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.

We’ve been super busy (as always) so we thought now would be a great time to showcase some of the latest business websites we have built powered by custom WordPress themes.

In no particular order here they are:

1 – Rafting Australia

2 – Blackburn Vikings Basketball

3 – Body Yoga

4 – Moggies

5 – Lose Baby Weight

6 – Flymount

7 – Sweat Equity

8 – Fluid Dynamics

9 – Clear Glass Solutions

10 – Spud O Haulage

11 – Berwick Village Chamber of Commerce

Body Yoga – A case Study

We’ve recently re-designed and re-built a website for a local Yoga business. See the transformation the website took and how we went about refreshing the look of the website.

The brief

• Re-design and rebuild a new website for www.bodyyoga.com.au
• Increase SEO ranking and use of keywords
• Update content on all pages to make them more relevant to the new business structure
• Add new content where needed

The old website did however use images as its focal point so we needed to retain the “photography” feel the site had and somehow develop a new layout to also house a lot more information and text content.

The Old Home Page

The new home page

The new home page explained

• First off was to enhance the use of the dark reds and black tones. These colours play a large roll in the clients existing branding and marketing so we needed to keep on the same colour pallet.
• We introduced 4 prominent call to actions (in this case 4 of the client’s most popular classes) to the home page to prompt the visitors to read onto each individual yoga class.
• A large prominent rotating image banner was planned to give the home page some notion of movement and class.

Old Internal Page

New Internal Page

The new internal layout explained

• The goal for the new internal page layout was to house as much information possible about each of the classes the client offers. The “Class” template is structured exactly the same for each class page – making it very easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for when best trying to decide on what class best suits them.
• Each class page includes a prominent timetable download button to invite visitors to view the timetable and attend a class.
• In addition to the timetable download button, the class pages also include a image gallery relevant to that class to give potential customers how the classes are run, and to showcase a warm, friendly environment.

An eye for the detail

Here are some close up detail shots of the design:

A happy client

“The guys at Eleven are amazing! They created exactly what I imagined and they were so much fun to work with. My new website was done in no time at all and I am thrilled with the outcome. It’s just stunning! Blaz and Aaron are two very talented guys and a pleasure to work with. “

- Mary Brkljacic – Owner of Body Yoga – www.bodyyoga.com.au

In Summary

In summary we are very please with the outcome, a great design, a great website and a great response from Body Yoga’s clients, we’re rapped.

Please leave your comments below and let us know what you think of the end result.

What is WordPress?

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full Content Management System and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes.

Easy to update

With WordPress you enter the Do-It-Yourself world. Once you have had a custom theme developed you can then log in and control all of your web site content yourself. This could save you time and money, keep your web site up-to-date and relevant to your target market.

Manage your images/pages and text

WordPresss is built on a bloging engine, this allows you to have full control of all your text, images, and pages on your web site. You can easily edit, deleted and modify all the pages on your web site as often as you see fit. You have the ability to manage your web site yourself, which will irradiate potential costs from your web development team and save you money in the long run.

It’s That Easy

• You don’t need to be a computer genius to use it. WordPress is easy to use, if you can send an e-mail, use Microsoft Word or set up a Facebook account, then you can use WordPress.
• You don’t need to worry about breaking your web site
• It’s website management for non-techies

Make changes to your site anytime – anywhere

WordPress is a online content management tool which offers multiple user log-ins, which means you’re not the only one who can change outdated information, pages or images. This allows yourself and your staff to access and edit your web site from any computer in the world with internet access.

Better Google Ranking

WordPress also makes it easier to optimise your website for a high search engine ranking. That means your site is more likely to appear on the first page of Google results, which means people are more likely to find you. By regularly updating your web site with relevant interesting topic google will rank you higher in the listings.

Easy to re-design

When it comes to re-designing a web site built in wordpress, things could not be any easier for your web development team. Whilst there is still a bit of work involved, re-designing WordPress themes for your web site can save you big bucks and having to go through the process of designing and building a web site from scratch.

Easy news/blog integration

Implementation of a blog or news section into a wordpress web site is very easy and has many benefits for your user base. By adding a news or blog section you can inform your customers the latest news, trends and products available from your business, which will increase traffic and possible sales.

Summary

• Access your web site any where with a computer and internet access
• Manage all images, text and pages on your web site
• Multiple user log in for yourself or staff to manage your business  website
• Increased Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Google ranking
• Easy Blog or News section/page intergration
• Easy intergration of other social media such as Twitter, Facebook and many more!

For more information about WordPress or to hire Eleven Media to build your next website in WordPress please call (03) 9707 2611 or contact us here.

At Eleven Media we use a bunch of great Web Applications (Web Apps) to help us run our business.

You might be wondering – what the heck is a Web App ?

A Web Application is basically a website that can you can use as an alternative to a desktop application.
Over the last couple of years we have switched to web apps wherever we can for the  following benefits:

• Access from anywhere : Home, Office, Overseas (as long as you have an internet connection).
• Files are up to date – no need to sync files or save multiple versions of the same document
• Mobile friendly – most web applications work well on iPhones & iPads
• No need to download updates  – web applications are updated for you
• Easy collaboration – multiple team members can work on files and projects at the same time

The 5 awesome web apps that help us run our web design business:

1) Thymer for Task & Project Management

We’re constantly raving about Thymer – it’s a simple & powerful task & project management web app.
More info: http://www.thymer.com

2) Dropbox for File Sharing

We use Dropbox all the time to share files that are too big for email.
You can sign up for free and receive 2 gig of storage !
More info:  http://www.dropbox.com

3) Harvest for invoicing

Harvest is an awesome invoicing application – it can easily link with PayPal for Credit Card payments.
More info : http://www.getharvest.com/

4) Campaign Monitor for Email Marketing

Campaign Monitor is a really well designed email marketing web app that’s run by a team in Sydney.
They have a pay per use model which suits us and most of our clients.
More info: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

5) Google Docs for Word Processing

Google Docs is a really popular online alternative to Microsoft Office.
They have word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and a bunch of other cool applications.
More info: http://docs.google.com/

We’ve been busy building a bunch of great websites in 2010 (All custom WordPress themes).

Here’s 10 of them:

1 – Starmaid International

2 – Class Landscapes

3 – Zail Hearing Care

4 – Ultra-Fresh

5 – Kitson

6 – Immerse Photography

7 – Animals of Oz

8 – Starmaid Professional

9 – CSBA Accounting

10 – Avalanche Cocktails

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!

I installed WordPress 3.0 on a test hosting account this week & I’m currently taking it for a test drive.
I’ve been hanging out for 3.0 and really wanted to try out the new features.

Custom Post Types

This feature has heaps of potential and can be easily setup with a few lines of code in the functions file although there is already a really cool plugin out called ‘Custom Post Type Ui’ – see the video below for an explanation.

One potential application for this would be podcasts – so rather than adding a podcast as a post or using a plugin it could be managed by the custom post type. There is of course the option for custom taxonomy’s. If you don’t want to use a plugin and your familiar with the editing WordPress functions file here’s a Custom Post Type tutorial.

Custom (Woo) Menu’s

This is a long overdue feature and essential for any WordPress website over a couple of pages. WooThemes have had this feature for a while and have worked with the WordPress team to add this to the core WordPress build. Having used a few woo themes briefly before it’s no surprise that this is awesome. If your looking for this feature it took a minute to find check – appearance > themes.

2010 Theme

The new default theme ’2010′ a great improvement and shows how WordPress has evolved from a Blogging Platform to a Powerful Content Management System. The 2010 Theme is really easy to customize using the background and header editing featured which come standard in 3.0, here’s an example http://joshjanssen.com/

WordPress 3.0 is out now and available from wordpress.org