Services

Web site Design
Custom designed web sites to suite any need. W3c Standards compliant CSS based development. Flash animation and applications. Email newsletters and templates.

Google
Search Engine optimisation. Google Maps integration. AdWords campaigns. Google Analytics reporting.

Graphic Design
Logo design, brochures, stationery, posters and books. Call to discuss any Graphic Design need.

E-Commerce
Solutions for 1 - 10,000 products. Pay Pal, eWay, VPASP. Custom designed e-commerce solutions. Digital product sales. These sites can include content management.

Illustration
Call to discuss your illustration needs. A wide range of styles from freehand to 3d are available.

Printing
Ask for a free quotation on your next print job. With over 20 years experience working with printers you may well save money and the hassle of dealing with printers.

Domains and Web hosting
If you are booking new hosting be sure to call first to discuss your requirements and ensure your purchase the right type of hosting. If you don't want to be involved in the domain/hosting management we can do it all for you.
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Contact Details

Contact David Appleby for a quote or further information.
Brookvale Office – by appointment only.
Phone +61 02 8011 3215
Mobile +61 0411 494 171

Adobe Roadshow

25 February 2009

I attended a Adobe Road show at Darling harbour this week and have to congratulate them on putting on a great show. The day kicked off with a You Tube video called Did You Know - a collection of facts about the internet which you can watch below. The show focused on highlighting the new creative and time saving features of CS4 which are too numerous to list. Having used Adobe CS4 since November 2008 I can confirm anyone not upgrading is wasting their time and possibly your money. The many small time saving features add up to big savings in productivity.

Work Samples

Underwear of Sweden (UWOS)
UWOS are redefining their brands and the first step is this new site. View

One Percent Plus GST
Make great savings on estate agent fees with this new web site. View

Max for Kids
New brochure site for the Max for Kids range of clothing. View

The Hideaway Jervis Bay
Just updated for the new holiday season to incorporate a new log and branding elements. View

Fruit for life
This site was recently given a fresh re-design, content update and an online store. View

Good Innovations
E-commerce site selling PDF products via download. View

Mostly Massage
E-commerce site selling related books and services.View

OceanWatch Australia
This Environmental Company self manage their web site using Contribute content management. View

More samples of print and web work are available on request.

Google wave

David Appleby, 18 June 2009

This may well be the next big thing, Google wave appears to combine all the functionality we see on the web in one place. It is only released to developers so far. There is a very very long developer presentation you can watch at http://wave.google.com/. Basically this is like a hybrid email, blog, forum content management system that can be customised by developers enabling collaboration. It is a bit like Facebook on steroids and like Facebook can be updated on a mobile phone.

Google giving away $75 advertising

David Appleby, 16 May 2009

If you haven't already used Google AdWords you can get $75 free advertising if you sign up before the end of June. You can self manage this or pass in back to me to setup the advertising campaign.

I have seen up to 44% increase in customers traffic after setting up campaigns for them. It is a very cost effective way of advertising. Apart from being a search engine Google has a huge network of web sites displaying it's adverts. Some web sites now offer graphic, flash and video banner advert placements in addition to the regular text adverts.

How it works:
You set a price you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your advert. You set a daily limit on how much you are willing to spend on clicks. i.e. for keyword "design" I am willing to pay $0.25 per click. Google will tell you how this compares to other advertisers. If you want to be top of the bids and have your advert display 1st you need to bid higher or you can bid lower and hope the other bidders use up their daily limit. If you would like to know more call David on +61 02 8011 3215.

Advertisers could be caught in Google's net

Julian Lee, April 23, 2009

HOW much longer can Google maintain its ambiguous status of "frenemy"? As the behemoth moves into other areas of advertising it will inevitably come into conflict with media owners. Read the SMH Article

$15b broadband network on way

Matt O'Sullivan, April 7, 2009 - 9:01AM

The Federal Government and private sector will invest up to $43 billion over eight years in a super-fast national broadband network. Read the SMH article

Good interview about internet security on Toms Hardware

Security Threat Analysis: Interview With Dino A. Dai Zovi : Read

Internet Explore 6 Market Share

David Appleby, 18 March 2009

As a web designer I am eagerly awaiting the day I no longer have to consider Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in my design and coding. I spent some time this morning looking for statistical data on browser usage. The most up-to-date information I found was at w3counter. Unfortunately it still indicates IE6 is a contender with about 25% of the market at time of writing but it is falling fast and has lost it's 1st place position to IE7 for good. My own analytics data from customers supports the w3counter numbers. Maybe another year until all web developers can rejoice the death of IE6.

Which Browser?

David Appleby, 15 January 2009

Which browser do you use? Much as people love to bash Microsoft I have long been a big fan of their products but Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and 8 are wearing thin on me. IE 7 has been very unstable for me with frequent crashes and IE 8 beta has the same crashes with additional compatibility issues with many sites. IE 8 does have a compatibility button that fixes most problems but the basic stability issues are enough that I have to recommend – Don't use Internet Explorer! Due to it's popularity IE has the additional problem of being targeted by allot of mal ware on the internet making it less safe to use despite its high level built in security.

Firefox 2 on the other hand has been extremely stable, is W3C standards compliant and has a huge range of wonderful add ons. Some of my favourites would be FireShot (screen capture), FireFTP (upload files to the web), DOM Inspector (detailed web page information for developers) and Cooliris which is a 3D web image browser. Version 3 is available but I haven't tested it as yet.

I haven't used Safari extensively other than testing web sites but it seems to be an OK browser. There are some compatibility issues so Firefox is a better bet.

Other browsers are too small a percentage of the market to be seriously considered as yet but Google may well muscle Chrome up to be a major player.

PS. IE8 beta has been patched to Release Candidate 1. It is more stable than before but still crashes occasionally.

Industry News

David Appleby, 1 October 2008

Adobe CS4 has been released and will be available at the end of October. While I cringe at the upgrade costs I can't wait to play with the new features. Highlights for me are adding a 3rd dimension to flash so we can start to see some real 3D animation in Flash. Addition of Flash support to Acrobat could be put to some interesting uses in PDF documents.

Adobe claim improvements to speed and on Windows the applications now support 64bit. There are too many new features to list but overall it will mean improved productivity and new creative opportunities. You can read all about it on the Adobe web site.