Wine and Company, Hermanus, South Africa

Wine and Company is a specialized wine boutique that supplies some of the finest wines, gifts and accessories and provides worldwide wine delivery. It is manages by the owner and offers free wine tastings on select wines daily.

Studio137 was contracted to design a website and the result was www.wineandcompany.co.za. The website has many great and noticeable features:

• A quick links drop down list that lets you select the wine and jump to that selection
• A great selection of the wines on offer just one click away
• An ordering system to order your wines, with world wide delivery
• The latest special with a link that takes you directly to the wine

Wine and Company, Wine selection page

Wine and Company, Full wine details page

Live the Life Church

Live the Life is a church based in Hermanus, in the Western Cape, who live out their passionate love for God, their unconditional love for one another, and their unrelenting love for their community and the communities of the world. The church is vibrant and diverse, with many of its members busy in their community. So Live the Life church needed a website that would be able to provide information to those who had visited the church or were looking in, provide a platform where the church’s resources could be accessed and downloaded, as well as have hub where members can view news and events and stay up to do with what is happening in their Mercy Ministries, Nations Missions, as well as their Youth Groups.
After Studio 137 was contracted to do the website for Live the Life Church, www.livethelife.org.za came about, which includes a number of noticeable features:

• An administration panel that allows the staff at Live the Life to easily:
  • add and update news and events
  • add and update photo’s
  • add and update rosters and schedules
• A portal where audio and video resources can easily be accessed and downloaded
• A front page that allows a variety of important media and information to be displayed at once ie the latest sermon, calendar, regular happenings, weekly and upcoming events etc.
• A full calendar view for viewing all events within that month

Live the Life Church - Full calendar view

Live the Life Church - Media Downloads page

Usik Construction - Home Page

USIK Construction (Pty)Ltd. founded in 1995 are a company that is at the forefront of construction in the Hermanus area having worked on constructions such as the Marine Apartments. USIK Construction strives to make sure, that all the facets of business are implemented, to ensure that their clients are kept first, and a good quality product is delivered, at a fair price.

Studio137 designed the website www.usikconstruction.com to fit the feel of an online portfolio. The angular and squared style of the images and buttons on the website as well as the squared sides with the writing done over a background layer of concrete helps to enforce a carefully designed and structured feel. The images on the home page are displayed using flash and show off some of the great construction works of the company.

The buttons are designed to look and work like folders/dividers which fit the portfolio feel of the USIK Construction website. The website is easy to use and contains drop down links  to provide more of the information you want to know about the company. The contact information is well placed and stands out easily for anyone who wants to know more.

Usik Construction - Services page

Usik Construction - Work History page

Village Square Shopping Centre Home page

The Village SquareThe Village Square is a shopping and life-style centre located in the epicentre of Hermanus. With a diverse and colourful arrangement of Cafes, Restaurants, Fashion Boutiques, Health and Beauty Stores, Gift and Curio shops and much much more, the management of Village Square needed a website where they would be able to showcase the diversity of the centre, as well as highlight each stores individual flavour.

Village Square Hermanus - shop listings

www.village-square.co.za

The website has many notable features, many which include:

• A vibrant and visually aesthetic design
• Simple yet attractive navigation system
• Individual, customizeable pages for each store
• Administration panel allows owner of each store to open up their own account, which allows them to do the following:
  • customize their stores page
  • add and update information, products and product details, and specials
  • upload and display images and videos of the store and products
  • a system that allows each store owner to market and sell their merchandise through the website
• Latest News and Events at Village Square and in Hermanus
• Interactive map, with the location of each store

Village Square Hermanus shop - African Kingdom

Interactive map - Village Square shopping Hermanus

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Client: DMO
Website: www.whalecoast.info

The Cape Whale Coast website is the official site of the Whale Coast region. The Whale Coast region spans from Hangklip-Kleinmond to Gansbaai including the towns Hermanus and Stanford and their surrounding regions. Studio137 was contracted to do this site and henceforth the site www.whalecoast.info was the result with the following noticeable features:

• Updatable listings created within the database. Both paid and free.
• Listings to be shown per region or per category
• Handling the listings via ajax allowing less clicks to get the information
• More aesthetic feel with 3 THEMES – ocean, dunes, fynbos
• Many many resources and articles with information about the Cape Whale Coast
• News and events

Dunes theme:

Fynbos theme:

Firefeed (formerly Bmail) is a online marketing tool, mostly aimed at allowing a company or an individual to send html format emails or newsletters to a large number of contacts within their contact list. But it’s not limited to that. Firefeed is also aimed at being a comprehensive marketing tool and therefore allows one to administer their contacts and arrange them into contact lists and also import/export to and from other contact managers. And, in the near future, to create SMS campaigns, run surveys, rss feeds and podcast/vodcasts using the system. In the distant future we also aim to add a billing section to manage accounts.

For a year and half Studio137 has been developing the system, having first called it Bmail. Unfortunately Bmail never got off the ground since it had bugs and forced us to manually setup and prepare campaigns for clients to send. Taking all the valuable lessons learned from Bmail and the already built systems, we decided to re-develop it and called it Firefeed. Now with about half the code and with a far more user friendly interface we have a more efficient system and we are almost ready to release it in beta. What this means is that current Bmail clients will be transferred to this system and will be able to make use of it before it is officially launched next year (date to be announced).

So here are a few of the improvements and the additions that will be available in the beta and then in the final release next year.

BETA

• Far easier contact management system. Bmail had many ways to do one thing. Firefeed now has one way avoiding confusion and also allows all contact lists to be available at one click from anytime you’re in your ‘view contacts’ page.
• The ability to import contacts in a CSV file format and export in the same format
• A subscribe box to add to your website allowing visitors to subscribe directly into your contact list system
• Firefeed uses templates now as opposed to solely relying on a WYSIWYG editor. For Bmail clients who have tried to use the current editor to setup an attractive email, they will have noticed the difficulty and frustration of trying to save tables and add images etc and even the easier tasks of making a paragraph bold. Firefeed now is improved by limiting the use of an editor to only the content that requires a change and therefore the template structure always remains fixed. We also can easily incorporate custom templates which we can develop.
• After you’ve previewed your campaign you can send a test message immediately. In Bmail this option was only available after compiling your outbox, which can be a lengthy process if you have a large contact list.
• The images within your mail are uploaded directly to the mail server, therefore eliminated the long period of time to compile the message (in the backend the images were transferred across to the mail server)
• Limited reporting will be available in the beta version.

FINAL VERSION RELEASED NEXT YEAR

• Full reporting functionality. How many contact received the email. How many opened the email. How many links were clicked
• Full comprehensive help section and video tutorials following soon after
• Up to 40 templates to choose from
• And hopefully more

Currently Firefeed (www.firefeed.co.za will be available on the 9th December 2009) is not running on a live server so we included below 3 screen shots. Firefeed makes use of the full width of your monitor. Therefore clients with widescreen monitors will enjoy the ability to view contacts at one point.

A view of the ‘View Contacts’ page which allows you to edit and manage your contacts and arrange them into lists.

A view of the composing step of creating a campaign. As you can see you can edit individual parts of the template without affecting the template structure

A view of the template when it is previewed.

PRICING

Firefeed works on a per email basis. You have 3 options for payment: monthly, pay as you go and once off. One email is one credit. Please note that and email cannot be larger than 512KB. If it exceeds this limit then it is counted as another credit for each 512KB after that.

Please take note of the following:

• Both monthly installments option and pay as you go option allow you the full use of the current edition of Firefeed. The once off option is where we will setup the email for you and send it without you needing to create an account with Firefeed
• For the monthly installment option only half of your allow credits will be carried across to the next month. eg. If you have 5000 credits per month and you only use 1200 in one month then only 2500 credits are carried over to the next month and not 3800. Therefore you can never have more than 7500 credits in any month.
• Pay as you go option’s credits are kept for up to 1 year
• Once off option’s credits do not carry over
• Monthly installment option is subject to a period of no less than 3 months after opening and one months notice is required for cancellation
• Prices are subject to change without notice.

Additional costs

Sms pricing will come at a latter stage.

For any questions and queries please contact Stephen on 028 313 2150 or email at stephen@studio137.co.za

If you’ve visited the Studio137 website in the past you’ll have noticed that it’s in serious need of an update.

Well finally the new site is up and running. It’s a very simple site, since ultimately it is a temporary solution until time allows and something more elaborate can be created, but for the time being it has all the relevant information regarding the company.  www.studio137.co.za

The other exciting development is the addition of this blog. We hope to make it a valuable resource for information as well as allow potential clients and current clients the opportunity to view our other work. Also we plan to keep well up to date with news and information regarding products, updates and maybe in the future tutorials

Lastly don’t miss our facebook page and you can also follow us on twitter