Kilobites by Sanico

As a software engineer I am not required to work from a particular location, in other words, no office required. I started my first software business with my brother called Infinity Mural back in 2019 that then morphed into Sanico Software. Since we just started as a new business we wanted to start with low overheads so we took the obvious choice and decided to work from home.

We saved a ton of money as we required no rental of an office or co-working space, no money spent on fuel or car maintenance, and best of all, we recouped the wasted commute time to drive to an office. Win, win, win!

So many benefits, no drawbacks, right? Wrong! After 3 years of home office working I am here to tell you, dear reader, that working from home ain’t perfect. I wanted to share 4 drawbacks that I found when I work from home. A small disclaimer, although I discuss the drawbacks all in all I still prefer to work from home rather than in an office, I will write the benefits of working from home in another post!

Drawback 1: Distractions from others in the house

If you live in a house with other people sometimes they forget that you work from home. They will ask small unrelated questions throughout the day, do overly loud chores such as vacuuming, talk on the phone as loud as possible to their cousin from Sydney and many other small annoyances.

It is a house after all, a shared space where one or …

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Website Tip #9: Choose a domain that suits your target audience.

I noticed many of my clients in Adelaide ask me whether to use .com, .com.au or .au for their website. The answer, as always, is that it depends. From an SEO perspective you must take into consideration your target audience.

If the target audience of your website resides in Australia then use .com.au or the new .au for your website. Instead, if your target audience is international without localised versions then use .com or another Generic Top Level Domain.

The type of domain purchased gives a strong signal to Google about the location and target audience of a website. If I buy a domain name with .com.au Google recognises that the domain originates from Australia and therefore allows them to show the website to the correct target audience.

Remember, Google wants to serve people with the most relevant search results therefore to send a strong signal such as a geographically specific domain name helps Google understand the relevance of a website.

For example, say I want to find a local plumber in my city of Adelaide, South Australia. I crack open Google and search: “Local Plumber Adelaide Australia”. Do you think Google will show me links for local plumbers from the UK? From China? From India? Look at the links below and guess which domain you expect to show up if you typed “Local Plumber Adelaide …

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I attended the Collective Markets earlier this year located in Civic Park, right across from SA’s well known Tea Tree Plaza. This is where I came in contact with The Naked Soap Company, a small business dedicated to hand making eco-friendly soaps and skin-care products.

Elise is the owner of the company and runs the business with her family. I had the privilege of meeting Michelle (Elise’s sister) at the market stall and mentioned I help locals like her develop their websites.

Fast forward several weeks later and I was in a Zoom call with Elise understanding what her primary goal was for the new website. Elise explained to me how their previous website wasn’t hitting the mark and wanted an update.

Why was the previous website not hitting the mark?

The previous website, as seen in the images below, made sales but it had a poor user experience. After viewing it myself I noticed that the website had slow load times, was designed with an average template and didn’t fully represent the quality of their products. These sorts of issues are not just aesthetic but practical issues since Google ranks on all of these factors.

A screenshot of the old website home page for The Naked Soap Company.

The website would take its time to display product images which can make users frustrated and deterred from staying on the website.

Products taking their time to load on the old website for The …

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On the 27th of November 2022 I went to the Bowerbird market on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to support some local Australian creators. The Bowerbird is a well-known market showcasing Australian designers and makers held at the Adelaide Showground in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia.

I love to go to the markets and support locals because I get the chance to meet small business owners face to face. No instagram, no Facebook, no technology, no phone call, literally face to face with the owners. They are usually warm, friendly, kind, and passionate people, definitely worth meeting in person.

Cards that I bought from Popcorn Blue Illustrations at the Bowerbird market.

At the Bowerbird market the small business owners travel from far and wide, from Melbourne to rural New South Wales. Predominantly the market consists of South Australian businesses but also gives business owners from interstate an opportunity to come along and share their products with us South Aussies.

The Bowerbird market reminds me of the stories my Dad used to tell me of when my family sold their fresh fruit and vegetable cultivated from their farm at the local markets. It reminds me of hard work, determination, and local Aussie spirit. The Australian dream, to have a home amongst the gumtrees with lots of plum trees.

A discovery set of perfume that I bought from the Botonic Enve at the Bowerbird …

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Website Tip #8: Write descriptive, clear, and concise titles for your products on your ecommerce website to rank higher on Google.

I wrote this tip because I noticed many ecommerce websites in my hometown of Adelaide fail to write good product titles. I thought what a shame. What a missed opportunity. Many people pay an SEO specialist like myself to improve a website while many just miss factors like this that they possess the ability to modify themselves.

I will provide an example to demonstrate both good and bad product titles with the use of a random yellow umbrella I found on the internet. Imagine I sell a yellow beach umbrella as seen in the picture below.

Examples of Good Titles:

• Yellow beach umbrella
• Yellow beach umbrella | Waterproof and windproof
• Beach umbrella | Waterproof | Windproof | Yellow

The titles provide a mixture of conciseness, descriptiveness, and clarity. A human not only reads them at a glance with more clarity but it also helps Google understand the product. I split the titles with the pipe ("|") separator but others exist such as a forward slash ("/"), a dash ("-"), and much more. Just ensure the separator remains consistent and don’t use a mixture of different separators such as both a pipe ("|") and a forward slash ("/").

Examples of Bad Titles:

• Umbrella
• Umbrella for the beach that keeps the sun …

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Website Tip #7: This tip may seem pretty straightforward but I constantly see missed opportunities for businesses sharing their website with new customers. Picture your website like a castle in the middle of the woods. Sounds random but stay with me here. You have gone to the effort to get your website published online and it now exists in the middle of nowhere. How does anyone know where your castle is? You could tell your friends and family which would create a magical path directly to your castle. However, this is a pathway just for friends and family. Unless they share it with other people this path will barely be used. You need to create more pathways and let people know.

But how do I create more pathways?

Take a step back and think about where a potential customer may be and how to guide them towards your castle. For example, you may create social media profiles for your business and generate a few followers. In this example you must make sure your website is super accessible for your followers. Therefore you are creating a pathway for all your social media followers to access your castle.

Let’s take Instagram for example. Don’t just put your website in your profile description but also share the link in your story as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Showing how to currently add a clickable link to an Instagram story

Those stories can then be added to your Instagram …

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Website Tip #6: Avoid putting important text in images as it makes it difficult for Google to understand. User’s can’t easily copy text and accessibility readers lack the ability to read the text aloud for people with a disability. Although this tip is subtle it is something that helps boost the SEO of a website.

When Google or other search engines index your website they ingest a variety of information, one critical piece of information is the text. Google rips all of the text from a website, interprets it, and understands its relevance which then allows it to recommend the webpage to people searching on Google. This is called the organic search ranking.

Another common problem is that users aren’t able to copy and paste the text from your website which is extremely annoying. To understand my point try to copy this text below:

Copy this text here.

Easy, right? Whatever device you are on it should be easy enough to copy and paste the text. Alright, let’s step it up, try to copy the text below that I put in an image:

Try to copy this text.

Ahhh not so easy. Unfortunately it’s almost impossible on most devices to copy text in an image and is extremely annoying for people who try to do so on your website. If you’ve ever run into this problem on a website you’ll understand what I mean.

The other problem is that accessibility readers that …

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Dom and I recently landed our biggest client ever with an Adelaide based company called Jobs Statewide. They came to us with a critical and short deadline handed to them by the Government. They needed to set up their new offices in Sydney and Melbourne and they wanted us to handle the set up of their IT infrastructure in each of their new offices.

After negotiating a deal we hit the ground running on a trip to get their tech up and running with a sensitive deadline. We started with a super early flight from Adelaide airport and once landing in Sydney and Melbourne we went straight to the first offices.

I had a hire car in Sydney where I transported laptops, desktops, servers, and a whole bunch of other tech across 6 different locations. These suburbs included Bankstown, Cabramatta, Campbell Town, Fairfield, Ingleburn, and Liverpool, all located within the South Western suburbs of Sydney. It did not help that during my travels there was severe flooding in Sydney and I ran out of clothes to wear as every outfit I bought was soaked. I was thinking at one point they should have hired me a boat not a car.

Dom was simultaneously running around several offices in Melbourne which included Box Hill, Cheltenham, Cranbourne, Coburg, Dandenong, Fitzroy, Frankston, and Prahran. Most of the tech was already couriered to their designated locations so Dom was lucky enough to only have to take …

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By god this is sort of controversial. Google provides many free services that I use daily but there was one tool that ruled them all… the TIMER! Figure 1 shows the timer in all its former glory, so simple, so elegant and now so non-existent. That’s right, when I searched up the classic word “timer” into Google last week my heart wretched at its disappearance.

Figure 1: The free timer tool provided by Google when using their search engine.

I reluctantly clicked the next available website with a timer and was horrified at their over the top designs. Google did it right as it was simplistic, user friendly and perfectly functional.

I needed to do something about this

There I was sitting at my desk lost without my simple Google timer. I went to search for a native timer on my Macbook Pro and was stunned to find nothing too. Literally only a clock is available to use like a barbarian. I might as well start using a sundial to track my hours. Alright, maybe that is a little bit extreme but you get my point.

Then it struck me, I am a software engineer! Of course, all the years of honing my craft led up to this point. It was time to recreate the wheel in its most basic form.

So I made a timer

Now listen, I didn’t sit down and design a timer with a billion features. In software there is the concept of over-engineering and I didn’t want my timer to solve philosophical inquiry. It just …

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Website Tip #5: Do not forget to add a favicon to your website. I say forget because it seems people usually forget to add the poor little favicon to their website and in doing so they miss out on an opportunity to increase brand recognition and verify the legitimacy of a website. I created this web tip because I am so surprised at the sheer number of websites that I see that forget this little impactful addition. No more, after you read this tip I hope it inspires you to add the favicon to your website.

What the heck is a favicon?

A favicon is a symbol or icon that usually contains the logo of a website and appears in common places such as Google Search or directly within a web browser. For example, when a user queries something on Google the displayed results show a small icon next to the URL of the website. Figure 1 shows a hand pointing to the icons that I highlighted with yellow circles. Google sources the favicons from a website and displays them in their search results adjacent to the URL of a website.

Figure 1: Google search results with favicon images.

Another place where favicons are used is in the tab of a web browser window. No stress if that sounds like gibberish to you. I will clarify. In Google Chrome on a browser tab the favicon appears adjacent to the title of a website, as seen in Figure 2 below. The favicons allow a user to pick between browser tabs with …

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