Blog
The new website truly reflects all of the wonderful things about this amazing community space - life, colour, creativity, cultural/gender diversity and social inclusion. All things which are more important than ever during the current world situation.
We are immensely proud of the work that Amber Henry (Creative Designer), Sergiu Nagaillic (Website Developer) and the rest of the Web Prophets team have done on this project.
Gasworks were recipients of Web Prophets 2020 community grants program, and the launch of the new website is a celebration of a great partnership between the 2 organisations which is now in its 12th year.
Web Prophets feel privileged and honoured to continue to be part of the Gasworks story.
Web Prophets first redeveloped Midtown Medical Clinic website in 2013. In 2019, it was time for a fresh new look, including a responsive design.
Australian Physiotherapy Association turned to Web Prophets when seeking a digital partner that could help support their cloud hosting infrastructure and support their internal web develoment team.
Web Prophets has been working with Flemington Farmers' Market for over 9 years, and in 2019, it was time for another refresh of the website. One of the main requirements was to ensure the website was mobile responsive - with 80% of the target audience using mobile as the main engagement platform.
Web Prophets first redeveloped The Melbourne Sports Medicine Centre (MSMC) website in 2013. In 2019, it was time for a fresh new look, including a responsive design.
Thirrili is a not-for-profit organisation that addresses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide prevention and postvention. Web Prophets was asked to help Thirrili with branding, brochure design and website design, development and hosting. The website core focus is to support mental health care workers in regional areas, assist families and friends, as well as provide a resource for staff and support workers.
Cordiner King first developed their website with Web Prophets in 2014, with a redesign at the start of 2019.
In July 2018 Web Prophets completed the purchase of RedyHost; a web hosting platform that specialises in hosting for Drupal and WordPress websites. RedyHost has been hosted within Web Prophets Data Centre infrastructure for the past 7 years; as such the migration of business services and customer accounts has been a seamless process.
National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA) is the peak body for Australia's national, state and territory libraries. A renaming to National and State Libraries Australia in July 2018, required the website to be redeveloped to reflect the priorities in NSLA’s 2018-21 strategic plan and rebranding. The focus of the website is to share strategic thinking, expertise and specialist solutions to increase productivity and achieve better outcomes.
On the 1st July 2018 the .au name space was transferred to a new registry. The migration involved the transfer of 3.1 million domain names to a new registry and national domain name infrastructure.
Web Prophets is pleased to announce the acquisition of Redy Host.
SITE SECURITY
On 22 February 2018 the Federal Data Breach Notification Law comes into force. The law makes it mandatory for businesses who are bound by the Privacy Act to self-report certain types of data breaches including website breaches.
Sorry folks - just realised there is a problem with our Telstra land line. If you need to contact us please email us at support@webprophets.com.au or call the work mobile on 0413 543 140. Hopefully everything will be back online soon.
We're on the move and something has come a bit awry at Telstra. Our phone is currently not working so please call us on the office mobile - 0413 543 140 of you need to speak to us.
There is a lot of Phishing emails around at the moment.
In the last week we have seen DropBox file connection requests, tax office issues, and Origin Energy bills to name a few.
Happy Holidays form the Web Prophets Team! We're here over the break so if you need a hand just give us a call.
Every year, Web Prophets has a Staff Appreciation activity which includes partners and kids. This year we had a day trip to Fowles Wine in Avenel in the Strathbogie Ranges. The day started off in the mini bus taking us 1.5 hours out of Melbourne. We arrived at Fowles Wine to a delicious morning tea and coffee and then jumped back on the bus for a tour of Fowles vineyard's and production factory.
Wagner Contemporary first came to Web Prophets to use Etools email marketing software. In June 2016, Wagner Contemporary, re-branded and moved to a new location which called for a new website. Wagner Contemporary wanted a solution that allowed them to easily update the website in-house. The website needed to showcase the current exhibition as well as have a listing of upcoming and past exhibitions. Artists profiles was also a huge part of the website with a listing of artists they represent and artworks that are available for purchase as well as artworks already sold.
Arctic Rescue Victoria Inc. is a brand new not-for-profit organisation setup to assist with the re-homing, rescue and fostering of arctic breed dogs. The website is a very important tool for the organisation as it allows them to promote dogs that are ready for adoption or in need of foster care. As a volunteer run organisation, the ability to collect donations online as well as sell tickets for fundraising events helps raise funds so the organisation can keep saving dogs in need. Arctic Rescue were the recipient of on of three $5000 web development sponsorships that Web Prophets offers each year to not-for-profit organisations.
Spa Wellness Travel have been a client of Web Prophets for over 8 years now. Spa Wellness Travel's old website required an update to improve the presentation, including a responsive theme for easy viewing on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile devices.
Some pretty simple tips to make sure you are not an 'easy-target'.
Email is not a secure form of communication; never share sensitive information such as credit card information; documents with your signature on it. Always protect your computers from viruses, worms, Trojans and unwanted SPAM / phishing scams etc.
The Internet was originally designed to transfer data between trusted sites. Unfortunately trust now appears to be in short supply.
There are plenty of people out there that would rather 'take' than 'earn'.
Even worse are the ones who do it 'just because they can'.
Below are some tips for protecting yourself and getting back on your feet WHEN the worst happens.
Before we begin, I know that most people would rather get a root-canal than deal with security type stuff.
However, we all have to do things we don't particularly enjoy.
Please have a read but if you think this is too hard maybe just go back to Tip #3 and find an IT person to deal with this for you.
CTC are a national organisation that provides training and technical assistance to communities around Australia to help them implement the Communities That Care (CTC) system. The CTC system aims to improve health and wellbeing of local youth. Their clients are people interested in improving the health of young people and may range from local council representatives to philanthropists, to state and federal government, to business people, schools, health services and more.
Years on from it’s early days, there continues to be hype over the benefits of social media.
In our experience, the way through the hype is a human-centred approach, which puts the ‘interpersonal’ at the heart of your communications.
Think about social media connections as community partners rather than simple ‘transactions’. The difference seems subtle but changes the whole way you think about communicating. Partners help each other, give to each other, think about other’s needs, refer business to each other and are supportive. Empathising with your social media community membership is the first step in successful and sustainable digital communication.
With the recent changes to Google’s page ranking algorithm (AKA 'Mobilegeddon'), mobile friendly, accessible websites are being prioritised in search results. You may have read how web accessibility can be achieved in the eye of designers, business planners and SEO gurus. It's about time we go technical and explore what exactly Google expects from a website to be eligible for a page ranking bump, or at the very least, retain it.
You could always get your website checked with an accessibility tool such as WAVE, but it would save a lot of time and effort if a website is proactively built with the following pointers in mind rather than having to fix issues retrospectively.
Digital strategy. As a term it’s becoming increasingly overworked. Whatever you call it, digital strategy is essentially a way of thinking about the digital world of the future and how you and your organisation’s communication fit into it.
As you can imagine, we work a lot with our clients on their digital futures.
These proven tips will give you the confidence to know your strategy is leading you in the right direction.
The digital communication landscape changes everyday – the technology, your audience and your organisation. Think about strategy as the process that allows you to grow and adapt to these changes, engage, look forward, and be ready for the future.
Whether you are a graphic or web designer, it's important to keep accessibility in mind when designing for online applications. In today's world, so much can be done online from shopping, paying bills, communicating through social media, emails and facetime, researching, GPS maps and the list goes on... Using websites, tablets and smart phones is only going to continue to grow, so why should people who are visually impaired or have cognitive disabilities not have access to the online world we live in?
Here some great tips to help with the design process for websites and online applications...
Iwantja Arts asked Web Prophets to design a new logo and website to represent a community of artists living and working in and around the Indulkana Community in far north eastern South Australia on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands 400km south of Alice Springs.
Iwantja Arts is a NFP, Aboriginal owned and run corporation. The art centre encourages artistic excellence and cultural development for its community by providing opportunities, training and career development for artists.
Web Accessibility… the mere mention can strike fear into hearts of otherwise courageous people. What should we be doing? Are we doing enough? Are we compliant and to what? What are the risks?
Previously we’ve written about Web Prophets success in meeting technical accessibility criteria with our adoption of Drupal aGov.
Here we offer some general tips on approaching ‘web accessibility’ with confidence.
You may have heard that on 21st April 2015 Google released a new algorithm for their search results to account for mobile friendly search. You may now be asking yourself Is my site mobile friendly? and How do I find out?
Depending on your site and what purpose it serves our research shows that between 13% and 37% of your site visitors are now using a mobile or tablet to access your website. For a breakdown of device and industry usage; check out our report for April 2015 usage based on the industries we work with.
Here are 10 useful facts & tips to find out more on this issue.
I know at times it looks like what website designers and developers do is black magic. So, to explain everything we do when Web Prophets creates a website for you we thought we would look at the last 7 websites we created. The chart below is a break down of the time and build components for these projects.
The projects varied in size; some were very small and others quite complex. None of the projects were online shopping carts (a story all to its self with additional requirements); however some of the larger sites contained Ecommerce components such as Membership payments and online Donation Forms. None of the websites we reviewed contained Member login areas; being primarily public facing information based websites.
AGOV is a distribution of Drupal 7 developed by Australia web development agency PreviousNext. In November last year Web Prophets completed a one day workshop with PreviousNext learning some of the details of the CMS and finding out a standard for deploying the AA Accessible solution for our clients.
In September 2014 AGOV was adopted by the Australian Federal Government as part of their GOVCMS solution. GOVCMS is the Department of Finance's 'whole of government content management and website hosting service for Australian Government agencies'.
Here's what we love about AGOV...
In April we completed a quick review of mobile usage based on websites we have designed & developed over the last couple of years.
In our review we looked at the analytics of the last 50 websites Web Prophets developed.
We broke these down into 10 sectors - which are the main areas we work within. Below are the outcomes of our research (all data is for the period 29th March 2015 - 28th April 2015)
There are lots of online tools out there to help you promote your website online.
We have listed some great tools for website rankings, search engine optimisation, online and email marketing.
Choosing the right keywords for your site is the first step to effective marketing online. Basically we are all looking for quality leads on our website. A keyword is what a customer types into Google to conduct a search for something they are looking for. WordTracker provides you with the amount of times a keyword has been searched on in the last 24 hours. Once you know what the top keywords for your business are, you can use them on your website to attract the right leads from search engines and for building emarketing campaigns with tools like Google Adwords.
I know at times it looks like what website designers and developers do is black magic. So, to explain everything we do when Web Prophets creates a website for you we thought we would break down the 10 steps of planning your website project.
Think about what you want the website to do for your business. Write this down and do research to find out how you can set up your website to achieve your goals.
Make sure you have links from allied partners, industry associations & business directory websites linking back to your website. The more you have of these the more valuable your site is rated by Google.
Make sure Google knows about all of the pages on your website. You can submit a Sitemap at the Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase coverage of your webpages. The system of lodgement requires an XML file - if you do not know how to create one, let Web Prophets know and they can set one up for you.
Below are 10 tips to help your rankings in Google...
Here some tips on how to register a domain name and more importantly how to pick the right domain name for your business.
If you are registering a ‘.com.au’ domain name you will need:
- A Registered Business Name or Company Name that is similar to the name you want to register. For example AB CD Pty Ltd can register www.abcd.com.au
- A Registered Business Name Number or Company Number
If you are registering a '.com' or any other US Based Domains Name you don't need either of the above two items.
Register your own domain name. This will also protect you if you ever need to change your Internet Service Provider as you will always be able to keep your Domain Name Email Address (i.e. yourname@yourname.com.au).
Make sure you set up your email address properly so that when you send email addresses the receiver sees yourname@yourname.com.au. This will provide a professional image when potential and regular customers see your email (believe me I know a lot of businesses that don't do this even though they own their Domain Name). You can normally set this up in the Tools > Accounts menu of your email browser.
Here are 10 tips to help you with managing your emails, aliases, email signatures and SPAM.
The Web Prophet's team had a great day celebrating 15 years with family, friends, colleagues and clients.
There was lawn bowls, amazing food, live music, a magician and Mr. Whippy for the kids (which the adults enjoyed too!).
If you have not heard yet websites in Australia should now be developed with Accessibility in mind. Accessibility for a website means providing access to information for all users, including those with a disability.
The standards for this is outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Since the very start in 1999, Web Prophets has been committed to supporting its local community.
In the 2013/14 year we formalised this support by offering a 25% discount to all of our NFP customers on any of our services. The support we have offered has included services in website design & development, hosting, technical support / systems administration and Etools emarketing services.
Melbourne and most of the South East of Australia is now experiencing what the west has been feeling over the last week. Our sympathies go out to all of those unlucky people sweltering with no air con in their lives - here are our most favourite tips for keeping cool...
Arts Project Australia required a new fresh website that would help it promote its key activities. As a studio space and gallery for practicing artists with disabilities, the site also promotes online sales for artworks, upcoming exhibitions and events. Arts Project Australia also utilises Web Prophets Enews Manager for broadcast enews to its membership, patrons and supporters.
Mangkaja Arts is funded through a range of Government agencies. Other operational income is derived from commission from sales.
Mangkaja came to Web Prophets with a tight budget, but with the need for a website to promote the artists and art of the region as well as the online sales of some items.
Director Julia Topliss spoke at the 2012 Mainstreet Australia Conference on Tuesday 25th September to over 150 delegates. Her paper provided some really interesting information about the impact of Smartphone technology on the web and how to prepare a solid web foundation to build for future technologies.
Web Prophets is thrilled to announce that its official 2011 sponsored organisation St Kilda Gatehouse is already bearing fruits from its partnership arrangement. Designing the concept of a High Tea as an annual fundraiser, Web Prophets will be supporting St Kilda Gatehouse with a website and event management assistance.
Web Prophets' work with local community groups and not-for-profit organisations is recognised by becoming the winner of the Partnerships & Social Inclusion award in the 2010 CitiPower Port Phillip Business Excellence Awards.
Web Prophets and Polyglot Theatre became a winning team on Monday 13 September 2010, when they won the Victorian AbaF SME (small to medium enterprise) Award for their collaborative partnership. The Australian Business Arts Foundation (AbaF) Awards recognise outstanding practice in partnerships between businesses and arts companies across Australia.
Relish 2010 is full of recipes donated by local restaurants and cafes operating in St Kilda, Prahran, South Melbourne, Malvern & Elwood areas. The proceeds from the sale of this book are to be donated locally to the Sacred Heart Mission, Polio Plus, Reclink, Water Wells Project Cambodia, Prahran Mission, Inclusion Melbourne, Very Special Kids and FareShare.
Relish 2009 is a collection of recipes generously donated by local restaurants and cafes in the City of Port Phillip area, highlighting its culinary diversity. It is a project designed by the Rotary Club of St Kilda to celebrate great food for a good cause.
Web Prophets won a Citipower Port Phillip Business Excellence Award last week for its work in partnerships with local community groups. Web Prophets currently partners with the following not-for-profit organisations: Gasworks Arts Park, Fifteen Foundation, Polyglot Puppet Theatre, Relish 2009.
On the 5th of September we were lucky enough to be part of Polyglot Puppet's 30th Birthday celebrations which included the launch of a new website that we have created for them.
In September, Jamie Oliver's Fifteen Restaurant in Melbourne was launched. Web Prophets are the proud sponsors of both the Fifteen Melbourne Restaurant and Fifteen Foundation Australia websites. The sponsorship for Fifteen includes design, development, and ongoing support of the websites for the next 2 years.
