We’ve put together a professional, cost-effective website pack for photographers. Whether you’re an amateur photographer, or a professional photographing weddings, families, kids or products, IN-FOCUS lets you upload and display your photos quickly and easily.

Visit the IN-FOCUS website

This is a post for designers – it’s a primer on what you need to know when you start designing an email invitation or newsletter.

Print vs Email:

Very simply, you can’t approach an email design job in the same way that you approach a print design job. First up, you can’t do it in Illustrator (or Freehand if you still live in 2004) – you need to work up a wireframe and look & feel in Photoshop, and then create an HTML template. From there you can talk to the editor or copywriter and start creating graphics for specific articles.

Read more…

We developed the African Micro Mills site in 2009. The business has undergone a restructure so we’ve shifted the focus on the site to show their updated offering.

Visit the African Micro Mills website.

Most of the time, we get asked for web design. This is fine – we do very nice web design – but describing the creation of a website as “web design” misses out some fundamental considerations that go into creating a successful website, such as online marketing and web development. It also misses out vital processes, like planning site structure, usability considerations and information delivery. We’re going to look at the first step in the grand process of “web design” which is known as: Wireframes.

Defining Web Design: Site Architecture and Graphic Design

We generally split our design practices into 2 distinct skills: Site Architecture, and Graphic Design:

• A Graphic Designer is concerned with colour, visual balance, guiding user interactions through visual emphasis and making the site look cool (or slick, or sophisticated, or the ever-descriptive “cutting-edge”). The Graphic Designer produces the look & feel for the website.

• A Site Architect is concerned with planning the layout of the website. This person looks at the proposed content for the site and works out how best the information can be delivered to users of the site. The layouts that the Site Architect produces are called wireframes.

Read more…

You see it all over: A really neat virtual book or magazine where you can simply click & drag to page through. It’s one of the best pieces of interaction on the web, mainly because it effectively re-creates a real-world experience – no plugins or experience needed.

We’ve recently implemented page-flip for a magazine publisher. Visitors to the site are using it regularly and it’s really quick and easy for our client to upload new issues to it. In addition, these “virtual reads” get counted towards the magazine’s circulation figures, making it a very good investment.

Read more…

Some websites need a search facility – on a complex site with lots of pages, it can be a quick and simple way for a user to find what they’re looking for. One of the best search facilities we’ve found is Google’s Custom Search facility. Simply put, it is a Google search that is restricted to searching for stuff on your website.

Building a Good Search engine

It’s pretty easy to make a case for using Google’s search engine: Most people (about 90% in South Africa) use it over other search engines because it gives the results that are closest to what they are looking for. There are a number of site-specific Search facilities that you can use – and we could even build one for you – but none of them would work as well as Google’s.

Costs

A basic Google Custom search is free, but it comes with Google Ads (those results down the right-hand side of your Google search). This can quickly become a problem because your competitors probably take out Google Ads on the very products and services that you are trying to promote on your website.

To remove the ads costs R1000 per year for up to 1000 pages. The costs go up from there depending on how many pages are on the site.

Additional Features

• The Custom Search will search any websites that you specify. This means you can get it to search from a suite of websites and from your blog.
• The results can be customized, so the colours match those on your site.
• The Search Facility is simple to implement and works on all website browsers.
• It allows you to place promotions in the Results – useful for directing common search queries.

See Google Custom Search implemented on the Trellidor Website

February has seen us investing a bit more time in reworking our CMS and setting up a schedule for creating blog posts (unfortunately there’s no way around actually writing regular blog posts other than scheduling them in…). We’ve been doing a lot more research on using Email newsletters – oh, and we went live with a new website.

Here’s a run-down:

Cannon Asset Managers – Email Invitation

We created a newsletter campaign for Cannon Asset Managers, for Science, a design studio here in Durban.

Crown Publications – NEW WEBSITE!!

We’ve developed a new website for Crown Publications, a trade-magazine publisher. We also implemented a Flash page-flipper that allows users to read the magazines online. The Flash reader also allows Crown to track “reads” and add them to their circulation figures – it seems that South Africa’s magazine industry is quite web-savvy, which is nice.
Visit the Crown website

Champagne Castle – Website Updates

We did general updates to Champagne Castle’s website – mostly adding updated information, but also reworking the layout and usability of their accommodation section – which will hopefully result in more bookings for them.
Check out the new accommodations listing on the Champagne Castle Hotel website

Castle Lite SuperSport Shootout 2010 – Website Update

The SuperSport Shootout changes sponsors from Pilsner Urquell to Castle Lite, which meant a subtle but distinct change to the general look & feel of the site – for example Pilsner has golden warm colours, where Castle Lite has crisp fresh silvery colours. We also add updated info for the upcoming 2010 event.
Visit the Castle Lite SuperSport Shootout 2010 website

South African History Archives (SAHA) – Virtual Exhibitions websites

We set up a website-creator for SAHA to take items from their collections and display them in virtual exhibitions. They compile the info through a back-end manager and we apply a skin to the front-end. The result is that they can create these mini-sites relatively cheaply and quickly.

The first of these, “ECC25 – Celebrating 25 years since the formation of the End Conscription Campaign”, went up late last year, and 2 more are almost complete.
View the ECC25 Virtual Exhibition on the SAHA website

Trellidor

We’ve been doing general design and info updates to the Trellidor website over the last few months. Recently we’ve also replicated the site for Trellidor Zimbabwe and Trellidor UK (still in development). These are both “starter” sites that have basic info which will be built on as the businesses in those countries develop and grow.
Visit Trellidor SA
Visit Trellidor Zimbabwe

Documentation

We’ve been working on developing step-by-step “How to guides” for using the content management system (CMS) to update the website. These are simple Word documents with 1; 2; 3; instructions and screenshots. They are quite low-tech but we’ve found they work a lot better and are quicker to get to grips with than instructional videos.

Have a look at this example: “How to add a News Article” which is what Trellidor uses to create new articles (with nicely formatted text and neatly placed images) like this one.

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Oh, and here’s a handy SEO tip: The reason we are starting to do these Project Updates on the blog is that the simplest way to get Google to re-index a website to show changes is to make a link to the new site or page, and this is a perfect place to do it.

Earlier this year we went live with a site for a family & kids photographer, This Other Eden. It’s a great little site that is helping the new photography business get off the ground.

Find out more

Many of our clients seek ways to monetise their websites through sales of targeted and monitored advertising space. We developed an Advert Manager in response to this. The result is a powerful, simple-to-use, site-wide Advert Management System that provides full reporting. If you are seeking to generate revenue from your website, this is an indispensible tool.
The system we’ve developed has three distinct parts:

Advert Placement

Generally, adverts can appear just about anywhere, but the actual positions of the adverts must be defined. So, for example, a website may have space for a banner advert in the header that appears globally (on all pages) and a mini-ad in the right-hand column that appears within only one section of the site, or on one particular page.
We’ve developed a simple system for combining placement of global ads and placement of section or page-specific ads by using advert “placeholders” in various positions on the site.
Positions for adverts can also be assigned on blogs and forums.

Advert Allocation

In order to create an ad campaign across the site, adverts can be allocated to available positions using a dedicated Advert Manager within our Content Management System. This allows the administrator to create new full campaigns with several adverts in various placements for each campaign. Currently only image adverts (JPEG, PNG or GIF, static or animated) are supported but, as with all our modules, if a wider range of options are required (eg: Flash based adverts, or HTML), we’ll expand our component accordingly.

In addition, each allocation is created with a start and end date, so that campaigns can be set up before they actually start, and an end-point can be set.

Adverts sharing the same placement are subject to a semi-random algorithm that ensures that no advert is shown significantly fewer times than its competitors.

Monitoring and Reports

Every time an advert is shown on a page (impressions), and each time it is clicked (clicks), the action is recorded. Click fraud prevention can be added to the module if necessary.

These impressions and clicks result in two types of reports:

• Site Reports, which organise the reports by site, then position, campaign, advert and finally date.
• Campaign Reports, which are organised by campaign, advert, site, position and then date.

The reports provide date-specific data for the number of impressions, the number of clicks, and the click-through-rate, which is a very good indicator of the effectiveness of the advert.

Reports are available either to view or to download. Viewed reports are designed to be easily printed, either to PDF, or straight to the printer. Downloaded reports are simple CSV files, which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or a similar program. All reports can be filtered with start and end dates.

Complete solution

These three sections together make up an Advert Management module that provides a powerful and highly customisable advert management system for a website, which is also very easy to use, and provides extensive, easy-to-understand statistics and reports. The only thing it doesn’t do is actually bill your advertisers.

It’s always great to go live with a new website – it’s our stock in trade. We’ve launched a new site for Africa Ignite – www.africaignite.co.za.

This client is very visual, and they work with crafters and desingers very actively, so the site is really bold and colourful, which is great. A special feature on the site is an awesome GoogleMap setup to showcase Africa Ignite’s latest publication, Burning Bright.