10

Notice that some browsers allow multiple versions to be installed simultaneously. This is a great thing for testing.

However, you can only install one version of IE, (there is a hacked version that allows older ones as well, but that seems a bit scary)

Recently, I found out about BrowserLab from Adobe, (Thanks @kalena) it is a great tool that lets you test browsers online without having to install them on your machine.

You enter the address of the site you want to test and the browsers you want to test on, and let it do it’s magic, you get presented with an image of what the result is for each browser.

Here is a list of all browsers:

• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under XP
• Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 under XP
• Chrome 3.0 under XP
• Safari 3.0 and 4.0 under OSX
• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under OSX

Having Safari and Firefox under OSX is great too. No Opera yet, but I assume they will appear in time.

Good to see a useful resource hitting the web.

Do you have any web resources that you “must have”, let me know in the comments.

We provide Adobe Contribute to quite a number of our clients. (From the Macromedia days too)

With the semi announcement (only semi, since Adobe haven’t released anything yet) it posed a question about where is Business Catalyst going to fit within the product offerings of Adobe.

Looking at what there currently is, the only thing I see is the relationship between Dreamweaver and Contribute. That developer / publisher relationship is what CMS is all about infrastructure-wise, the snippets of information released by Business Catalyst, show that GoodBarry, blogged about here, will cease to exists as a retail offering and the more “serious” Business Catalyst will be the sole offering.

This is not going to be an issue for a while, current users of Contribute won’t be disadvantaged for a few years at least if there is a discontinuation of Contribute.

I am wondering if Adobe is seeing “Software as a Service” being a new stream of revenue.

I liked their subscription service for their products, and with GoodBarry they were charging $47 (AUD I suppose) per month.

Possibly a way of generating additional revenue from a product like Contribute is to move to a web based system.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Adobe will get behind the product.

Well September is here, Spring in NZ – Good times ahead.

So here are some of the people we have been working with in August

Crackerjack Fishing – Charter Boat in the Bay of Islands
DiveOps – Dive the Canterbury wreck as well as the Rainbow Warrior
Team Dilusi – Rally Team based up here in Kerikeri
Kerikeri High School – Local High School in Kerikeri
Flutes Bed and Breakfast – Accommodation in Whangarei Heads, have stayed here, brilliant!

Plus many more, it is good to be working with local business.

Will it be Binghoo or Yabing?

With the announcement that Microsoft and Yahoo collaborating on search for a 10 year license term, one of the key outcomes is that Yahoo search will now be powered by Bing, the new Microsoft “Decision Engine”

After Xtra ditched MSN and went to Yahoo, Microsoft is back in the fold.

Regulatory issues in the US could mean we won’t see “powered by Bing” at the bottom of our Yahoo results for a couple of years.

So what affect will this have on the search market in New Zealand?

Not much.

It is pretty hard to compete with a competitor has over 90% of the market. The only thing I could see is that they might actually make an effort to increase their share. With each owning less than 5% share, it was even more futile. So now they have a chance, albeit a very slim one.

Microsoft will have access to key Yahoo technologies to make Bing better (Can’t see how this is good for Yahoo in the long run, past the 10 year license) and in Steve Ballmer’s words, reported by Danny Sullivan from the press conference.

Burden on Microsoft to deliver the goods and enable Yahoo to be successful

I think the key issue here is that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally decided that they will only be able to compete with Google when they stop fighting amongst themselves and consolidate their effort against a common enemy. Again as reported by Danny Sullivan:

Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO: it’s hard to be a long term leader with Microsoft and Google keep stealing your employees

So I expect it will be a drawn out process, no surprise launch like Bing a couple of months back, but it will be an uphill battle for both to finally prevail as the No 1 search engine here and internationally.

Well we are nearly at the end of July, on the down slide to Christmas.

Here are new additions to the Deepweb Family

• Mid North Town and Country – New Local Newspaper
• Auckland Rubbish Removal Information
• Necia Prior’s Art Blog
• Ragdoll Cottage and Kittens
• Crazy Steve’s NZ Golf Equipment

Welcome all.