Krustyfries, who created the original site design and development, were engaged to implement a simple cost effective e-commerce solution to sell the bands extensive back catalogue and tour merchandise.

The site utilises  FatFreeCart for the online shopping cart and Paypal to handle the payments.

Available on the site are 9 of the Bcaksliders full length CDs, posters and t-shirts.

The Backsliders latest mini album, Throwbacks is out on October 1 and is available for pre-order now at the Backsliders online store.

www.eesti.org.au

Krustyfries has launched the new website for the Estonian community in Australia, at www.eesti.org.au.

The aim of the new site was to create a destination to inform people on what is happening in the Estonian community in Australia. The site features information on the latest events, news, consular and passport information and Estonian language classes as well as articles from the community newspaper, Meie Kodu.

The key client functionality for the website was that it had to be easy to update the content.   Various stakeholders around Australia would be submitting their news and events.  This was achieved by utilising Wordpress as a content management system.

As www.eesti.org.au is a community, non for profit website,  the site was developed using mostly free open source tools from Wordpress for the site and CMS development, GIMP for the graphic design and Google for the maps.  The only additional expense was for a base theme from Theme Forest.

Yahoo (and Ninemsn’s market share) is barely 10% these days in Australia, however 10% is still a sizeable audience that you shouldn’t miss out on!

Yahoo is offering:

• A FREE Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign for 3 months*
• Campaign set up and optimisation handled by Yahoo! certified local specialists. This means that all the hard work is done for you!
• Your ads seen on Yahoo!7 and ninemsn.

Offer ends 31 July 2009.
Sign up for the Yahoo Big Bang.

So no more excuses.

Sign up for the Google Business Stimulus Offer

If you are still a little bit confused as to how Adwords works, check out my
How does Google Adwords Work? post

Urbanspoon iPhone App

So how do you make sure that your business is listed on Urbanspoon?

Good news, it’s easy and free!

First check to see if your business is listed by searching at Urbanspoon. If it is already there, update as much information as possible and include photos, menus and anything else that is relevant.

If your restaurant is not currently listed, simply visit the Add restaurant link at Urbanspoon and fill in as much detail as you can.

That’s it! You will now appear on Urbanspoon (usually in around 24hours), and most importantly on peoples’ iphones when they are looking for somewhere to go.

Links:
Urbanspoon
Download Urbanspoon for the iPhone at the Apple store .

The Google Business YouTube channel has recently posted a great introductory video. If you are new to the world of Google advertising, or if you just never really understood how it worked, then I highly recommend you watch the video below.

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

Hal Varion, Chief Economist at Google

In September 2008, I travelled from Darwin to Adelaide through the Centre of Australia, 3200km on the Stuart Highway. I posted my photos directly to the map below during my trip using my iPhone, and used Trippermap, Shozu and Flickr:

• Shozu – allows you to upload photos from your iphone to many different webservices, including Flickr!, Facebook and Photobucket.
  - After geocoding (a one click procedure with Shozu) and taggging, I uploaded my photos to Flickr!
• Flickr!- The best photo sharing website!
  - I tagged each photo with “trip” for use in my map.
• Trippermap – pulls your photos from Flickr and displays them on Yahoo Maps and Google Maps (however you need the premium version to use Google Maps).
  - I utlised the Google Maps feature and produced my map, below:

See all the award winning maps at the Google My Maps Australia Awards. See my map directly in Google Maps at Darwin to Adelaide, a 3,200km adventure down the Stuart Highway

I never really understood the point of twitter. Until I started using Facebook came addicted to updating my status. And then…. I final understood the meaning of Twitter! One of the great geek epiphanies.

But since I am not going to update both,  I set up a feed to automatically update Twitter from my Facebook status using Twitterfeed. It was very straightforward to set it up:

Edit: Updated with screen shots to help you find your way around

How to update Twitter with your Facebook Status

1. Set up an account on Twitterfeed. It uses the OpenID system so you can use an existing login from sites like Flickr, Blogger,Technorati and more, or just set up a new one.

2. Click “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)”.

3. Click “Create a new twitter feed”.

4. Grab your Facebook Status RSS feed location. The easiest way to do this on the new facebook is to login and go to this link – http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11 and then right click on My Status from the Subscribe to these Stories: menu and click copy link location.

Edit – this no longer seems to work for anyone anymore. To find your facebook status RSS URL, read Facebook RSS feeds – what is available?

5. Go back to Twitterfeed and enter your twitter username and password. Paste you RSS URL you just copied from facebook. Uncheck “Include item link (if unchecked, sends tweet without the link)”. There are a few other options you can play with.

6. Finally click “Create” and you are done! Twitterfeed will check for updates every hour (you can change to 30mins if you want). Be patient, I did find it took over an hour for the first tweet to happen. Your Twitterfeed page should look like this.

Twitter Followers

Download some great Twitter follow me badges here by Limeshot, just like the ones below:

• Archive Pages
• Bookmarking
• Excluding a Page from Navigation
• Incorporating Google Analytics and Sitemaps
• RSS Feeds

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Archives Page

I wanted a simple page, with a list of all my posts.  I don’t have that many yet, so I didn’t want to have a complicated drop down system.   I tried many plugins, but most of them required another plug-in to execute php code within a page or post; or I simply couldn’t get them to work.   Finally I found Clean Archives Reloaded and it was the only plugin that was dead simple and I could get to work in under 5 minutes.

Wordpress Post Archive List

Example: Archives on Kristi Barrow Ramblings

Download: Clean Archives Reloaded

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Bookmarks

Sociable is a great plugin to allow your readers to easily bookmark your posts.  You can choose from over 100 sites and decide which page types you would like the bookmarklets to appear.

Sociable Options for Wordpress

Example: Check the bottom of this post!

Download: Sociable

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Exclude Pages from Navigation

I needed a way to exclude a page from the navigation.  This was necessary as I was creating a page to display Google Search results.

(There is a great post on how to create a Google Search Page for Wordpress here by Liew Cheon Fong (LcF) HERE Google AdSense Search Results within WordPress Pages)

I found a simple plugin from Simon Wheatley’s Wordpress plugin section that adds a simple check box to exclude the page from the Navigation

Example: Google Search on Kristi Barrow Ramblings

Download: Exclude Pages

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Google Analytics and XML SiteMap

The easiest way to set up Google analytics was with CaveMonkey’s Google Analyticator plugin, you just need to input your UID. A great sitemap generator plugin comes from Arne Brachhold,  which allows you to set many options and is simple to install.

Example: Estonians in Australia Sitemap

Download: Google Analyticator and Google XML Sitemaps

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RSS

Feedburner is a must for any blogger, and I found the quickest way to set this up was using Feedburner Feedsmith from Feedburner themselves.

Example: Kristi Barrow Ramblings syndicated by Feedburner

Download: Feedburner Feedsmith