Launch of the HomeSpace NZ Website

NZ Design Awards Best Label

We have won a NZ Industry Design Award for Best Label Design

Design Lounge’s Label Design has won a major award at the recent 2016 NZ Olive Oil Awards, held in Parliament in Wellington.
The label was judged winner of the Best Label Design from 138 olive oil entries nationwide. It was apparently the largest and strongest field of entries they have had entered for many years. The design award was judged by invited Professional Graphic Designer.

This label design, was refreshed this year, to give it a sophisticated, crisp and modern look, while still keeping it simple and high class. It was a clear winner from the four finalists, and scored top marks in all 3 categories, including ‘Shelf’ Appeal, ‘Overall Design’, and ‘Printing’. So getting industry recognition for this hardwork is excellent.

The judges critique of the label was as follows:

“Sophisticated and classy are the words to describe this label. Well designed with a subtle use of line illustrations and type. Good balance of hierarchy between text and image and great use of visual space. This really does say ‘high end product’, quality and just a bit special. A step above the normal label designs.”

Jerry Gull, Senior Lecturer Eastern Institute Design School.

 

The label was printed on a foil stock, and coated in a matt laminate, giving it a very high quality look. The printing was done by the team at Excel Digital.

 

Mobile Friendly Website

All New Mobile Friendly Website Packages to be Released Soon

We are really excited to shortly be releasing a range of New Website Packages, aimed for the lower cost end of the NZ Web Design market. These will be known as our ‘Starter Website Packages’. Our Starter Web Design Packages will be the perfect solution for many small New Zealand Business and Sole Traders, or for individuals who need an affordable and simple to use Mobile Friendly Website presence.

Our Starter Website Packages will allow us to setup powerful mobile friendly websites for clients, at a relatively low setup cost, and they can be setup in a relatively quick turnaround time. The Starter Website Packages focus is on simple mobile friendly websites, and will include features such as Unlimited website pages, Image Galleries, Slideshows, Videos, and a inbuilt blogging platform.Mobile Friendly Website

Our Starter Websites will be able to be updated by clients using just their website browser, via a simple Drag and Drop, WYSIWYG website editor. The Website CMS and platform that is utilized, is one of the best around, and allows people to easily edit their website with ease.  The hosting platform has also been specifically designed for the website platform, providing great website performance and robust reliability.

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Should I Retain My Existing .co.nz Domain Names?

Last year we saw the release of the new shorter .NZ domain name extension, which gave many businesses the opportunity to register the shorter version of their existing .co.nz domain name. For example, if a business had the domain mybusiness.co.nz, they may have had the preferential right to register the shorter domain mybusiness.nz.

NZ Domain NamesAs a result of many businesses taking up the opportunity to register the shorter version of their domain name, many business now have more domain names than they previously had. Many have registered multiple domain names in order to protect their Intellectual Property. But most businesses have an accountant who likes to ‘trim the fat’, and save money where possible. One way some businesses may see an opportunity to make some cost savings, is to consolidate the number of domain names they have. For example, a business may choose to let their old .co.nz domain lapse when it is next due for renewal, and only retain the shorter .nz domain name. However consolidating domain names in order to save a bit of cash short term can be a big mistake, and cause major expensive headaches down the road. As the .co.nz domain is focused toward companies, we believe any business should try to retain their .co.nz, and not let it expire. If your domain does expire, you may find that one of your competitors may buy that domain, or it may get purchased by a cyber-squatter, who buys and sells domains for a profit. Both may use your old domain name for different things. A competing business may use the domain name, to redirect it to their own businesses website, gaining the traffic that your website should be getting. If you were previously using the expired .co.nz domain for email, you may find that the organisation that has purchased your old domain now has the ability to receive emails from your clients who are still sending you emails on that old domain email address. These are just a few of the many potential problems companies may face in letting a domain name expire.

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NZ Domain Names

The Great .NZ Domain Name Land Grab is Now On

With the recent release of thousands of previously reserved .NZ Domain Names into the public pool, now is your opportunity to snap up your perfect shorter .NZ domain name.

There are many fantastic shorter .NZ domains which have become available in recent weeks, which for one reason or another, have not been secured by those businesses who previously had rights to do so. So these previously reserved shorter .NZ domains are now available for ANYONE to register.
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Google NZ SEO

Major changes to Google NZ search results on mobile platforms

As of April 21st Google will begin to rank mobile search results, on the mobile-friendliness of your website. This means that if your website hasn’t been built to be mobile friendly, it may not rank well in mobile search results, and this could be a major problem for your business. This means all that money you may have spent on website design and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) may have been in vain if most of your visitors are mobile based.

Mobile Friendly Wellington Web Design

So what does this actually mean? Apparently this change will only apply to Google search results on mobile devices. This would include Google searches from mobile phones, for example Apple iPhones, Android and Windows phones.  Up to 40% of visits  to NZ websites, are now made using a mobile phone, and most will look up the website via Google instead of typing in the website address, so this change is quite a big deal. If your website is not currently mobile friendly, this change does not mean that your website will not be listed in Google search results. It only means that those other websites that would normally appear in the same search results as your website, which are also mobile friendly, will get a boost and may jump ahead of yours in the rankings.
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Wellington Web Hosting

Good Quality Web Hosting is behind every successful website

There is really nothing more important than good quality business grade web hosting and email hosting, when you get a new website designed.

Through our Wellington Web Hosting division, the Lounge Network, we offer some of the best and most reliable web hosting services available in New Zealand. We host all of our clients new websites on it.

Our web hosting service includes domain based email accounts for no additional fees, so you can have any email address you want, ending in your domain name eg. anyname@yourdomain.co.nz. Our web hosting service also isn’t just restricted to our own web design clients. We also have web designers and stand alone web hosting cleints all over New Zealand using our web hosting service, including many clients in Auckland , Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

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Wellington Web Design

Introduction to Responsive Web Design – Making Your Website Mobile Friendly

Responsive Web Design, often abbreviated to ‘RWD’, is when a website layout is designed to automatically format to the screen size it is being viewed on. Essentially this type of web design allows your website to be ‘Mobile Friendly’, without the need of having a separate mobile website or special mobile web design template.

With a Responsive Website, the websites format and layout are automatically adjusted by the websites code, to give the best viewing experience for the individual device it is being viewed on. This means it is ‘Responsive’ to the environment it is being viewed with. With websites now being viewed on so many different screen sizes and devices, having a responsive website is a must.

The traditional approach to designing websites for mobile devices, was to have a separate mobile website designed specially for those mobile devices. But with responsive websites, this is no longer required, and the same website can be used for all devices.

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Email Marketing in New Zealand

Since 2007 when the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 came into force, it has been illegal for NZ businesses to send unsolicited commercial emails to people,(referred to as SPAM) who hadn’t previously agreed to receive them.

However from our own experiences, many businesses are still unaware of the laws, and are carrying out some very poor practices when managing mass email communications. This topic is therefore for the benefit of our own clients, many of whom are businesses, that use mass email communications for their business.

We decided to write about this topic, after recently receiving a flurry of unsolicited emails from NZ companies that we had never heard of. When we contacted some of these businesses, and asked where they got our details from, they had no record of where our email address was actually sourced from.  But they promised to remove our email address from their database. That should have been the end of it, but in several cases we continued to receive unsolicited email from them. Some of them had no automated way to remove us from their database. Others failed to provide any contact details or subscription information in the emails they sent us.

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Brand New Website

We are proud to launch our brand new Design Lounge Website. It is the third version our Wellington Web Design website since 2001, and uses all the latest web technologies.

Wellington Web DesignOur Web Design Wellington website is also responsive, meaning it automatically formats itself, based on the type of device it is being viewed on. Therefore it looks different on different devices, whether it be an iphone, an ipad or a desktop. This makes it mobile friendly web design.

As it uses the latest web technologies, it may not look the best in older web browsers, but it is designed for the future, not the past.

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