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.

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.