Good morning

Welcome to our last Great New Zealand Tourism Web Marketing Newsletter for the year.  

At this time of year, many businesses close or are only partially staffed, so it is a good idea for you to know exactly who to contact or who may be able to help you if you have a problem with your web site, email or Internet access.

Many people we talk to are confused as to "who does what for them". So in this newsletter we will try to clarify that for you. We suggest you ensure you know what services and support they may be providing during the Xmas holiday period, particularly for email and hosting support.

In this newsletter

• Web Marketing
• Who is your developer?
• Who is your web site hosting company?
• Who is your ISP (Internet Service Provider)?
• Who is your domain name registrar?
• Who is your web marketing company?
• Who is Summary
• Recent Listing Offer

Who is your developer?

Your developer is the company or person who has "written" and published your website for you. This may be recently or several years ago if you have not changed it lately. Most likely though you will have had some contact with them to change something on your site like prices, images or contact information at least.

Your developer "wrote the code" for your site and made it work. They may or may not have also used a graphic designer for the site layout and look. They will have asked you lots of questions about what images and content you wanted on your site before it "went live".

Your developer may also have either set up or facilitated the setting up of your email and site hosting. In some rare cases they may also do the web site marketing for you.

You may be getting a regular bill from your developer even if they are not doing ongoing work on your site – perhaps monthly. This could be for site hosting if they are doing that, or for an ongoing maintenance or licence charge for a Content Management System.

Have a look at their bill, it should state what you are paying for (like hosting)

Some well known developers include Digitise, Cabbage Tree, Image Centre, 360 Degrees, @url, Babelscribe, Inow.

Don’t expect to get much done on web site development over the holiday period. But do ensure that you know what other services your developer is performing for you (like site hosting and email). Find out what support they are offering over the period so if something important breaks, you have a realistic expectation of what they will do for you when.

If they are just a developer for you, don’t expect them to be happy about a call on Xmas day!

However, if they are also looking after your email and hosting, we would expect them to have some sort of responsible support services in place for clients over the period. Having your site and email working at all times may be critical to your business.

Who is your Hosting Company?

Every web site needs to "live" or be hosted on a computer somewhere on the Internet. Your hosting company is the company which provides the banks of computer servers where sites are physically located.

Your hosting company could be anywhere in the world but will most likely be a New Zealand company such as 2 Day, Kiwi Web Host or Digiweb. IHUG, Xtra and many others also host sites.

It is likely that you will receive a monthly or quarterly bill from them, usually payable in advance. If you don’t pay this, your site will most likely go "down" until paid.

A dedicated web Hosting company will usually provide 24/7 support to ensure their servers are running. Most aim for "100% uptime" for their servers and therefore clients’ sites.

However, generally, they are not responsible for taking backups for your site. Some do, some don’t. A few years ago many sites were lost because a hosting company was not backing up sites. While most do in fact have internal backups, there is likely to be a cost involved if you have to ask them to restore your site for any reason.

Usually you or your developer should be ensuring that there are "off site" backups of your site. If your site is "database driven" or regularly changed using a Content Management System (CMS), you should make sure you know who is taking backups of this changing data on your site. Your developer may have the site as it was when they originally built it, but may not be backing up the database or CMS. Database and CMS backups are often overlooked.

Please note that your hosting company may actually be the same as your developer. Some developers (eg Digitise) also offer hosting services. Others like Cabbage Tree may charge you for hosting, or else require that you host your site at a particular hosting company (in their case Digiweb) to ensure compatibility with their CMS system (Thrive)

Anyhow, someone will be regularly charging you for hosting. The bill is likely to read something like Linux (or Microsoft) hosting account 25Mb. It may also have various secure card, email and statistics packages itemised in this account.

Ensure you know who is responsible for your hosting so that you know who to contact if your site is "down" over the holiday.

Who is your ISP (Internet Service Provider)?

Your ISP is the company which "connects your home or office computers to the net". This is the company that provides the service that enables you to read your email or view websites. You will be on either a "dial up" or "broadband" plan with someone.

For the majority of New Zealanders, this is Xtra (Telecom). Others include IHUG (Vodaphone now), Actrix, Paradise, Orcon, Iconz or similar.

In many cases, your email address will tell you who this is – eg bob@xtra.co.nz. 

You are most likely charged monthly for this service but in many cases it will be bundled with your telephone bill (or vice versa). Most ISPs also offer some sort of incentive on phone calls with their Internet services.

In some cases your ISP will also be your hosting company. In this case services should be itemised separately on your bill.

Although there are a number of different ISP’s, because Telecom owns most of the phone lines, if Telecom services go down, yours probably will too, regardless of who your ISP is.

However, even if this is the case, whenever you have a problem connecting, you will need to contact your own ISP in the first instance.

Your email services may have been set up by either your developer, your hosting company, or your ISP. Each may have had a part to play in it.

ISPs should be providing 24/7 support to clients.

Who is your domain name registrar?

Your domain name registrar is the company with whom you registered your domain name. Most hosting companies offer this service, as well as some companies who only do registrations.

You probably pay for this annually, from approx $20 upwards depending who you have it registered with and if it is a .co.nz or .com domain name etc.

It is important that this is paid in time or it can lapse causing your site to stop working, and incurring a redemption cost to recover the name before someone else grabs it.

To find out who is responsible for this (it could be your developer, ISP or hosting co) you can look up the domain record at any registrar.

For example go to http://www.discountdomains.co.nz . Enter your domain name and hit "Go". Now click on "view whois record" and it will tell you who the registered contacts are as well as the expiry dates etc. Check that any of your contact details are correct – this can be important later if you wish to transfer the domain.

As long as your domain is registered and not due to expire soon, you should not require any support for this over the holiday period.

Who is your Web Marketing company?

Your web marketing company (if you have one) is the one which is trying to make sure that your web site actually gets seen on the net. Generally this means optimising your site as well as other things to ensure that when someone searches the net (using Google etc) your site comes up near the top of the results rather than at number 30 squillion in the list. The purpose of this is to get more qualified traffic (visitors) to your web site so that you get more business or bookings.

"Web marketing is ensuring that your web site is seen online in the places that your customers will be looking, including search engines, directories and link sites."

Our company, Net Action Ltd (http:/www.netaction.co.nz) specialises in Web Marketing for travel and tourism businesses. There are others too but I guess we just won’t advertise them here!

Achieving great search engine ranking and traffic is a long process. So generally your web marketing company does not need to provide extensive support services over holiday periods. Your business or site will not break if your web marketing company is closed.

So, please don’t call your web marketing company on Xmas day!

Your Developer
Contact them for site changes and maintenance. Usually this work will not be done immediately, but will be scheduled in to their workload. However, make sure you know if they are also providing hosting or email services to you. If so, find out what their after hours support services are for this.

Your hosting company
Contact them if you can access the Internet OK but your site is suddenly not working. Or if your email breaks and they are responsible for that. Your hosting company should be providing 24/7 support services of some sort to ensure that your site has close to 100% uptime.

Your ISP
Connects you directly to the net. Contact them if you cannot access the net or email via your dial up or broadband connection. ISPs should be providing 24/7 support.

Your Domain name registrar
Keep your domain name paid or you might lose it. Usually paid once per year by you, your developer, or hosting co.

Your Web Marketing Company
Gets your site seen on the net over a period of time. Your site or email will not break because of what they do. So they do not need to be providing extensive after hours support services.

Make sure you know who does what for you so that you know who to contact if you have a problem. Write down the phone numbers you need – it may not be possible to look these up on the net if there is a problem somewhere!

Recent Listing offer

A good number of people took us up on our recent listing offer for the new web page and photo listing on Great New Zealand, Destination NZ and our regional guides. We continue to work to ensure that these listings have prominence above others.

Although this offer has now finished, if you missed out because you forgot or were too busy to deal with it, and you would still like to take advantage of it, contact us and twist our arms. After all, it is Xmas so we will probably still let you have it for the special price.

On that note we wish you a Merry Xmas and a great season. Our office will be largely unattended through Xmas and New Year. But if you need us, just send us an email and we will attend to it as soon as we read it. We will be checking these fairly regularly.

Best regards

Ron, Judie, Sue and the team
Great New Zealand Ltd and Net Action Ltd
07 866 3929

Subscription Information

You have received this email because your website has a listing on our New Zealand Travel and Tourism websites Great New Zealand (www.greatnewzealand.co.nz) and Destination NZ (www.destinationnz.co.nz) If you have several sites listed under the same contact email address, we have only sent you this email for one of your sites.

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 means that emails can only be sent to those who "opt in" to an email list. As it is a condition of listing with us that you are also on the email list, (see Terms and Conditions ) you can only be removed from this list by also having your listing removed from the directories. If you would like to do this, please email us asap and we will action it.