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

An important lesson here is to not oversell, to promise what you are offering while presenting crisp, clear information and visuals.

www.gardensapartments.co.za

www.montagusprings.co.za

This is especially relevant to South African companies choosing to host their websites in the USA to save on hosting costs, but their main audience is a long way off. Being able to measure the site’s load speed and evaluate changes made to the website against these values can only be useful to anyone with the website.

Unfortunately there are some tweaks which need to be made to tracking codes to be able to take advantage of this, but our advice is the sooner this is implemented the sooner you start gathering data for future analysis.

The popularity of the blog and interest in the designs produced have resulted in growth and enthusiastic following, and the challenge in this move was to not interrupt any of this. Existing posts & images were transferred maintaining consistent URLs, new home experience for the website, numerous about-type pages, widgets for signing up for newsletters, facebook page setup and posting from the blog etc.

It is pleasing to see that on the first day of being live the new Skinny laMinx website has had 1,286 visitors, leaving close to 100 comments, a successful wordpress.com to wordpress.org migration.

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.

www.freeworlddesigncentre.co.za

The Brief

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.

The Result

Working on analytics for an online application based in a social media platform has been interesting, from a couple of angles.

1. measurement of virality of the application.

You have your plan of how your user-base will grow, but only through analysis of user data will you learn what is really happening.

2. focus on user engagement

Online retail for instance wants you to buy something; look around the store, pick up a couple of things and go through the checkout. Social? Well there could be any revenue model, but what you really want is users interacting with the app, with each other, and with the thing that is generating your revenue, no clear funnel necessarily, a lot of chaos to make sense of.

I would not go so far as to say that Analytics for a retail site vs social is totally different, but the focus is slightly shifted. eg on a retail site you may ramp up your ad spend as you grow, where on social you want to get a critical mass early on and gain a groundswell of users inviting their friends as soon in the application’s life as possible.

An article on ClickZ (sponsored by Omniture) Web Analytics for Social Media starts to look at this issue, but leaves it with a lot of open questions, but with social media being such a broad area it would be tough to go into specifics.