This is a simple website for Jo O’Connor, a friend who is an artist, a space where she can upload her portfolio of past work, show people what she is currently working, and possibly do some blogging.
WordPress was the most logical selection for this, and the clean lines required made the requirements even simpler. Despite the apparent simplicity, it took us about a year to get all the bits and pieces together for this site.
Take a look at Jo O’Connor’s current work
These self catering apartments in Gardens Centre, Cape Town offer real value in a great with incredible views. I am not trying to sell this to you, but this is what we needed to get across on the website.
An important lesson here is to not oversell, to promise what you are offering while presenting crisp, clear information and visuals.
The revision of the Montagu Springs website was an opportunity to better communicate what accommodation is on offer as well as the facilities available. A fun aspect of the place is that they keep a wide range of waterfowl which are really interesting for kids at the resort.
The brief was to make use of Missibaba’s existing look and feel to create an informative website with news/blog publishing as well as an online shop www.missibaba.com.
Rotating images can be managed in the CMS
The technology chosen for the online shop is Prestashop
Dolphin Beach Hotel has incredible views of Table Mountain and direct access to the beach, the brief was to replace the outdated website, provide a CMS for rates and content updates.
Freeworld Design Centre recently opened their doors and needed a platform for their design centre consultants to publish regular content in the format of a blog. The solution is a simple WordPress blog allowing the team to publish their content as themselves, thereby enhancing their profile as well as that of the team at the centre.
Clementina is a Cape Town based ceramist who produces beautiful ceramics generally with strong, sometimes zany, colours. She designed the Africa Cafe range of crockery which I am sure everyone in SA has seen at some point.
The site serves as a home to Clementina’s work and the Clementina shop which carries other ceramists work as well as some other products. There is the possibility that an e-commerce component will be added to the site in the future.
Design a clean uncluttered website that will allow the work to stand out.
Provide a CMS for easy editing of pages and for the addition of news.
TakeAway Theatre is a Cape Town based theatre company well known for industrial theatre, corporate and social intervention theatre. Their existing website had the fun element and featured well for the phrase “industrial theatre” but for other relevant topics they did not feature.
Visitors to the website were greeted with a doorway page:
Takeaway Theatre Old Doorway Page
The doorway page, had one navigation option through to a welcome page from which you could then navigate the website.
Takeaway Theatre Old Welcome Page
Takeaway Theatre Old Section Page
The existing design and layout was reused as the client really wanted this to remain as is. The result is a fun website but now the content is also engauging and fresh, www.takeawaytheatre.com.
Content management system was provided allowing the client to update website content, create new pages, manage menus, etc. The website makes use of the WordPress CMS system.
Website sections and navigation were reworked to make getting around the website more logical.
The home page was built so that anyone arriving on that page would be able to navigate directly to any page within the website. Also the website sections make use of fun terminology; Favorites=Theatre Types, Ingredients=Themes and Specials=Theatre Packages, the challenge was to clarify these website elements’ meaning without detracting from the menu style of the site.
Takeaway Theatre New Home Page
Last year we spent a lot of time working with a particular client on a lead generation website, which turned out to be a great success.
The client had produced his own website, making use of free web publishing platforms, and had done a great job of initial SEO by creating hubs on other free web publishing platforms and linking back to the parent site.
QROPS Website Before
The objective of the website was to generate QROPS business leads, through the provision of helpful information to visitors. The information was highly topical on a niche subject, and had done well in the search engines. Visitor volumes were decent, but lead volumes were low; 1 to 5 per month.
So getting as many quality leads as possible was the client’s focus.
On a relatively low budget, with no money for propper design, Nook made use of the client’s content to produce a website that would convert visitors into leads. How was it done?
With the above in place it was time to enhance traffic volumes:
QROPS Website After
Website conversion rate: 2.37%
Lead volumes have been the most impressive, with the original website producing 1 to 5 per month, the revised system delivers just less than one lead per day.
The results on the first website were so good that we then created a domestic South African website on the same topic, but on a .co.za domain. For South African searchers this website jumped the search engine rankings quickly to take up position #1 on the topic. This site has had a conversion rate of above 6% from visitor to completed lead form.
Another result was that Nook’s client received an offer from an international financial group to buy the website off him.
It is always satisfying to get a new website out the door, but when it is really quick it can be immediately gratifying. Threadcount is a collective of Cape Town based independent contemporary textile designers and producers, and their need was for a simple online home. One of the members had asked me advice on how to best achieve this using WordPress.com for a free platform.
After discussing the simple requirements, it was decided to complete the project for free. Two late nights and some tweaking after that resulted in the live site at Threadcount.co.za.
