michaelbain has successfully delivered a complete website solution for Tartan Manor.

The website features the following functionality and components, all neatly tied together:

• The tried and tested WordPress CMS with which the administrator can manage their own content
• A custom design with an easily manageable image slider
• Featured content area on the homepage
• Social media integration
• News items and blogging
• Visitor commenting and interaction
• An events calender
• Image galleries

Tarton Manor is a fun and dynamic new stable yard, just 4km from Greenhills, Randfontein, a stone’s throw from Maple Ridge and 20mins away from Featherbrooke.

Visit the Tarton Manor site for more information and contact michaelbain to discuss your needs for your website project.

michaelbain has developed a plugin for WordPress that can be used by organisations who solicit donations and would like to enable payment by credit card and payment processing through Virtual Card Services (VCS).

The plugin is available under 2 licenses:

• Single Site License: R 550
• Developer license: R 1250

All payments by EFT  when invoiced. We are unfortunately not accepting online payments at this stage.

• The plugin allows for donations by credit card, securely processed by Virtual Card Services (VCS), on your WordPress installation.
• The plugin exposes a shortcode to place on a page which then handles the donations form. It also provides for extra text to be added where you may supply additional instructions for manual donations, EFT donations or any other instructions or text.
• The plugin exposes  a sidebar widget to place in a sidebar which then entices and links to the donations form. The text of the sidebar widget is editable by you.
• The plugin exposes an administration screen for filling in all the details particular to your form and your Virtual Card Services (VCS) account.
• The site administrator receives an email for all successfully processed credit card donations, containing the contact and donation details supplied by the person making the donation.

Administration Screen

Widget Options

Widget Rendered in Your Theme

michaelbain has successfully completed a small website project for www.heatherdale.co.za.

Heatherdale Guest House needed a new look and feel, an easy to use content management & publishing platform and some facebook integration.

michaelbain met these requirements by creating and implementing a custom WordPress theme for them.

“Heatherdale Guest House  is an accredited member of the National Accommodation Association of South Africa. We have been awarded four stars by the Tourism Grading Council of South Africa. We have 2 Executive suites, 7 luxury rooms and 2 self catering units plus 2 conference / function venues, catering for up to 75 delegates or up to 15 delegates. Facilities include U-shaped, classroom, boardroom and cinema style seating plus executive facilities such as plasma screens, data projectors and wireless internet connections. Our venue allows for outdoor team building activities”.

For more about Heatherdale Guest House, visit www.heatherdale.co.za.

michaelbain (in conjuction with pixelmagic) is happy to present another successfully completed web project.

Rapidwave had very specific style, landing page, user interaction, navigation and content requirements with regards to their web presence and as such michaelbain developed and delivered the following for Rapidwave:

• pixelmagic effectively translated Rapidwave’s corporate identity into a design that was implemented as a WordPress template.
• The WordPress content management system was installed and extensively modified (by way of a custom template and custom plugins) to meet their needs.
• A custom landing / home page was developed (thanks pixelmagic for the design) with JavaScript and DHTML functionality that simply, but effectively gives the user of the site an overview and a jump-off point.
• A custom navigation system (incorporating a navigation bar listing sub sections of the currently viewed page, block-image navigation with remembered history and breadcrumbs) was developed. These were developed and implemented as custom WordPress plugins.
• A custom contact form was developed as a WordPress plugin.
• The site frames in their existing offering where their clients can log into a back-end management system.
• The client can manage their own content without any special skills or tools, online, in real-time.
• All of this was tied together effectively to form a neat and usable user experience.

Thanks to Adi for the excellent copy.

From the Rapidwave site:

“We are a privately owned broadband infrastructure company providing data and wholesale Internet services to small, medium and JSE listed enterprises

Rapidwave is powered by a dedicated staff with a passion for excellence and success. In a short space of time we’ve established ourselves as the network and infrastructure providers of choice.”

Please vistit www.rapidwave.co.za for more information.

michaelbain in conjunction with pixelmagic has successfully completed a website revamp and modernisation project for the two sister sites, Dunblane Lifestyle Estate and Dunblane Equestrian Centre.

The client had a web presence in the form of static websites that they could not update and maintain themselves. Useful functionality like update picture galleries, news items and articles was not possible. They needed  a content management system and a publishing platform with some added functionality and a revamped layout and design to fit their image and marketing strategy.

The following was delivered:

• A customised WordPress content management system with which the client can manage their own content, picture galleries, news items and articles
• An events calendar managed through the admin interface
• A newsletter subscription and publishing service to collect newsletter subscribers and send out newsletters, managed through the admin interface
• Consistent and related (in function and form) navigation, layout and widgets across both sites to tie them together (theme design by pixelmagic)

Visit the sites by clicking these:

Dunblane Lifestyle Estate
“Dunblane offers you the move back to an old-fashioned country existence, coupled with the best of modern living to create the extremely desirable lifestyle that you’ve always dreamed of. Dunblane is situated in the East Rand around a magnificent Equestrian Centre, made up of  133 prime, large stands, dams and breathtaking countryside.”

Dunblane Equestrian Centre
“What better way to spend your time with your horse than in an environment that offers everything you could ask for? From the smallest pony to the most competitive horse, Dunblane has something for you. If you live for horses, you should live at Dunblane Equestrian.”

michaelbain in conjunction with pixelmagic is proud to launch the DarkCarnival Forum.

The forum is part of phase 1 of the project.

DarkCarnival has some exciting additions coming to the website soon, but we are not quite allowed to talk about it yet

Look out for another article when phase two is launched – it will be worth the wait.

michaelbain in conjunction with pixelmagic has successfully completed a website redo project for The Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA).

Powered by WordPress and extensively configured and customised for FEDUSA, the site boasts the following features:

• A content management system with which FEDUSA can manage their own content, documents and press releases
• An admin managed calendar
• An admin managed newsletter subscription service to collect newsletter subscribers and send out newsletters to them
• Facebook integration
• Automatically rendered navigation, layout and widgets into the theme designed by pixelmagic
• A complete custom plugin was developed to generate the horizontal unpacked page map in the footer. The administrator can determine how many levels deep need to be unpacked, which pages need to be exclude and how many columns wide the map must be before it wraps to another line

“A major change in the South African trade union balance took place with the establishment of a new trade union federation with over 515 000 members. The Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA) was established on 1 April 1997 by the amalgamation of two federations, namely Federation of South African Labour Unions (FEDSAL) and Federation of Organisations Representing Civil Employees (FORCE).”

Visit the site by clicking here