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ATO Checklist for a Deceased Estate

Business & Legal Advice
Deceased Estate

When a person dies, their estate must be ‘administered’, which can mean different things for a person who owned a business than for someone who did not.  If the deceased person was a business owner, it is important to seek advice from a lawyer immediately as there are many things to know about and to do, especially when it comes to tax compliance.

If the persons who has died was near and dear to you it may be difficult to focus on the administration of their estate, especially if it includes a business that is operational. If this is the case you may want to appoint a deceased estates lawyer as an executor. This will save you a lot of stress at a time you are least able to bear it.

Otherwise, it is important to know exactly what you should do as the executor of the estate. Here is an ATO checklist to help you.

  • Find out if the deceased had a Will and who they appointed as executor. You may already know this if it is yourself. If not, the public trustee in your state may be asked to act on behalf of the deceased.
  • If you have been appointed executor, you may need to establish your ID and authority in order to deal with the deceased’s tax affairs.

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How to Avoid Legal Issues in Business

Business & Legal Advice

Once you start running a business, whether it be a local plumber or painter, you are likely to find a whole host of legal issues that must be solved quickly to avoid fines, litigation and loss of reputation, amongst other things. The best way to do this is to have good lawyers on hand so you can get the advice you need quickly. Keeping the same business solicitors is best because they will be familiar with your business and know exactly what is likely to be a problem and how to avoid it.

It is far better for your business and your peace of mind to avoid a problem than have to solve it. Working to solve a problem will take a lot of time and effort away from running the business, even though this must be done. Avoiding the problem in the first place will cost a lot less, even when you take into account paying your legal advisor.

Don’t let problems escalate

Many problems tend to escalate, especially if you don’t get onto them straight away. The end result can be litigation or having to appear in court for another reason; both scenarios are something to be avoided at all costs. Even a small business can suffer from legal problems, especially if no legal aid was sought in the beginning. It is common sense in business to surround yourself with professionals who can guide you through what appears to be a maze of legalities.

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5 Concepts to Help Keep Your Brand Relevant

Web Marketing
Brand Relevance

Most business owners give some thought to branding their company; however, if you are only just going online with your business, some of what you know about branding may be old hat. It is important to keep up with the times, which is why you are now getting an online presence. But what you did for your offline company may not work for an online one.

Here are 5 concepts to help you keep up to date with branding.

  • Yours is not the only business in the market and those that have gone before you – and are still there – have done the work of defining the brand for your industry. What you need to do is see it is delivered on a consistent basis on your website. To do this, you need a brand strategy that defines what you stand for, including what you promise and your personality.
  • People are not as trusting as they used to be. Rather than take note of advertising from a company, they prefer to ask family and friends or even total strangers what they think. Why? Because these people don’t stand to gain anything by promoting a company they like, so their opinion is real and authentic.
  • You need to find out what is really working with your marketing strategies and the only way to do that online is to track everything. It is only by examining the results carefully that your marketing team can say for sure what is working and what is not working. They then have to double their efforts on the former and quit the latter to ensure a good ROI.

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How a Healthy Appearance Can Advance Your Career

Business & Legal Advice

It’s a well-known fact that psychologically speaking, people feel better when they are surrounded by a beautiful setting and in business, this includes the appearance of employees. Management in business usually understands this, which is why employees are chosen partly by their looks, especially for those positions that have to do with the public. Employees that want to make the most of their business opportunities often choose a Botox to give them a youthful and healthy appearance.

A Botox treatment can certainly give you a more youthful and healthier look by removing facial wrinkles. Wrinkles between the eyebrows and across the forehead not only make you look older than you are, they can make you look harassed and bad-tempered. This is not the image you want to project in the office.

Rather, you want to look stress-free and in control, to project the image of a person at ease in their job, someone who copes well with whatever they have to handle. In this way, you will give the impression of being in control while ensuring that there is no bad-tempered look on your face, which can easily turn people away from dealing with you.

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3 Steps to an eCommerce Website

Web Design
eCommerce-Website

Having a successful e-commerce website from which to sell goods globally is the dream of many people. It would allow them to work from home or have a second job that could be done from home while they still keep their day job. Some people have become so successful that they were able to give up their day job altogether.

If you dream about doing that, it’s a good idea to put some thought and research into it first, so here are 3 steps to help you.

    • Choose the product. It may take some time to work out what is best for you. It needs to be something you are interested in or even passionate about, that is also a popular product in the market. There is no point in trying to sell stuff that no one wants. Choose a product by (a) the selling price – it needs to be enough to give you a good return over your investment (ROI). So make sure your cut on the sale is enough to make you a nice profit. (b) Make sure the product is not available in locally. If people can’t get it locally they have to go online to shop. (c) Make sure the product is not too big and heavy, or shipping costs will be very expensive. It should not be breakable either so less packing will be needed.

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Who Should you Use for Conveyancing when Buying a Business

Business & Legal Advice
buying-a-business

A commercial lawyer along with a digital agency is the best combination to provide professional legal advice for any conveyancing work when purchasing a business.  Conveyancing is the transfer of a land title from the seller to the buyer and is the last chore in a long list of things to be done when purchasing real estate. Not everyone will need to purchase the land and buildings when buying a business because these are often leased, and you just take over the lease in order to continue running the business.

However, in some cases it is necessary to also buy the real estate which consists of land and buildings, but is generally referred to as property.  Sometimes you simply purchase the property with no business and you then have to have a suitable building erected and apply to startup your own business there. Since these proceedings can take many months, most people prefer the property lease option.

If you do go the route of purchasing property, it can be dealt with by a conveyancer, but they are not legally allowed to give financial advice or do legal work that is not considered to be part of the property transfer. What can they do?

  • Prepare agreements to do with the conveyancing
  • Complete transfers
  • Draw up leases
  • Deal with mortgages

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Just How Receiving Stolen Goods Is Illegal

Business & Legal Advice

Have you ever been offered the sale of goods that were just “found” by the seller? Maybe when you asked about the origins of the goods, or how the person came into possession of them, you were answered with a sly smile and told they “fell off the back of a truck”. While it might seem like a stroke of luck to be there at the right time in order to take advantage of these “bargain” items—it’s more likely that the law is being broken. Many people will be surprised to learn that receiving these types of goods is in fact illegal.

It seems like a harmless thing to buy some cheap goods that mysteriously turn up. The lawyers opine that after all, you don’t know where they came from, so how can you be culpable if there was any crime committed? There are many different aspects to this offence, so there’s no need to become suspicious of every single item that you see for private sale.

Technically, it is an offence to receive stolen property if you are aware that they were actually stolen. There is absolutely no question about what this is, and no grey area to think about. If you’d like to get technical and see the actual offence guidelines, taken from the Criminal Code 1899 of Queensland, here they are:

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New Crowdfunding Laws Might Affect Startup Capital Raising in Australia

Business & Legal Advice
crowd funding

Legislation changes have been passed to allow public companies, which are unlisted, to use crowdfunding to raise money from small time investors (otherwise known as “mum and dad” investors). This legislation has been successfully passed in the lower house of parliament.

There was a lot of criticism of this bill from the opposing parties. The bill will allow companies to raise as much as $5 million, even if they are not listed, and have a combination of assets and turnover that is less than $5 million already. This can be done once per year, using the highly popular method of crowdfunding.

Those who are wondering what exactly crowdfunding is, might need to consult experienced commercial lawyers or do some research on the subject. But a basic explanation is, crowdfunding allows people and companies to ask for money from potential customers and investors, for products, services, and business ventures that have not actually come into fruition yet. This type of thing is commonplace in countries like the USA, so many people see no issue with bringing that kind of practice to small businesses in Australia. After all, small companies are typically in need of the most help from legislation. However, there are some deeper issues to look at.

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What You Should Know About Liability Insurance for Directors and Officers

Business & Legal Advice

Liability insurance for directors and officers has typically been viewed as a routine thing, in the past. It’s just one of tasks things that needs to be done, and many people give it little thought. However, it is important to understand what the implications of this “box ticking” activity really are.

Here are some of the most important aspects of these insurance policies, as well as the potential problems that might be encountered. These pitfalls should be carefully noted or get some expert advice from lawyers, to avoid falling to them.

Notification Timing

Different policies will typically vary, regarding what will trigger a notification. That means directors and officers will not always be notified by the same events, depending on their company and the policy it holds. If an insurer is notified, it is important to be aware that proceeding events might not actually be covered. This will, of course, run the risk of exposing directors and officers to potential claims, even though they believed they were covered.

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How AdWords Can Help Startups

Web Marketing

Starting a business is never easy, and quite honestly, one could use all the help they can get. With few options and a limited budget, using features like Google AdWords is among the most effective ways to get the kick start that we want. In fact if AdWords are utilized skillfully and strategic search campaigns are conducted then a startup can soon grab investor’s attentions, give a heads-up to the startup if they are heading in the wrong direction and help them stay up-to-date with the latest features and ideas and more importantly help them get the attention they need in order to begin on the right note.

Listed below are some of the ways in which AdWords can help a startup:

1.     Gmail Ads:

Gmail Ads are one of the most interesting and helpful tools for startups to get the instant attention of their audiences and gain maximum exposure. Interesting thing about businesses is that we are only aiming to snatch out competitors customers. For instance everyone use mobiles, but some use Apple’s while others use Samsung’s. Now with all the marketing and advertisement Samsung is just trying to grab the customers of other mobile manufacturing companies and not looking to find a new target audience.

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Squatters and Property Title Claims

Business & Legal Advice

You really don’t need to be any sort of expert to know that Australian property prices are incredibly high, even compared to other affluent countries around the world. The dream of owning one’s own home seems to grow further and further for the average Australian citizen, but what if there were an alternative? Getting familiar with this little term might help: “adverse possession”.

While this type of talk might be little more than hyperbole for the typical person, it’s a rather interesting law, and one can gain an understanding of it, though not the expertise of lawyers, which is worth learning more about.

What Is It?

Simply put, adverse possession relates to a person gaining title over a property that they have been living at for a certain length of time. The truly interesting thing about this law is, the “squatter’s” title to the property might actually grow greater than that of the real owner.

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4 Key Elements to Developing Modern Web Design

Web Design

There are numerous plans you can follow when it comes to building a website. However, the basic points remain the same. If you want to generate higher traffic, it is very essential to focus on a few critical factors when developing good looking and effective web design.

You should take in consideration whitespace, great images, clear calls-to-action, search functionality and other elements that can make a lot of difference. Some of these key elements are described below:

Right Use of Spacing

When it comes to an effective web design, it is very important to manage space effectively. It helps in dictating flow, readability and navigation of the page. More designers now use space in an effective manner to increase web traffic and increase user engagement.

The key is to use spacing between lines of text, expanding open space and maintaining spatial relationships. There should be a consistency in spacing and the amount of space between lines should remain the same throughout a page. The right usage of space is also essential in creating a focal point. Any image or text which is surrounded by white space will seem larger and heavier than other material on the page.

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Do These 3 Things Only If You Want to Get Banned from Google AdWords

Web Marketing
get-banned

While to normal people, this may sound as nothing big, but believe me when I say that getting banned from Google AdWords might be a living nightmare for advertisers and online business owners. No one will be happy to have worked day and night to drive traffic on their websites only to receive the horrifying mail from the Google carrying the news about the dreaded ban.

In some cases, the ban serves as a warning and allows the advertisers to reinstate some of their accounts. However some bans are of more serious nature and may lead to the companies never being allowed to advertise on Google again. Terrifying right?

So in order to save you from ever experiencing this, we have put together a list of common reasons and mistakes that will definitely be legal landmines for your online business and put you at a risk of getting banned from Google AdWords. Read on and learn:

1.     Free of cost but not really:

Have you ever had the experience of downloading an eBook that says free download only to be directed to a page that says the free version is too slow? Why not buy the premium one? And then true to their word, the free download is so slow that you could actually wake up from a nap while the book downloads.

Another offending example involves downloading software for your PC only to find out that you had to fill out 100-something forms in order to get what you came for.

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Generate More Traffic by Observing Your Competition

Web Marketing

One of the major goals of SEO practices is to help business owners generate more traffic for their website and almost every SEO practice revolves around this concept only. If you are looking for ways you can boost your site’s traffic, one simple strategy is to pick out one of your leading competitors and have a look at what they are doing, what keywords they’re using, the business directory they are registered and how they are doing it.

If you feel that despite using the right keywords you are still not being able to get the desired amount of traffic, analyze the keywords your competitors are using, the ones that are apparently getting them so far ahead in the competition.  A large number of tools available online cannot only just help you in identifying the keywords of your competitors, but they also tell you the exact number of searches that are being done for each of these keywords. Once you have picked out those keywords, start incorporating them in your site’s content.

Other than keywords, another thing that you can observe is the sites that are linking themselves to your competitors. Getting high quality links from other websites is considered as a highly effective SEO strategy that helps with improving search engine rankings. However, a thing to remember here is that these links need to be high in quality and the only way your competitor’s sites is going to want to link itself with you as well is when you have high-quality content as well.

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SEO Content: Viral or Unique?

Web Marketing

Quite a lot has been said about the importance of content in the world of SEO; content is king, quality over quantity, etc. Several factors are to be considered if you want to come up with posts that really do help generate more traffic. Most of these factors, if not always, aim towards making those posts go viral.

Viral content is any content, usually on social media, that is shared so much that it almost becomes an internet sensation. In today’s terms we would call such a post as a post “that broke the internet.” There is no argument that when you have a post that has gone viral (for whatever reason) it is single handedly going to make that post appear at the top of every search engine.

A digital marketing company that provides SEO services understands that inbound links have a huge impact on the ranking of your website on a search engine. And when you have a post that goes viral, it ends up generating millions and millions of inbound links, which explains why that post has such high rankings on search engines.

Creating viral content is not easy; you need to come up with something so amazing, so spectacular that people feel almost compelled to share it. And that can take a lot of time. In most cases viral content is usually created randomly; there is no fixed formula for it.

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The Innovation of AdWords for Smartphones

Web Marketing

I believe it would be unfair to say that the mobile era is coming and soon it will take over everything. The truth of the matter is; it is already here.

Gone are the days when we used to wait till we got home to put in our search in the Google machine. Every year, a large number of searches are conducted on Google and more than half of them are done using a cell phone. Google verifies that a large number of web traffic is coming from tablets and Smartphones.

When millions of people use their cell phones to search and check web pages then why not marketers be given a chance succeed in the same forte? Thanks to Google now, they have brought some very interesting and innovative changes in their AdWords campaign that will help marketers think and work in the most updated way.

In the latest Google performance summit of 2016, we get to hear some really interesting news from Google and how it is reshaping and reimagining AdWords to accommodate the smart phones era.

Let’s have a look at some of these highlights:

1.     New mobile Ad formats for a number of industries:

Keeping in mind some of the most searched items on mobile, Google talked about mobile ad formats for four niches, namely: shopping, finance, travel and automotive. While this was all great and fantastic, we all had the same question in our mind – what about all the remaining industries? Google being smart, unsurprisingly confirmed that there will be mobile formats for other industries too. Text ads will be made user friendly for the mobile users so the customer’s would be able to reach an answer faster–which is the ultimate goal of Google.

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5 Benefits of a User-Friendly Web Design

Web Design

Considering the fierce competition in the digital market, you can never be too user-friendly for your audience. However, according to digital agencies, it can be very difficult to implement unique marketing strategies to attract your targeted users.

Slinky Digital says that developing an effective web design for your site is one way you can get the attention of your potential buyers. Although there are countless technical and promotional benefits of a good web design, some of the most common web design etiquette include:

1.      Increased Activity on Your Page

You will be able to engage more visitors to stay on your page. Since the basic objective is not only to attract visitors but to turn them into customers, you need someone to go through the different pages of your website, read your content, know about your services and take the necessary actions as suggested on the site.

If your website does not have a strong web design, most people who get to your page will leave immediately. A website needs to be build to create sufficient interest on the user’s part.

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My Not So Fair Share – Trends in Family Provision Claims

Business & Legal Advice

The personal and often emotional issues that arise when people’s expectations are not met by the decisions of a will maker often give rise to thoughts and actions premised on entitlement and occasional avarice. However, the usual “pub talk” that follows can be a slippery slope of disaster and it is worthwhile occasionally reviewing what the Court’s attitude is towards the genesis of a family provision claim rather than just relying on commonly held beliefs.

Courts will frequently ask the wills lawyer to present the nature of the estate such as its size and the composition of its assets and liabilities as well as the financial position of the parties. In Darveniza the Queensland Supreme Court awarded $3m out of a $27m estate to a son who had performed significant amounts of work in the deceased’s business relying on certain promises of provision.  Similarly, in Mead the Western Australian Supreme Court ordered $25m paid to the daughter of a relationship between the testator and his former wife, from whom he was divorced.  The estate was agreed to have a value of at least $1Bn and the testator, who was in his third marriage at the time of death had some obvious issues with the daughter and left her approximately $3m inside a trust that made it almost impossible for her to actually receive the money. The case is currently on appeal.

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5 Common Mistakes in Web Design That Drive Visitors Away

Web Design

Website owners do their best to attract, hold and retain the interest of their users. They promote their web pages on various social media platforms, invest in web design and hire the best professionals to generate optimum results. However, more often than not, the website fails to capture enough attention.  In most of the cases, this is due to a simple mistake on the web designer’s part.

Mistakes that seem very small on the surface can significantly impact the appeal of a website. Usually, the fault is so subtle that it is hard to even pinpoint. However, it can drive hundreds of visitors away every day. So, what are some of these understated errors that are doing so much harm? Let’s check them out!

1.     Broken Links on Site

This is one of the strongest reasons for why people usually leave a website. If a visitor wants to reach another page on your site but the link is broken, it can leave a very bad impression. Any bad links, hyperlinks that redirect to the same page, links that do nothing or lead to error pages can be very frustrating for the users. The best way to get rid of such errors is to constantly keep a check on your web pages. It is also important to include a ‘Contact the Webmaster’ option, in case any emergency arises. This way, users will have minimum difficulty in navigating through the pages.

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Overly Accommodating – The Utility of Life Interests

Business & Legal Advice

Once the weapon of choice for wealthy land Baron to provide for a surviving spouse while keeping the land asset in check, a life interest is used by lawyers as a tool to balance different interests between beneficiaries. An example of a modern use of the tool is to counter the surviving spouse remarrying, where there is a competing need to provide for a spouse as well as a need to preserve or quarantine the asset for the benefit of other beneficiaries.

In those circumstances, the life interest is regarded as beneficial to secure the property so that the children can be raised in it, and subsequently, it can also be passed to them once the interest of the surviving spouse has ceased.

The use of a life interest is also prone to some down-sides in the form of its inflexibility and are frequently the victim of inadequate drafting, particularly the life estate agreement.

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Slip-ups that sabotaged your AdWords Campaign

Web Marketing

We often believe our competitors to be our biggest enemies. In truth though, it is our own lack of knowledge and ignorance that often drives us to the edge of failure. To gain more traffic, high exposure and heavy leads we often get blinded by greed and fail to comprehend things with a logical reasoning.

While many of the advertisers and businesses might already have learned this the hard way, to save others from the same fate, we have listed down some of the common AdWords mistakes that have sabotaged many campaigns already and might do even more damage if this blog is not taken seriously.

Following are the slip-ups that we should avoid:

1.     Using the wrong approach with keywords:

There are so many things that could go with keywords that we cannot even blame the person making the mistake. But in order to achieve your desired goals, one must learn to do everything right.

  • It is very important to group your keywords. Throwing all the different keywords into the same ad will never show the desired results.
  • There are three categories of incorporating keywords into Ads, broad match, phrase match and exact match. All three provides a different result. Many advertisers make the AdWords mistake of using one approach while expecting the result of the other.
  • Negative keywords are actually a blessing in disguise as they help you exclude all the keywords that might not be related to your product thus helping in refining the research and driving the right customers to the landing page.

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How to Discover Related Keywords Using Just the Google Homepage

Web Marketing

There’s a lot of tools out there for discovering keywords, keywords related to the keywords, building up a keyword network strategy, and so on. Here, you can do all of that for free using some Google search operator hacking.

We start with the tilde operator (~). (Ask a nearby Linux geek to find it on your keyboard if you’re stuck.) The tilde means “synonym” to Google; it will highlight the synonym words in bold when you use this. Next, we use the dash operator (-).
The dash means “opposite” to Google; in other words, leave out all pages that contain this exact word.

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7 Tips to Help You Stay On Top of Your SEO Game

Web Marketing

For a field that is constantly evolving, keeping up with all the new trends and updates in SEO marketing can be a little difficult. In this post, we bring you 7 things that no matter what year they are used in will guarantee you great results whether you are looking at your sites on-page optimisation or off-page optimisation.

1: Polish Your Keyword Selection Skills:

Keywords are not everything, effective keywords are everything. And unfortunately this is one area that most people struggle in. Looking at just the keywords that are being used by your target audience but are not leading your business to financial success will give you some pointers that would help with your page’s ranking, but that is all they are going to do. So to come up with truly effective keywords you need to selectively look at those search queries of your consumers that are bringing you financial gains.

2: Bring Out the Mobiles:

With more and more people using their smartphones to conduct their researches, going mobile with your business page is another one of the very effective SEO strategies. Make sure that your websites are mobile friendly that means they are quick to load and all the content that they contain can be viewed by smartphones.

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Are You Getting a New Web Design? 6 Things to Consider

Web Design
web-design

You have committed your time and money to creating a new website for your business. If you think all you need to do is to choose a web designer you would be wrong. If you want a website that’s highly successful there are plenty of things you need to do. Before you have your web designer builds your website, there is plenty to carefully plan, because if you plan poorly it’s going to cost you time and money, and you’ll be disappointed. Let’s look at 6 things you should consider.

  1. Establish the aim, target and theme of your website –  What will you do on your website? Sell products/services, provide information, etc. You also need to know who your target market is because that will also determine what your theme will look like. If you want a site that’s successful, you need to know your target market.
  1. Know what it will cost – You will want to know how long it will take to launch your website and what the web design is going to cost you. You’ll also want to know what it will cost monthly if the web designer takes care of the monthly maintenance.

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Skills You Need to Become a Successful Web Designer

Web Design

Web designing has evolved into a competitive market niche and it can be quite difficult to excel in this area. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the success of a website. The designer has to focus on multiple elements while delivering a project on time. If you aim to become an accomplished web designer, some of the most important skills you should acquire are:

Written Communication Is the Key

To be a successful web designer, this is one of the most important skills you need. The success of your website largely depends on the quality of content you use. The best web designer should not only know what banners to put on a web page, but also know the effective use of words to ensure readability of the content.

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How to Make Google AdWords Work for You

Web Marketing

With web marketing on the rise today and sometimes the only means of advertising for many, it is hard to stand out from the crowd and catch visitors’ attention, especially since everyone is strategizing with the same tactics and using the exact keywords.

Digital marketing experts will say that despite all the other free-of-cost options, AdWords is your best bet. Those who say it didn’t work for them must know that they might be doing something wrong. Let’s keep that discussion for some other time, and for now, focus on all the ways you can make Google AdWords work for you:

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4 Top Web Design Trends for 2013

Web Design

When it comes to affordable web design, it seems 2013 is going to see some changes in the trends. Let’s have a look at 4 top web design trends for this year.

  • Typography – Front & Centre

    Web designers are focused on the weight each component, like JavaScript or images, has on the site they are building. In the last couple of years there have been huge improvements to web type, which means that typography usages is likely to become the central design element. Layouts and typography based on content can be made responsive much easier.

  • Designs That Are More Responsive

    Responsive websites aren’t new, but what is new is the methodology behind the responsive web design. 2012 we saw a focus on responsive designs for new devices like the iPad mini. For 2013, the focus is more likely to be focused around the responsiveness of the website itself rather than the numerous devices on the market.

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Google and Privacy: Much Ado About Nothing

Web Design
google-privacy-policy

So it turns out that self-confessed Google junkies really don’t give a flip whether Google collects data on them or not. No, in fact, some of them say “yeah, bring it on!” This is the counter-reaction to the reaction to the new Google privacy policy. Another one is this guy, who points out that Google underestimated his age by half.

Look, people, it’s this simple:

  • You can opt out any time.
  • You can get five computers with three web browsers on each and delete cookies and search as 15 different strangers if you’re that paranoid.
  • Google is only collecting data and saving it to target marketing. That’s been the cornerstone of capitalism since the invention of money.
  • All this data will consist of is your interests, and guess at your gender and age. It doesn’t steal your credit card or anything.
  • Some of us (blog writers, for instance) have interests that aren’t going to make sense to a tracking algorithm anyway.

OK? Can everybody quit panicking?

How Could We Lose Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy In the Same Month?

Web Design
dennis-ritchie-and-john-mcc

Never heard of those two names? If so, we’re sorry for you. You would have to know that Steve Jobs died. Everybody (at least in the tech blog world) knows that he’s the founder and longtime CEO of Apple Inc. He made the front page of newspapers and the cover of magazines the world over when he passed away this last October.

But two more giants in computing passed away last October also, and they were barely noticed.

Dennis Ritchie founded the C programming language. He was also one of the founding fathers of Unix. He was one half of the partnership of Ken Thompson, with whom he basically invented the modern operating system and the modern programming platform as we know it today.

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An Analysis Of How Hackers Penetrated The US Pentagon

Website Hosting

We love a good caper story as much as the next mystery fan, and this perky after-crime report is a good look at cyber-security matters and how they fail. In How Hackers Stole 24,000 Files From The Pentagon, the breach is traced to some very obvious methods.

Briefly, they slapped together a bogus PDF document that got sent at about 7:30AM “because the best time to send those types of things is right before someone’s had their coffee.” See, right there, it’s the human factor, not tech. Victim opens document, document installs malware, target system has 24,000 documents on file because they subcontract for the US Department of Defense, and that’s that, it’s break time.

It also goes to show just how little progress we’ve actually made at information security. As long as we have the concept of a zero-day exploit, we’ll still have computer networks that aren’t any more secure than a cardboard box, no matter how many clever measures we take.