If you’re an Algoa FM listener, you’re sure to have heard the recent MoneyMarket.co.za advertising campaign. Check out the site www.moneymarket.co.za – it’s one of ours.

MoneyMarket.co.za provides a single solution where individuals, professionals, entrepreneurs and corporate investors can access the most current money market rates on an independent platform.
 

We designed a website for Herman Brink back in 2008 which showcased his beautiful hand-crafted wooden furniture. He has since grown to offer custom furniture to the hospitality industry, and with that has rebranded his company.

As Herman had lots of compliment on his old website, he came back to us for a revamp to reflect his new brand and promote the new service of furniture for the hospitality industry.

We felt it vital to showcase the amazingly intricate detail of his flawless products, and so provided a detailed lightbox for his products accordingly.

Take a look. www.hermanbrink.co.za

The once “Eastern Cape only” Wedding Guide which we developed back in 2005, has recently been relaunched and has now gone national to now offer brides throughout South Africa fresh, unique and stylish ideas through regular blog posts, articles and DIY inspiration, as well as reputable wedding suppliers, making the planning of their wedding that much easier. The site aims to inspire brides-to-be to create a beautiful wedding that reflects their personality and style.

The Perfect Day project is now a joint venture between ourselves, and a professional wedding planner, Megan Moller of Confetti Weddings. Her passion for weddings and knowledge of industry trends and etiquette enables Perfectday.co.za to offer brides the most relevant, up-to-date wedding inspiration, advice and information.

We are finding this to be a match made in heaven – a wedding website run by a professional web development company and professional wedding planner… what could be more perfect!

Visit the website www.perfectday.co.za or join Perfect Day on Facebook to keep up with latest happenings on the site.

The South Africa National Peace Project was launched on Friday 16 July 2010 as a gift to Mr Nelson Mandela, for his contribution to peace in South Africa. The peace initiative is working towards a non-racist, non-violent, more peaceful South Africa.

Their slogan is “Yes we can. United we stand”. The project is structured in such a way that all South Africans can take ownership and join the peace initiative, to start making a difference in our beautiful country.

Patrys Wolmarans, founder of the South Africa National Peace Project, approached us to provide branding, a website, and product design for all SANPP products, including funky t-shirts, wristbands, shopping bags and more.

Visit their website www.sapeaceproject.co.za to see how you can get involved, or join them on Facebook to show your support.

The World Cup is finally here and it’s time to play ball! We have our supporter shirts, vuvuzelas and braai tongs, and in support our country’s soccer fever, our office will close at 2pm on Friday 11 June 2010 for the opening match.

Go Bafana Bafana, we’re behind you all the way!

We’ve been telling our clients for a while now that full Flash websites just aren’t the way to go anymore. “But why, it looks so cool!?”, they all say…

There seem to be more and more reasons to steer clear of full Flash websites. Yes, Flash used to be the only way to go if you wanted to deliver a rich experience across a range of browsers, but that’s not the case anymore. With the advancements of modern browsers and JavaScript libraries, the same experience can be produced using Web standards, which is definitely preferable.

Flash isn’t supported by mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads, so your website will be lost to a large audience.

Search Engine Optimization for a full flash website is a challenge and often won’t be touched by search engine optimizers, because the likelihood of success is next to none. A full flash website doesn’t optomize well because it is usually an entire flash movie file which is embedded into one web page. As the flash movie is navigated from one page to the next, the website’s URL address never changes because it’s all on one page… that’s not good for SEO! The written content within the Flash file can’t be read by Search Engines, so the website won’t be indexted for search engines.

Flash definitely has it’s place on the web… but a full Flash website isn’t the way to go.

PayPal offer the following benefits

• You can use your PayPal account to make or receive payments for goods and services online.
• Shop online at merchants in 67 countries and regions.
• Pay for things and send money without sharing your financial information.
• Checkout quickly at hundreds of your favourite online stores (not just eBay!).
• Receive payments from buyers in 190 countries and regions.

All nice offerings, but what about practicality from an ecommerce website point of view? Well, in order for you to receive funds into your PayPal account, you will be required to transact in one of the currencies supported by them – unfortunately South African Rands is not one of them.

Local users using your website would surely want to see prices displayed in South African Rands, however, at the checkout stage, these prices need to be represented in, say, US Dollars or one of the other currencies supported by PayPal, which may confuse users and give them cause for concern. Ideally, users would want to checkout in the currency they are trying to transact in.

Currently FNB have exclusivity, meaning that the only way to transact using PayPal for South Africans is to have a qualifying FNB account as well as setting up a PayPal account.

Some of the things to be wary of when opting for this approach:

• FNB charge 1.5% of each ‘withdrawal’ and ‘top up’ amount on top of PayPal charges. This percentage is based on the PayPal Rand-Dollar exchange rate.
• Each ‘withdrawal’ and ‘top up’ transaction through your FNB qualifying account needs to disclosed and the purpose of your transaction provided, including contact information to ensure that you comply with all South African Reserve Bank regulations.
• All funds received into your PayPal account must be withdrawn within 30 days of receipt.
• A Top Up can take between one and four days to reflect in your PayPal wallet.
• A Withdrawal can take between three and six days to reflect in your FNB account. This excludes weekends and public holidays in South Africa and the United States of America.

All in all this may be more hassle than its worth and being unable to predict transaction timelines and exact transaction amounts may result in users using local payment gateways instead.

To all our Umsobomvu clients -- We were informed today that all Umsobomvu branches may issue 10 vouchers a month, but they are not sure at this stage if branding and website vouchers are going to be issued. We’ll cross fingers for all of you wanting to get another voucher!

Watch this space, I’ll keep you posted.

We were all hoping that the NYDA would recommence their Voucher Programme so you could get another voucher for either branding or a website – whichever you still required.

We’ve kept in contact with them and have just been informed that it’s very unlikely that they will be allocating anymore vouchers – the Voucher Programme has now stopped nation wide.

If you still require branding or a website, give us a call and we can provide you with a cost-effective solution.

So, Web360 has been around since 2005 (wow has it been 5 years already?!) A lot has changed since we opened our doors - our services have evolved and been refined allowing us to focus on our core business. So we decided that with a new year, should come a new look for the new “refined” us.

So what’s changed you ask? After thinking long and hard we’ve decided to move away from offering multimedia presentations as one of our services. We’ve had great fun producing these for companies such as Coca-Cola, General Motors and more, but have decided that we’d rather focus our talents and efforts on the web side. We’ve found that the web industry evolves at a rapid rate, so we need to dedicate all our efforts to staying ahead of this crazy, cutting-edge industry.

We recently launched a stock image website for Nyati Productions, who specialise in nature and wildlife photography. All stock photography on this site is quality checked before being made available to users, so you’ll only find great images on this site.

The site is also a great way for wildlife and nature photographers to showcase their work and earn some "bucks" selling their images online.
Visit www.nyatiphotography.com

I started wondering how many designers have the discipline and take the time to design something every day - nothing big, just a little something to practice the skills and keep the juices flowing. I found that loads of designers are doing it! Just one great example is Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische. Every day this talented designer creates a new decorative drop cap – just whatever takes her fancy, then adds it to her blog. (and makes it available for free download)

I was impressed and inspired.

For those of you who haven’t visited us for a while, we want to show you something… it’s our new office!

Ok, it’s not brand new - we’ve been in it for just over a year. But it’s made all the difference and we’re so happy not to be crammed it to a tiny room anymore. We practically live in here (sad, I know.), so we wanted it to be fresh and funky, something to reflect our company – hence all the bright orange!