In the dynamic digital landscape of South Africa, a strong online presence is paramount for businesses to succeed. Your website design and development play a crucial role in establishing a captivating online brand identity. To empower your digital journey, Originate Media proudly presents our guest blogging powerhouse. In this article, we will delve into the transformative potential of guest blogging and how Originate Media can elevate your website design and development endeavors in South Africa.

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In today's digital age, having a well-designed website is crucial for any business to succeed. A visually appealing and user-friendly website can attract potential customers, enhance brand credibility, and increase online visibility. If you're a business owner or a web designer in South Africa, optimizing your website for search engines using the right keywords is essential. In this article, brought to you by Originate Media, we'll explore the best keywords for website design in South Africa, helping you boost your online presence and attract more visitors to your site.

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Reflecting back of 2019 we've had a busy year and during this time we have been quietly expanding our operations, we now have presence on Ile de la Reunion, Mauritius Island and Madeira Island - Portugal.

Expanding has ensured that Originate Media has a diverse client portfolio and risk redundancy which in turn means we are able to better service our clients in South Africa along with broadening our clientbase.

We have found that our creative and unique, custom build designs has raised eyebrows further afield and this year we acquired clients as far as Australia and New Zealand and with our ongoing work in Switzerland the world is our oyster.

We've made some real headway into the corporate sector in South Africa - with projects for BPESA and CMC Networks - 2 very big organisations driving change in SA and look forward to working with more companies like this in the future - lets make things better! Believe in Better :)

 In other news we have also expanded our service offering and are now competent APP developers.

Having built and successfully launched YellowMetal.app - which has an IOS and Android APP along with a public facing website and WebApp.

This week I had some great fun setting up a Facebook campaign with a few ads, posts and competition and conversion tracking, it’s still early to know conclusively if it has been successful but so far if we continue at the current rate it will be an overwhelming success.

So I’ve learnt a few things, one of the important ones – was that you cannot according to FB terms and conditions run a competition to drive fan page or website likes. You need to be more inventive than that, what I discovered is that if you want to run a completion to drive brand engagement and grow a fan base you do have some options which do not breach the terms and conditions. It must be added that if you do breach the terms and conditions of FB – your page can be suspended/ closed down.

The approach I took was to create a competition where we wrote a content post about our product – content marketing at its best . With that post we asked our fans to like and share the post in order to enter the competition, this has been a great way for us to get that article shared and liked without additional costs. Occasionally we boost the post to reach a wider audience.

But like any online marketing efforts – its all about the ROI (return on investment) so far we have spent very little with our product being a lucrative one and conversions we make represent anything above a 500% ROI.

In closing I can definitely say we will continue running Facebook Ad campaigns, they are particularly good for brand building / mindshare and present a good ROI in terms of conversions.

A big part of what we do comes down to how we are able to measure and track success online, to see what sign-ups we have, e-commerce purchases or "Book Now" buttons have been clicked – in short what goal conversions there are to reveal how users are using our clients sites. At the end of the day we fail in our mission if our clients don't see an upturn in business and more sales/ leads being generated. In order for us to do that we need some way to track users online.

Enter Google Analytics, GA has been around for quite some time now and the arsenal of tools available is staggering – never before have we had as much ability to see what's happening online than we do now – the old days of print advertising without knowing what your Return on Investment will be are well over and have cemented online as the premier way to promote your business. In my opinion the only value in print these days is for brand recognition and development/ steering and customer education.

A while ago we used to use the GA tag and place that into the head of the site index.php file or implement it through some Google Analytics plugin – but we have since learned about Google Tag Manager! OMG this thing is the shiznit... It has made our workflow much easier and streamlined the way we integrate the rest of the google online tools into our sites. It's farily simple to use and means that when you need to add something new you just work through tag manager to implement it. Google Tag Manager combines all of the different google online tools for Analytics, AdWords, Webmaster Tools and others I have yet to discover into a simple one-stop-shop for online metrics. Hallelujah!

Can I get an Amen!

Are you aware of how you or your company are percieved online?
We are talking about reputation management, which is the science and art of maintaining a positive image of your business / brand or even personal brand online which will in turn influence how you are percieved.

The reputation you have built up, positive feedback, reviews and testimonials are all openly accessible. Reputation Management essentially aims to enhance the positive aspects of your company and when necessary do damage control.

At Originate Media, our goal is to craft a positive image for your business that will leave a positive lasting impression in the mind of web users wanting to learn more about your brand. We at Originate see reputation as a critical component to running a succesful business both online and offline and as such will look to showcase our clients in the best possible light and its relevance to the targeted user. This goes beyond what you are doing on your own website but becomes more about how you are percieved online.

We take a holistic approach to enhance your online reputation that will allow user to feel that they have found a company that understands them, which they can trust. Our strategies include: A clear sense of WHY you are in business, Consistent Brand Management, Social Media Integration and applicable usage, alliances with brands or identities that share common values and a raft of other measures.

Some of the questions you might ask about this subject: so what is responsive web design? what does it mean to your average Joe - more importantly why should I be aware of it? Well responsive websites respond to different browser sizes and orientations, they expand or shrink to fit a wide array of screens. In the past we would have used a mobile plugin or mobile component to auto detect the browser and screensize and then serve up a site styled to fit that. But as we have so many different screensizes and browsers there has been some development into producing one site that responds to the various screens trying to access it

So lets talk about Responsive templates for Joomla or themes for Wordpress, the way it works is that as you visit the site, the site is aware of your browser/ screensize and inside the stylesheets, we now have some new declarations: @media which says: Yo whenever a screensize this size: x tries to access the site give them these declarations: xyz... Whats happening here is the content, the images and even the styles themselves remain intact while additional code is added to decide what to do about the declared screensize.

So what does this mean?? Well 1. you would no longer need to pay for the development of a .mobi site - redundant. 2. You setup your site on Joomla and whenever you get tired of the look of it just have a new template designed - one of course that is responsive - this way you do it once and reuse it over and over, no teardowns and start from ground-zero. 3. The trends are there and as more mobile phones move into the smart phone arena this side of online access/ internet connectivity can only go one way - busier... more and more, so if you site is lookig like a dog's breakfast on a smart phone or if your having a new site developed - consider the implications of not going responsive - how will peeps with smart phones see your site?

Contact us today about building you a custom designed Joomla Responsive Website.... LEAD THE WAY!

Is your business in the cloud? - Excuse me please, what does that even mean?... well I'm here to explain a little and of course sell you on some of our cloud services :) because the cloud is the future and the future is erm... Cloudy? Okay enough of the chitty chatty, cloud services - you heard of dropbox and gdrive by google? these are examples of cloud services, you want to collaborate on projects or be able to access your work files from your home computer -> go for the cloud.

So just like in school we learnt that not all clouds are created equal, you get cumulonimbus (Thunderheads) stratos cirrus etc etc well, so too with Cloud computing services. Although Dropbox and Gdrive are great free services (Which I use a lot) they are not enterprise level, so if you would like your backups/ remote office collaborations etc to have access control (Not everyone can see everything) then our premium services are something you should consider.

Preimum Cloud Computing Services: you know how awful it is when your computer dies and you take it to the techie and he says... erm sorry man its like dead hey... well whatcha gonna do homes? I mean when your Hard Drive kicks the bucket - whats gonna happen to your data? Ah yes the cloud... :) you see you could just buy an external HDD and load all your stuff there, but if something happens to that? - Here's why a cloud solution is better. Cloud Service Backups, it installs a service on your machine that once it has run the first entire backup it only backs-up the files that have changed - to the cloud (What is the cloud? - think of a few server farms - AKA: data centers, well now your data is stored at secure levels at a few of them (this is called redundancy) so if one kicks the bucket - your data is still safe... Crucial for businesses... so crucial simply leaving your backups to a external hard drive seems irresponsible - and the management of the backups a real pain, compared to an automated service with the data being stored off-site under secure conditions.

Some of the cloud services we are now pleased to offer: Data Synching for project collaboration. PABX systems a fraction of the cost of the normal route with hefty infrastructure layouts and then of course our Data Backup Cloud Service. Call us today to get more info, of course you know I like to tailor things and I prefer the human relationships over the telephonic ones so I'd be happy to meet and chat about your various options to suit your needs.

Cloud services bring enterprise level infrastructure and services to the masses by distributing the cost - this is much more effiecient, going forward we will see much more of this methodology from SAAS (Software as a service - Adobe CSS6 etc) to web applications and even Hosted CRMS, if you are serious about your business and being prepared for the future - give us a call today.