We have recently redesigned and launched the online presence for Sundance Marine. Just quietly… We’re pretty chuffed. We hope you enjoy it too.

The Brief

The redesign of Sundance Yachts had to incorporate the following:

• A change in branding from Sundance Yacht Sales to Sundance Marine, with their expansion to Tasmania.
• Reflect the luxurious look and feel of a stylish yacht.
• Utilise clean lines, easy navigation, and great visuals… Like a stylish yacht.
• The use of a similar colour scheme to maintain consistency between the old and the new.

Eleven Media recommended building the web site using the WordPress publishing platform as it would allow Sundance Marine’s staff to easily add new products and information.

The Original Home Page

The New Home Page

The New Home Page Explained

• By increasing the depth of blue, and adding the cream, we feel that we have created a more sophisticated and mature design. We think that this is more appropriate in reflecting the clients move from Sundance Yachts to Sundance Marine.
• The navigation was simplified for ease of use, and three large call to actions added, representing the three different areas of Sundance Marine.
• We also cleaned up and minimalised the layout of the page by removing current yachts for sale, replacing it with a SEO friendly introduction, and adding a rolling news feed.
• The pièce de résistance though (look at us, talking like we own a Yacht) is in the application of large and professional imagery.

The Internal Pages – Old Website

The Internal Pages – New Website

Our favourite is the product page (second image down). Clean lines, a custom gallery, and a layout that is very easy on the eyes.

The Art is in the Detail

Here’s a couple of close-ups of the detail.

What the Client has to Say…

“The guys at Eleven Media have been a absolute breeze to deal with. The whole team at Sundance Marine love the new site and design, and just quietly so do our clients!

The response from our customer base has been very positive and helped increase our business profile.
Thanks again guys!”

- John Beck – Director Sundance Marine

What we Think…

In summary, we love the new Sundance Marine website. We feel it’s a great website, for a great client, that will serve Sundance Marine well into the future. Unfortunately though, we now want a 58 foot cruiser, black hull, pirate flag, with all the mod cons. Keep your eyes peeled for the Eleven Media Yacht Racing Team in the years to come.

For the moment though, we’re going to cruise around the bay in the Eleven Media Tinny…

Let us know what you think in the comments section below. About the redesign of course.

Facebook is by far the most popular Social Networking website, approximately 8 million Australians are part of the almost 500 Million Wordwide Facebook users. I’ve decided to share some tips for business owners that are starting out with Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages can be setup for just about anything: Businesses, Brands, Products, Organisations, Artists or Public Figures.  Facebook Pages work much like normal Facebook profiles so you can add status updates, add photos and other Facebook users can write on your ‘wall’.  The main difference is Facebook Pages don’t have ‘friends’ they have fans that ‘like’ the page.

I recommend most of our clients setup a Facebook Page for their business because it’s a great free way for businesses to quickly, easily and directly engage with their customers.

My top 5 tips for starting out with Facebook Pages for your business:

1. Choose your page name carefully

Facebook page names can not be changed so choose wisely! I recommend including a keyword or two in your page name if possible as this can help optimise your business in the Facebook Search Results.

2. Be strategic about when you time your updates

According to Facebook the average Facebook user has over 130 friends so they may miss your status update among all of their friends status updates. One of our clients that run a chain of retail store post facebook page status updates on Thursday and Friday nights mentioning specials, new stock and that they are open late on those nights. Another one of our clients that manages a popular restaurant posts updates on Sunday mornings such as “Hangover? Hungry? why not drop in for a Big Brekkie??”.

3. Include photos in your updates 

In my opinion status updates that include photos will help your update stand out in your ‘fans’ news feed and encourage users to engage with your business. A few of our clients use their mobile phones to take photos of new products as they arrive in store and they upload these photos to Facebook within minutes.

4. Promote your Facebook Page

There are a few quick an easy ways to promote your businesses Facebook Fan page: Add a button to your website, add a link to your email signature, send out an email newsletter, promote it at your place of business or you can even pay to advertise your Facebook page on Facebook.

5. Maintain your Facebook Page

I recommend that you review to your Facebook page at least once a week to see your page ‘insights’ (a.k.a stats) and to review comments posted on your page. I recommend you ensure that your contact details (website address, email, business address and phone numbers) are up to date and easy to find!

To setup a Facebook Page for your business visit:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Feel free to leave a link to your Facebook Page in the comments & checkout Eleven Media on Facebook.

At Eleven Media we’re huge fan’s of WordPress – we use WordPress as a CMS to power almost all of our new clients websites & blogs. Here’s a quick list of our favourite 11 WordPress plugins:

Adminimize

Adminimize has heaps of features and it helps us to hide any unnecessary WordPress Admin sections from clients.

Multiple Content Blocks

Multiple Content Blocks  allows us to easily add more than one WYSIWUG editor for certain page templates.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is jam packed with features – we use it because it’s so easy to customise and extend.

WP Maintenance Mode

WP Maintenance Mode allows us to develop and test a new website on a new domain while the public see a maintenance or coming soon page.

Theme Test Drive

Theme Test Drive is great when we’re working on new themes for an existing WordPress site – we can test the new theme while the public see the old theme.

WP Title 2

WP Title 2 gives us two title text box’s so we can customise headings on each page to make them different from the page name / menu slug.

All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack has a bunch of great features and makes things like editing title or description tags for each page super easy.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a popular little plugin that we use to create and customise simple email contact forms.

Tiny MCE Advanced

Tiny MCE Advanced simply improves the default WYSIWYG editor to give us greater control of the content styling.

Flutter

Flutter is a really powerful plugin that allows us to add ‘fixed’ custom fields to posts and pages – we’ve used this to create simple product databases.

WP Security Scan

WP Security Scan is a time saving plugin that we use to scan WordPress installs to identify changes we can make to improve security of the site.

Update: Here are some of the plugins as suggested by our readers on Twitter & Facebook:

• Meteor Slides
• Google XML Sitemaps
• WordPress Admin Bar
• Sexy Bookmarks
• Facebook Like Button
• Breadcrumb NavXT
• Simple Section Navigation Widget
• Wickett Twitter Widget
• Disqus Comment System

What are your favorite WordPress plugins ?

Feel free to leave a comment below & we’ll update this post to include them!

We’ve recently re-designed and re-launched the Zail Hearing Care website.

Zail Hearing Care is a family owned & operated hearing care business which has 6 hearing clinics scattered across South East Melbourne & the Mornington Peninsula.

Zail wanted a complete re-design to represent the modern, professional & family orientated business they run. Zail hired Eleven Media to design & develop a new website that was Google friendly & would be easy for their staff to keep up to date.

Eleven Media recommended building the web site using the WordPress publishing platform as it would allow Zail’s staff to easily keep the website up to date and allow Eleven to easily optmise the web site for Search Engine Ranking.

The old home page:

The new home page:

The new home page design explained:

• We’ve emphasized the main navigation with white text on a dark blue/high contrasting background.
• We’ve used 3 large ‘banner’ images which flash through & promote different aspects of the business.
• We’ve added a latest news section which automatically brings in the 3 latest news from the news area.
• We’ve used new text and images to communicate that Zail is ‘Family owned and operated’ .
• We’ve included a large ‘footer’ area on each page which contains the most essential contact details.

The old internal page:

The new internal page:

The new internal page design explained:

• We’ve incorporated a well defined ‘sidebar’ so users can easily navigate between internal pages.
• We’ve included a large ‘footer’ area on each page which contains the most  essential contact details.
• We’ve made sure the text is well formatted and an appropriate size for the target audience.
• We’ve used ‘sifr’ text replacement technology to use a unique typeface for each of the headings.
• We’ve included large stock photography / product photography for a professional look & feel.

We plan to update this post in the coming weeks with the appropriate statistics to show how the re-design has directly benefited the Zail Hearing Care clinics & how their google ranking has improved.

To view the new Zail Hearing Care web site in detail visit: http://www.zailhearingcare.com.au/

Thymer: Project management and task planning for people who hate project management and task planning…

When we started Eleven Media in 2008 we would list our projects on a whiteboard and scribble a daily to do list in our diary. This was fine for the first few months but as our workload increased we were wasting way to much time planning our day or week rather than ‘getting things done‘.

I wanted to find a web or desktop application that would allow our team of 2 to easily manage the projects we were working on and to plan out our workdays. I tried at least 35 different project management apps, some of the applications were way too complex, some applications like ‘Basecamp‘ are good at managing projects but not a daily task list and some of the Mac desktop apps like ‘Things‘ are awesome but don’t work that well for teams.

I finally stumbled across a new web app called ‘Thymer‘ developed by Stunf in the Neatherlands.

5 reasons Thymer rocks for project management:

1. Web App: All projects & tasks stored ‘in the cloud’ – this means our project list and task list is always up to date no matter where we login from (desktop, laptop or iphone at home or office).
2. iPhone app: We can view projects and tasks anywhere (Typically at a local cafe over coffee).
3. Powerful Interface: The smart input box means you rarely have to leave the single page design.
4. Great value: We pay around $15 USD per month for the ‘small team’ package
5. It’s easy: We can easily create & mange our to do list and assign tasks to other team members

How we use Thymer for our web design studio:

We set Thymer as our browser ‘home page’ so as soon as we open Firefox we can see the tasks we have on for today and the rest of the week. If for some reason we can’t complete a task set for today we can easily drag it to another day or assign it to another team member.

We don’t just manage projects with Thymer, we can list anything we need to be reminded about: returning calls, paying rent or meetings. We can easily switch between team members to find out what each other have planned for the day and we can generate all kinds of reports.

The best feature of Thymer would have to be the smart input box – it’s simple and intuitive.

For example, if a client calls to discuss a design and Blaz is in a meeting – I’d simply fire up Thymer and type: ‘@blaz @today Call Client XYZ on (03) 9707 2611 to discuss web design.’

For some more examples checkout the Thymer preview video:

Find out more: http://thymer.com

We have finally re-designed and re-built the Eleven Media web site.

Over the coming months we will be updating our blog with ‘how to’ videos, online marketing resources and showcasing the projects we are currently working on…. so stay tuned !

The 2010 Eleven Media web site:

Want to see more of our work?

Checkout our web site design folio