Bush Branding & Marketing is organising and hosting a Joomla Day on Sunday May 11th starting at noon. For those of you not familiar with Joomla here are a few links and info bytes:

What is Joomla? An open source content management system and web application framework. Translation–A powerful tool for web developers and their clients that enables relatively easy updates to websites.

Who will be presenting at Byron Bay Joomla Day? Stars of the Joomla project Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker will be our lead presenters. Following them will be Bush Marketing’s long time associate Jason “Scout” Ferris and a number of Joomla case studies including some exciting news from Hans Lovejoy from Byron Bay’s local community newspaper–the Echo.

How much does it cost? $20 Book soon as spaces are limited to 50 people.

Pictured Bush Marketing’s Briony Moore and Greg with some of Google’s Open Source Progams Office bling donated for Byron Bay Joomla Day. photo by Kavi.

Thanks to Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager – Open Source
Google Inc.

Bush Branding & Marketing got its big start in search engine optimisation in 2001 when the Australian Boot Company asked us to boost their search engine rankings. This was the start of a steep and steady learning curve that has been one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of our business.

Things have come a long way in SEO since the heady days of meta tag fixation. Bush Branding & Marketing has offered SEO and SEM as part of our services in various forms. Our biggest successes have come from clients who have retained us to manage all aspects of their brand. Our biggest failures, especially from a financial perspective, have come from people looking for the SEO silver bullet. In other words, you did not make our pages rank # 1 in Google within 24 hours so we won’t pay you.

Introducing the Standard search engine optimisation service:

• Keywords: 160 character description and 25 key words
• Webmaster for Yahoo, MSN and of course good ole Google
• Google Analytics with scheduled report delivery
• Site map

We are offering this starter search engine optimisation service at a cheap and cheerful price of $500. Please contact us if you are interested in this or to discuss our other search engine services.

Less is quite often more. In the case of using www. in front of web addresses we could not agree more. For more on this subject visit this no-www.org dedicated to the subject. Next time you are including your website address on something have a look at it with and without the www. Why clutter up your url with superfluous letters?

Back in the day setting type was an art. A very time consuming, laborious and expensive aspect of advertising and publishing. More type is being set then ever today; however, far less time, if any, is spent thinking about how to best present letters and words in a pleasing and effective manner.

Most of today’s type is consumed on the screen. By this I mean we read less on paper and more on our computer and other electronic screens. Thank goodness there are serious limitations on the internet. Not all fonts are web friendly, here is a good wikipedia reference on this subject.

In simple terms there are less than a dozen fonts that you can count on displaying properly. Here is an example based on the fonts that are available in blogger.

Typesetting for the screen-Arial

Typesetting for the screen-Courier
Typesetting for the screen-Georgia
Typesetting for the screen-Lucida Grande
Typesetting for the screen-Times
Typesetting for the screen-Trebuchet
Typesetting for the screen-Verdana

The Steam Whistle story begins in the spring of 1998 when three friends were on a canoe trip in the Ontario heartland. Greg Taylor, Cam Heaps and Greg Cromwell had all been colleagues at Upper Canada, a craft brewing pioneer in the late 1980’s and 90’s – before it was bought out by Sleemans, a national brewer and closed down. As they sat around the campfire, the self-named “Three Fired Guys” dreamed of running their own brewery one day.

They wanted to make a Pilsner that would compete with the best in the world. They wrote a plan and quickly attracted investors with their vision and passion.

Which brings us to the subject of this blog “Brewery Wanted for Fired Guy”. Bush Branding & Marketing’s Greg Cromwell has been fermenting for a decade to get stuck into the micro brewing business again. If anyone knows of a Good Brew Brand that could use a hand, contact Greg. He’s all fired up and ready to grow.

Is advertising worth it? A question often asked and very difficult to answer. In our experience advertising is a key ingredient to growing brands. However, making your ads work their hardest and measuring their impact takes some fancy footwork. Take this “worth it” ad created by Ranscombe & Co for Blundstone Canada. This little ad has hit a cord with consumers.

Why has it worked so well generating sales? You cannot beat a straight forward retail ad with good old fashioned attention to the lost art of type setting. Add a powerful two word headline that draws you in. Insert some strategic copywriting that cleverly deals with price/value and presto- you have an ad that is truly worth it.

More to come on how we will be leveraging this successful bit of print advertising on the internet.

Last week I took 3 days off and went camping with 3 of my daughters. We were the envy of the Coorabell School camping excursion when we pulled up with our 3 Dog Camping trailer. On our first night as luck would have it rained like cats and dogs. We were high and dry inside our 3 Dog unlike many of the water logged campers; in fact, we took in a couple of refugees from the rain.

Another big hit on the camping trip was my Presso coffee maker.

On the first morning I became a teacher’s pet, which was a first for me, when I offered to make the teachers a well earned hot cup of camp coffee. There were so many events during our stay at Woody Head near Iluka but here are a few highlights: learning to track animals with the park ranger, sand castle competition on the beach in Yamba and of course the two possums that blessed the rafters of the barracks that half our group slept in on our last night. I had the privilege to settle the children down with a bad bit of bush poetry which included….Possums it’s time to go to bed in the shed at Woody Head.