Free Range Chicken Friendly Garden in Merewether NSW Australia

Here is my first vision of the backyard - I am learning a lot.  Have a look and share your feedback!

This is the start of something!

Web Designer Newcastle

Promoting your website online is as simple as regularly updating your blog, keeping tabs on a Facebook page, maintaining a presence in industry forums and submitting relevant articles and authoritative advice.  Sounds confusing?  Well it can be to those who have to maintain their business in the “real world” and then find there is a parallel “online world” that demands the same level of commitment and accountability.

So you are best advised to outsource you online web promotion – or at least get steered in the right direction with an introductory training session with Newcastle Digital.

But back to the fundamentals of online web promotion - which is the basic truth that a website just left to it’s own devices will not magically flourish and attract traffic and convert sales – it will slowly wither and age and not really do much at all.

So what we need to do is get your website out there mingling with the crowd – with like minded similar sites brimming with customers and sales reps from your suppliers and your tradeshows and conferences and the like.  Someone has to be putting your website out there so it is slowly building an presence in your chosen niche and most likely growing in authority and recruiting for itself a higher flow of link juice.  Which roughly translates into being high in the search results.  Which is what we want, after all.

So with some regular training and updates, like reading the Newcastle Digital newsletter and following the hints and tips for increasing your organic ranking, you will soon be practising online web promotion without even knowing it.

And that’s when you start to see some really dramatic results and entrench your site at the top of the rankings for your most lucrative keywords.  So the prevailing advice it to get off to  flying start with some sustained online web promotion for at least the first twelve months so your site gathers some initial momentum.

Bench Seat Installation

Here's how I installed a 2100mm sandstone bench seat as a retaining wall. I found it at the local hardware as a discount piece with broken legs - it was $80 marked down from $399. First, I prepared the site by measuring the layout of the bench seat, and putting that in place over the site intended for it. Since the site is on a slope, and would be working as a retaining wall also, it had to be back filled with well draining material. I put down a base of 3 dozen bricks and broken roof tiles, then backfilled this with six bags of blue metal screenings - small gravel. On top of this I spread three bags of sand to give a soft base for the bench seat to rest in.

Putting the sand on top will fill in all the little cracks and gaps so that there is no movement after settling in.

Getting the bench seat to the site was a job in itself - I made a stretcher type set up and carried it along like a sled, dragging the base along the ground. It worked pretty well and I only needed help to position the bench seat into place.

Once in place it was just a matter of settling in. I have since moved more rocks around the edges to protect the site from my scratching chickens, who can excavate amazingly well when they have time. I will post more updates of the garden as I have planted more palms and grasses too.

Fan Palm and More

Now we are off work for a month and it is time for some much needed catching up in the garden. Today I bought four fan plams (Licuala ramsayi) and four giant spear lillies (Doryanthes palmerii). The Fan Palms are emergent growers, in that they survive the darkness and lack of light in the understory of the rainforest whilst they grow up to fifteen metres to emerge in the full sunlight above the canopy. The Spear Lilly is not a rainforest plant, more a local plant and will form a thicket with heavy perndulous red flower spikes as it matures.

Whilst they are small now, over the years they will provide great architectural structure and depth to the garden and of course they are natives.

The fan palm loves deep shade a moist conditions, so I have a great spot on a watercourse for it.
More soon...