Innovation

Impress Media Australia works with a range of innovative Australian companies and individuals. Please read the stories below for details.

Greg BirchCut costs not customers warns corporate gift expert

Corporate gifts specialist Office Range warns that many businesses risk cutting off communication with customers in their rush to cut costs in the economic downturn.

Office Range general manager Greg Birch said an unfortunately ‘knee jerk’ reaction to tougher times is to reduce the marketing budget. “Marketing simply means ‘to retain existing or prospect new customers’ with regards to your products or services,” he said.

“In tough times, it’s wise to look at what is really needed and what you can do without for a while - “trim the fat” so to speak. The problem is if you cut out a fundamental part of your company such as marketing, both new and existing customers may lose touch with you or even think you’ve gone out of business.

“The net result is an accelerating decline in revenues which makes the problem even worse."

UniSA’s commercialisation arm ITEK has relaunched its website to make it easier for university researchers to successfully start transforming their research into a profitable business.

ITEK is responsible for developing commercial opportunities from research undertaken by the University of South Australia. After a three-month redesign process, the relaunched website delivers fresh insights on how to turn leading-edge research into a business that generates commercial returns for researchers, investors and the university.

Impress Media Australia has refreshed the underlying infrastructure of its website by upgrading to the Joomla 1.5 content management system.

As well as improved security, Joomla 1.5 offers more sophisticated design templates, much easier management of published stories and and making it easier for search engines to find and index content.

Joomla is an open source content management system that allows stylish and easy-to-manage websites. The upgrade from version Joomla 1.12 to Joomla 1.5 was undertaken by Alltraders, the specialist web hosting business that maintains the www.impress.com.au website.

Alltraders director Michael O'Loughlin said many businesses were upgrading to Joomla 1.5 for the enhanced security. "With the new version, security is now an active process," he said.

"This is occurring through an ongoing audit process by teams within the not-for-profit Joomla support organisation, Open Source Matters, which is finding vulnerabilities in the code before they are publicly identified."

For more information, see the FAQ on Joomla 1.5 at www.opensourcematters.org.