Archive for the ‘Case Study’ Category

Back in June, Ida Horner approached us to see if we wanted to do ‘Africa on the Blog’. Knowing how much the Blogmistress loves a challenge she swiftly set to work on setting up Africa on the Blog (why change a winning formula ). Given the brief of , colour it like Africa, she came up with a golden brown design on the Studiopress framework that is consistent theme on the ‘On the blog’ sites.

It’s visually stunning.

Ida in the mean time started recruiting bloggers – please welcome @naomiestment @AshantiGirl @taluta @Chocolat_a_toi @jkainja @TonyBurkson @STM95 @sportinkenya @Chiira

From start to launch it took 14 days and three of us working at it – and the first blogger posted a blog about African traditions and since then, 5 days a week there has been a huge amount of discussion on the site. Significant amounts of retweets and a tremendous amount of traffic.

I learned a huge amount from this experience – blogging about what you are really crazy about, what gets you hot and bothered is a good thing. Ida who also blogs about African development and manages ‘our girls‘ through her charity, is relentless in bringing the voices of Africa to a wider audience. To the tune of a 1000 people a week, and then some.

An example of this is the blog post The Cut, about female genital mutilation. Yeah I know, it’s been spoken about for years. This time the story was told by a man and the impacts on the community and different perspectives. Just when you think you have been de-sensitised about something and nothing can be done, a blogger gives you fresh perspective and puts the fire back into the fight against it.

I have learned about Eba, the African equivalent of tapioca or semolina. I have learned that Nigeria has a thriving film industry. I have read about what it was like to be a child in Egypt. I have read what the World Cup really did for South Africa and I saw some stunning photographs.

If this blog can change my thinking about Africa, and her people in diaspora, show me sides of Africa that I never knew existed, I think you could learn something too.

Sarah

@AfricaOnTheBlog for tweets of the blogs and African news updates or join the Facebook page to get the updates there.

Majestic Rugs is owned by the loveliest of gentlemen, retired from the flooring industry and keen to continue working with his own business. So having sourced the best rug manufacturer, he set about selling Wilton rugs online. This was quite a few years ago and Des was one of my first clients when I ran a web design agency, so when we decided to update the website, and knowing how powerful WordPress can be, we had a good look at whether his updated shop could work well with WordPress.

The first thing we needed to be sure of was the ease of navigation – the website has always had a homey feel to it and was constantly complimented on the ease with which customers could find what they wanted.

Next we needed to know that whatever ecommerce plugin we used could work with the payment service provider, in this instance SagePay – this is essential to know, not all plugins will work with your payment provider.

The obvious choice at the time was Instinct’s e-Commerce plugin and after a lot of hiccups and perhaps not the level of support that one might wish for, the new rug shop was live. It is easy to forget that while WordPress is a powerful system, there are limitations in some of the functions available – especially when they are inexpensive or even free. One great thing with the new setup is that Des will be able to add new rugs himself with more ease than the much clunkier previous system. Thankfully we did not have to consider the delivery issue  - another important consideration with WordPress shopping plugins, we’ve found – as all rugs are delivered free.

Having maintained the comfy feel of the original website, we want to next gently add further functions for Majestic Rugs’ customers – an easy large rug image request system and something that will encourage customers to get in touch with their concerns and questions that is very simple to work with.

One especially useful aspect of this new shop is that we can easily add in extra photographs – I am surrounded still by lots of rug samples for photographing – and as for getting the colours right – we’re very careful about that, as I’m sure you can imagine!

Anyway – we expect that working with WordPress will also be helpful as we work to bring Majestic Rugs higher in Google – it’s a hugely competitive market with expensive PPC advertising essential. So now to get cracking on a blog about rugs and review the best strategy for selling rugs online!

And having bought one of the delicious Shaggy rugs, I can personally recommend the quality, I’m glad to say. It is lovely!