Anyone who has ever planned a wedding will know how much work goes into organising the whole thing to ensure a memorable and glitch-free day. So the first thing you need is an experienced wedding planner to help and provide advice. Weddings and Events of Maleny are complete Wedding Planners, and will assist you with all aspects of your preparations, co-ordinating and styling your event.

You’ll also need a ceremony and reception venue, a marriage celebrant, professional photographer and a wedding florist. Luckily, Maleny and the Sunshine Coast Hinterland has an abundance of professional services.

For a wedding venue, it’s hard to go past award winner Maleny Manor. If you prefer a traditional church ceremony, then the Little White Wedding Church provides vintage charm set in a beautiful rural setting with sweeping views.

Marriage celebrants are becoming more popular, and you’ll be spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing your marriage celebrant in Maleny. Ian Stevenson from Peachester Celebrations and Janelle Wellsteed are professional marriage celebrants who would be more than happy to discuss your Maleny wedding plans. As an aside, If you’re getting married in Townsville, then you can’t go past Weddings in Townsville (Hi Mum).

You’ll want the photography handled by a top quality experienced professional, such as Penny Riddoch, to ensure your special day is captured in the best possible light, to be cherished for years to come.

When it comes to wedding flowers, there’s really only one choice, award winning florist Mondo Floral Designs.

With so many professional services on offer, it’s no wonder Maleny is such a popular place to get married.

One of the recent developments that have come with faster broadband connections is an increasing prevalence of software that runs over the internet, rather than being installed on your computer.

Non Cloud – Most people have used Microsoft Word or other similar office software products. You create documents on your computer and save them on your computer.

Cloud – With Google Docs, the software is installed on Google’s computers, and the files are saved on Google’s computers. You log in using your browser (internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) to create and edit documents.

Also known as ‘Software as a Service’, the term ‘cloud computing’ comes from schematic diagrams of computer networks, where the internet is drawn as a cloud.

Some advantages of cloud computing are:

• Low cost – the software is generally free to use
• No upgrades are required – the software always up to date
• Automated backup – if your computer crashes, the files are accessible online
• Collaboration – many users can work on the same document, no need to email back and forth.
• Flexibility – You can work on the document from any location with Internet access, even your phone

Word processing is one example of cloud computing that you can start using immediately. But you can do almost all your computing in the cloud – email, accounting, customer relationship management, ecommerce, project management etc.

What do you do when you have many jobs to complete in a short amount of time, but finite resources?

I like to use the game of Ludo as an analogy. In Ludo, you have 4 tokens which all have to get from start to finish. Part of the strategy of playing Ludo is deciding which token to move forward on a given turn, when there may be four choices. Which one gets the priority? They all have to get to the end as soon as possible!

You could move one token on successive rolls and get it to the end quicker, but that leaves the other three back at the start. Or you could move the pieces in turn, so it will take longer to get any to the end, but they’ll get there together.

The difference between the game and the real world is there are often more than four simultaneous jobs, and they will have different priorities. The one that gets the highest priority is often the one that will bring the most pleasure (usually money) or avoid the most pain (an irate customer, for example).

Obviously the strategy is to get all the jobs to the end, but the tactics can change during play. You may have determined the priority is getting ‘Job A’ to the end as quickly as possible, but then new information comes in from ‘Job B’, and it suddenly becomes top priority, which makes ‘Job C’ get put on hold even longer.

Work can be stressful. The Ludo analogy is a way to picture all the jobs currently in play objectively, which can help to determine priorities. And, hopefully, add a light-hearted element to your workload, because remember, it’s all a game anyway!

Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is part of the rapidly growing South East Queensland metropolis, stretching along the coast from Coolangatta in the south to Noosa in the north. The area is renowned for its natural beauty and lifestyle options, which makes it a great place to live and work.

Looking for a website design business on the Sunshine Coast may seem overwhelming at first, due to the proliferation website designers available. Here’s a couple of tips to take into consideration:

• Look at their website design portfolio, and contact the owners of those websites and ask if they are satisfied with the service and results they received.
• Can you find those websites easily using Google?
• Do the websites all look similar, or based on a similar template?

By just following these 3 tips, you can determine if you are likely to get good service and results, if your website will be search engine optimized, and whether your website will have a unique design.

Your domain name is your home on the internet. It’s your online brand, it’s on your business cards, and it’s in your email address. You’ll be using it a lot, so it makes good sense to get the best one you can.

So what makes a good domain name? Starting with the suffix, a .com domain name is essential for a commercial business. Leave the .net and .org for networks and organisations.

If you’re doing business in Australia then a .com.au will be good to have also. You can put your website on either the .com or the .com.au, and redirect the other one, so both names will lead to your website.

www.example.com

www.example.com.au

Then comes the main part after the ‘www’s. If you can register an exact match of your business name, then that’s the way to go. If not, then you can be creative and use relevant descriptive or locality keywords. If you sell widgets, then www.examplewidgets.com could be an option. If your market is based in Maleny, then www.examplewidgetsmaleny.com would be a good choice.

Domain names can include a dash (-), however be wary of getting one in your domain name, as you will forever be reminding people to put the dash in, and if they forget then they may end up at another website instead of yours.

www.example-widgets.com

Keep it as short as possible, if your domain name is too long, there is more chance of forgetting or misspellings.

www.examplehasthebestwidgetsinmaleny.com

You can research available domain names on the Arrowsmith Websites Domains page.

Some things that people find annoying on websites:

• Music starts to play straight away. Can be embarrassing in an office situation, or if you’re listening to something else. Use a ‘play sound’ button.
• Anything flashing. Usually indicates the ads are more important than the content.
• Can’t find the ‘home’ button. People like going home.
• Welcome page that says ‘click here to enter site’. Why not just enter the site to begin with, instead of requiring an extra mouse click.