Delighted to launch the all new Good Food & Wine Show website. GFWS is South Africa’s premier lifestyle exhibition and came to Tenacity Works with requirements for a site that would broaden their exposure from a purely event-based organization to a fully blown lifestyle authority. They wanted the site to become a destination in it’s own right.

We build the site on the WordPress platform and developed several custom functions to best display and arrange the various content types on the site.

So here we are, one year into the much heralded new golden age of the magazine. Has Steve’s wunder-tab delivered the flagging periodical publishing industry from decline?

Not if you look at the numbers… Wired sold a hearty 100 000 copies of its initial iPad release. Sales of subsequent editions haven’t been great, with 22k and 23k for October and November respectively. Most other magazines have had similar plunges, mostly of about 20%. (source: Cult of Mac)

So, why isn’t this working?

I am no expert but I have snapped up copies of pretty much every iPad magazine as it launches. From the stripped down InDesign export PDFs of Zinio’s offering to Virgin’s beautiful but massively over-produced Project. They all have obvious kinks and flaws but there definitely seems to be a bigger problem at play. Is it that they just don’t fill the gap in our expectations? Or could it be that we are missing the sensory input of touch, the tactile consumption of news, the rustle of the page, the smell of newsprint?

On paper (ahem) at least, the advantages to reader, publisher, advertiser and Mr Jobs are obvious. Instant updates, low distribution costs, interactive commercials, online citizen reporting, etc. Why then are we getting these bloated applications with bad user-experience and no imagination? And why is digital subscription so damn complicated? (I’m looking at you The Economist)

If the real value of magazines is the distillate of timely news, opinion and visuals then why hasn’t someone found a way to present their content on iPad in a way that is clever, quick loading, interactive and above all easy to consume?

Doppio Zero Mandela Rhodes Place is the perfect combination of comfort and quiet and is on St. George’s Mall, slap bang in the middle of town. Great staff, excellent breakfast, reliable wifi and a damn comfortable couch make this a part of my daily Cape ritual.

Doppio has served with distinction as Tenacity Works’ default meeting room while we put finishing touches to our studio common area.

Foursquare

Gowalla

To get started, open your index.php template and look for this code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?> <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

Replace this code with:

<?php $temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('cat=3 &showposts=3'.'&paged='.$paged); ?>
<?php while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>

Once the above is inserted look for this code:

<?php endwhile; ?>
<div class="navigation">
    <div class="alignleft">
       <?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?>
   </div>
   <div class="alignright">
       <?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?>
   </div>
</div>
<?php else : ?>
<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
<p class="center">
   Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.
</p>
<?php get_search_form(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>
<div class="navigation">
  <div class="alignleft">
      <?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?>
   </div>
   <div class="alignright">
       <?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?>
    </div>
</div>
<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>

And that’s it. Your pagination should work now. To make the pagination look pretty I used WP Page Numbers plugin which works really well.

The plugin is simple to use, all you need to do is replace the above code with the following and you will see your new and improved pagination.

<?php endwhile; ?> <?php if(function_exists('wp_page_numbers')) :
wp_page_numbers(); endif; ?>
<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>

A big thanks to www.wplover.com for supplying this awesome code!

We were delighted to flick the switch today on the brand new site for Madwa.  Madwa is a sustainable craft project based in Madagascar, an island with a unique natural biodiversity and one of the world’s most endangered eco-systems.

We built the site using WordPress and used some Pods goodness to create the product and stockist data types. We also used the awesome Gravity Forms to create all the form elements within the site.

Best of luck with the new venture guys!

We are delighted to have been part of the team working with Justin Bonello to launch his excellent new food education initiative, The Great Food Hoodwink.

As well as completely reworking Justin’s website, we developed a Facebook Fan Page for Justin and added a bespoke tab for the The Great Food Hoodwink. The tab captures signatories to Justin’s petition through the use of Facebook’s “Like” function, displays a half hour video of Justin’s recent presentation at the Good Food and Wine Show and allows people to take part in a quick food questionnaire.

Inspirational stuff. Visit the page, watch the movie, take the survey and get involved!

Part one of our new series on Essential Cape Town is dedicated to the life-saving establishment that is Deluxe Coffeeworks.

Deluxe is the home of the finest cup of coffee in Cape Town. Fortunately, the shop is tucked up the side of Church Street in the CBD which is just staggering distance from our studio.

Carl and Judd started blending, roasting and selling coffee from the shop about a year ago and now have a pretty huge following.  The shop was even in last month’s edition of Wallpaper magazine which featured a whole section on things to see and do in South Africa.

All coffees of any shape or size are R10. Open most of the time, not late afternoon or Sunday.

We are hard at work putting the finishing touches to our new collection of Facebook Fan Page Apps. You will soon be able to add Tenacity Works apps to your company or organization’s Facebook presence.

The initial tranche of apps will include:

• TW Twitter: add multiple Twitter streams to your fan page
• TW Video: add Vimeo or YouTube streams to your fan page
• TW Survey: poll your followers and display results within your fan page
• TW Press: display all company or organization’s recent media exposure on your fan page
• TW RSS: pull an RSS feed into your fan page to display your blog or news stream

This is just the beginning! We have plans to roll out several more apps over the next few months and will also offer bespoke Facebook Fan Page App development as part of service range.

More and more companies are starting to realise the power of good email marketing. No wonder really when you consider that in 2009, email marketing was shown to be one of the most efficient tools available to modern marketeers.

Perhaps you have been considering taking your brand and product messaging to a wider audience but aren’t exactly sure what is possible with email newsletters? Here are some things to consider when briefing your design agency for your next newsletter.

1. Think about your content.

Will it be a collection of short paragraphs on different subjects eg. Latest news, competitions, services/products etc. Or will it be very focused on one specific thing, for example, the competition of the month.  People don’t really read email newsletters. They scan them for interesting information and then read the bits they feel are relevant to them. So fusing good, to-the-point content with a great layout is crucial. Also consider layout; do you want the common two column layout, full width or perhaps something a bit different?

2. Think about width.

Email newsletters usually appear within an email client like Outlook or Gmail, this puts a limitation on the width of your newsletter as the application itself takes away viewing area. The average width we design our email newsletters to is between 600 – 700px. (If you’re unfamiliar with pixels, most websites are designed at 960px so this will give you an idea of ratio)

3. Think about text.

Coding an email newsletter is like going back in time. It is utterly archaic! With this in mind we can definitely confirm that background images are pretty much a no no. They do work in some browsers but none of the big contenders like Outlook or Gmail. This in turn means that you cannot have “live” text over an image.  You can however save an image of the text.  This would not be advisable as spam filters read text much better than they do images. The more images you have the higher the spam rating will be. So doing perhaps one heading in a unique font and saved as an image isn’t a crime. But doing the entire newsletter as cut up images is the worst thing you could possibly do!

4. Think about imagery.

When doing something like a “latest news” emailer try to always provide an image for each heading, this gives the user a visual clue to scan through and draws in attention. It also makes the newsletter more interesting and dynamic. If you offer a service try using provocative images of people. People are always drawn to look at other people, especially when the picture makes eye contact with the viewer.

Try steering clear of grabbing an image off Google, as this is mostly illegal and the image quality probably won’t be good either. There are many stock photography websites to choose from and for a small fee you can have beautiful photography driving your email newsletter. Ask your design agency which stock website they usually download from, they should even be able to find images for you.

So those are the basics! Armed with these four points you should now be able to confidently hold your own when discussing newsletters. Please get in touch with us if you want to discuss putting together a successful email newsletter for your company.

We recently launched a WordPress site which turned out to be a very “interesting” project. As mentioned in James’ previous post, this site really needed speeding up! At the outset we were totally mystified and couldn’t for the life of us figure out what was slowing the site down.

After many coffee-fuelled hours working on the live site, we decided to put the site into maintenance mode and started taking it apart.

Below is a list of things which were done to obtain this speed:

1. Firstly, I made sure that I had the latest version of WordPress.
2. I deactivated all the plugins and then tested the speed of the site. This clearly showed me that the plugins were one of the major problems for the slow download of the site. I then reactivated the plugins one by one. Each time I activated a plugin I reloaded my web site to test the speed, this way I could see which plugin was causing the issue. I used Yslow and Google Page Speed to test the speed. The plugins which caused the site to noticeably slow down were: Tubepress, LightBox Plus, Maintenance Mode, Twitter Tools. Instead of using the above plugins, I hard-coded the functionality required directly into the PHP templates. This made a huge difference to the weight of the site!
3. The next step was reducing the size of the images. Firstly, we optimised all the images for web then to reduced the size a bit more using WP Smush.It. This reduced the size by 1-2%, this might not seem a lot but it impacted on the loading time of the site.

Once I had done all of the above I again tested the site using Yslow and it loaded so much faster. However, I was yet not satisfied. I wanted it to load even faster so I installed WP Super Cache plugin and this cut off another 2 seconds off loading time.

Following all these steps helped reduce the site’s loading time from ±20 seconds to 2 seconds!

I really hope this helps. These few things may seem really simple and basic but I think it’s always best to start from the beginning and work your way up especially where code is involved!