School holidays are over and it's back to business full throttle. The 'January Effect' we have spoken of before was stronger than ever as our start to 2008 saw over 300,000 visitors log onto aussiehome.com, from nearly 90,000 unique computer browsers.

Average time spent on the site was up to 8 minutes 30 seconds, and 1.1 million pages were opened during the month.

(We recorded 30 million hits to the site - a meaningless stat, as this measures every image and piece of a web page - some web pages would register 50 hits from one visitor. Note to self - anyone quoting 'hits' to you is not being entirely honest with you...)

Overall this was a 36% jump on December figures, which traditionally attracts the smallest number of visitors in any year.

As we mentioned in December's E-News, online search God Google has recently made some major changes to its local search site.

For those of you with web sites with us, this represents an opportunity to get to the top of Google without having to do any serious SEO (search engine optimisation) at all!

Google now squeezes 10 local results into a 'local box'. Essentially there are now 20 results on a Google page - 10 local results run alongside the local box and 10 run beneath (as standard results). If you used to rank first, you now rank 11th.

This change has propelled some businesses from 'nowhere' into the top 10, and relegated others (who may have invested in SEO) to the bottom 10 results.

So how do you take advantage?

You cannot afford to miss this opportunity. If you are a local real estate agency in Nedlands, you should enter 'ABC Realty - Nedlands real estate agency'. Use important keywords alongside your business name and you won't get in trouble if you keep it reasonable!

Want a good local expert to do it for you? CONTACT US and we'll ask iNeedHits.com (based in Nedlands, just across the street from us) to sort you out. Already aussiehome.com clients are reaping the rewards from this.

Wondered why some websites just seem larger than others? How your site may 'fill the screen' on some computers, then look puny on others?

Web site designers (such as us) have to take into account various computer screen settings; and of course it is impossible to please everyone. Up to 18 months ago, we built sites for the predominant 800 pixel wide screen setting; now we build from 1024 settings and up (about 20% of our users have 1200 screen settings, less than 10% still have 800 wide).

While you can build sites that stretch to fill the screen, this can reduce the creativity possible within a design, and on 1200 settings makes text difficult to read as the eye has to move such wide distances 'across the page'.

So we stick to 1024 (... for now). Not sure what screen setting you have? Right mouse click on your desktop and choose 'Properties' and then the 'Settings' tab: In the bottom left 'Screen Resolution' box, your setting is shown. The first number is the width (800, 1024 or maybe 1200).

A quarter acre  block is 1011 sqm. The 'quarter acre dream' included a nice house set back from the street, with a flower garden and a regularly mown lawn presenting a tidy image to the world out front. 

A concrete drive ran down one side to the garage. The backyard was the place for the vege garden, tool shed and a Hills Hoist. 

In this modern age of urbanisation, this dream is slowly in decline ... across Australia it could be better termed the "1/6 Of An Acre Dream" with the median house block size being approximately 720 sq metres.

The closest you can still get to the quarter acre dream is in Darwin, where the median property size is still approx 920 sq m, the furthest removed being Sydney at a little over 600 sq m. 

Costs for a piece of the country to call your very own vary too between our major cities, with Sydney being the most expensive at over $800/sqm and the pick of the bunch being Hobart at less than $400/sqm. 

Source: Map Data Sciences, Nov 2007