Web & Design Boutique

This is a sample Virtual Tour project to promote a property offer by a Real Estate Agency. Due to the high contrast, image bracketing was used to get the best results. We customised the navigation elements to match a light blue colour theme with some red highlighted markers. We customised a floor plan, project and agent information window for more detailed descriptions. There was no Google map added at this stage because this is just a sample Virtual Tour, however it can be done as well. It contains seventeen 360-degree panorama location images chained together into a Virtual Tour. Please click here to immerse yourself!3DVista, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom Classic;So far seventeen 360-degree panorama photographs, 12 graphical images for navigation elements; Please see our Photography Packages for pricing details. Simply contact us to discuss your requirements! @ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF90YWdzIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsiYmVmb3JlIjoiUmVsYXRlZCBUb3BpY3M6ICIsImFmdGVyIjoiIiwibGlua190b190ZXJtX3BhZ2UiOiJvbiIsInNlcGFyYXRvciI6IiB8ICIsImNhdGVnb3J5X3R5cGUiOiJwb3N0X3RhZyJ9fQ==@You might also like... Read the full article

This was the first Virtual Tour project to evaluate various photography methods hard and software solutions to create this immersive online experience. Optimising images, developing the navigation and info elements, integration of floor plan, slide show and video were essential parts of this project And serves as a marketing means to explore the training facility, the website and therefore attract more people to participate in the Tenshin Aikido style training. Please click here to find it on their web page and immerse yourself!3DVista, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop;So far one 180-degree panorama, three 360-degree panorama, four 4 by 3 photographs and 16 graphical images for navigation elements, plus a floor plan;So far one video to edit and embed; Please see our Photography Packages for pricing details. Simply contact us to discuss your requirements! @ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF90YWdzIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsiYmVmb3JlIjoiUmVsYXRlZCBUb3BpY3M6ICIsImFmdGVyIjoiIiwibGlua190b190ZXJtX3BhZ2UiOiJvbiIsInNlcGFyYXRvciI6IiB8ICIsImNhdGVnb3J5X3R5cGUiOiJwb3N0X3RhZyJ9fQ==@You might also like... Read the full article

After many months in the making, we are excited to announce a new service addition that fits right in between Photography, Graphic Design, Web Design and Multimedia, combining these various elements to a new online experience known as Virtual Tour or 360-degree Panorama Tour. As trends show, online shopping, working from home and virtual exploration of places before travel, are on a steep rise. For instance, if you are in a Tourism or Real-estate business, you would like to maximise eye-balls on your offers in the web space and leave a 3D, real and comprehensive impression. Besides the targeted traffic it drives to your service or business, your prospects will get the convenience to explore it from anywhere. There are numerous other benefits like cost savings, environmental protection and pollution reduction. Virtual Tour provides a superb base for making informed and targeted choices after being immersed in a 360-degree Panorama Tour.   Key advantages are: - Immersive experience creates familiarity; - Increases targeted traffic and buyer intent; - Increases convenience, reach and new opportunities to market products and services; - Reduces environmental impacts due to informed choices; Simply contact us to discuss your requirements! @ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF90YWdzIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsiYmVmb3JlIjoiUmVsYXRlZCBUb3BpY3M6ICIsImFmdGVyIjoiIiwibGlua190b190ZXJtX3BhZ2UiOiJvbiIsInNlcGFyYXRvciI6IiB8ICIsImNhdGVnb3J5X3R5cGUiOiJwb3N0X3RhZyJ9fQ==@You might also like... Read the full article

After many months in the making, we are excited to announce a new service addition that fits right in between Photography, Graphic Design, Web Design and Multimedia, combining these various elements to a new online experience known as Virtual Tour or 360-degree Panorama Tour. As trends show, online shopping, working from home and virtual exploration of places before travel, are on a steep rise. For instance, if you are in a Tourism or Real-estate business, you would like to maximise eye-balls on your offers in the web space and leave a 3D, real and comprehensive impression. Besides the targeted traffic it drives to your service or business, your prospects will get the convenience to explore it from anywhere. There are numerous other benefits like cost savings, environmental protection and pollution reduction. Virtual Tour provides a superb base for making informed and targeted choices after being immersed in a 360-degree Panorama Tour.   Key advantages are: - Immersive experience creates familiarity; - Increases targeted traffic and buyer intent; - Increases convenience, reach and new opportunities to market products and services; - Reduces environmental impacts due to informed choices; Simply contact us to discuss your requirements! @ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF90YWdzIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsiYmVmb3JlIjoiUmVsYXRlZCBUb3BpY3M6ICIsImFmdGVyIjoiIiwibGlua190b190ZXJtX3BhZ2UiOiJvbiIsInNlcGFyYXRvciI6IiB8ICIsImNhdGVnb3J5X3R5cGUiOiJwb3N0X3RhZyJ9fQ==@You might also like... Read the full article

If you are like me working for a long time with computers and dealing with a lot of files like documents, images, videos, etc. you want to create a somewhat logical folder structure to store them mainly for the purpose to quickly find them again. Surely there is a search feature but often that does not help in a folder view with many hundreds of files being listed, especially when these files do not have meaningful names. Also structuring files by topic or category is essential for content management purposes to quickly add or find content supporting media files. Creating a folder structure in WordPress is quite limited as you have only two options. By default the media files are stored in the upload folder alternatively you can activate the "Organise my uploads into month- and year-based folders" function via Settings - Media, that will upload files to the year and its month sub-folder. This might be fairly suitable for a casual content creator as all files are listed in the Media library, but when you have a lot of content files and reuse them or even update them regularly it becomes quite a task to manage these. Custom folder structure in WordPress In bigger projects I want media files to be grouped in a custom folder structure by a certain category or topic to keep track and make it easier to manage all these files. As mentioned above by default WordPress stores uploaded media into the Upload folder which quickly will get crowded. Read the full article

www.seeingwithstars.net is offering Astrological Consultations on her website. The Seeing with Stars owner Stephanie Johnson requested a new look and feel and provided me with a design mock-up to update her web presence. For this project I had to change an existing Bones design template which is based on the Bootstrap framework to reflect the new look and feel. All graphical elements needed to be replaced by web optimised ones and were implemented following the given design guidelines deduced from the home page mock-up. Except for the new logo and photo I had to re-create all social media buttons and graphical elements. To be able to offer online bookings for Astrological Consultations I implemented and configured the Appointment Hour Booking plugin on her website. This website design project was also based on WordPress CMS and required Graphic/UX/UI/Web and Front-end Design skills using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks, jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3 to achieve the desired look and feel. The new website was published in March 2020 and is built on State of the Art standards and optimized for SEO requirements. As is the standard it was made sure that this website is mobile responsive. Read the full article

Since I started my journey with WordPress in 2008 I found the following plugins very useful for most of my website projects: Content Editor and Management Classic Editor is what was the default before Gutenberg block editor was implemented into WordPress. It provides a basic WYSIWYG screen type editor for your content editing and formatting. If you use page builder plugins it is often recommended to have only the Classic editor plugin installed. Or in case you have problems with Gutenberg or otherwise just want to keep it simple. Duplicate Post or Post Duplicator speed up the page and post creation process as you can easily copy a page or post into a new one and then simply just change the title and contents in the newly created copy. Especially useful when you have a custom layout created with page builders that need to be applied to other posts or pages as well. WP File Manager is great for up- and downloads of files to and from the WordPress website folders, especially if you do not have FTP or cPanel access to the hosting server environment.   Communication Contact Form 7 plugin is a widely used and versatile contact form that is free. It provides a lot of options to create, configure fairly sophisticated contact forms. It has a variety of "extension" plugins some of which are quite useful, i.e. the Honeypot for Contact Form 7 or Controls for Contact Form 7. WP Mail Logging is very helpful in trouble shooting email issues. It will keep track of all emails you send from within the WordPress environment, i.e. form a contact form, but also order confirmation emails. Sometimes very helpful in determining if WordPress or the server environment might have problems sending emails or other email issue are at play.   Productivity Jetpack by WordPress.com is like a Swiss Army knife from WordPress for WordPress websites as it provides a couple of handy functionality. It has settings to improve security, speed, usability, i.e. extending the Widget features with more granular controls to show or hide them on certain pages. Or to use WordPress itself as a CDN for images to speed up page loads is a great feature. You can also add like and share buttons, even automatic sharing to your social media accounts to name the most interesting features it provides for me. But there are more which might be of interest to you. Smush is an automated image compression tool that in making image sizes smaller improves the loading speed of a page or post and therefore helps to improve the Search Engine ranking. Speed is one of the major factors Search Engines rank a website higher so the smaller the files the faster the website loads. WP Fastest Cache has proven to me to be the most efficient caching plugin for WordPress and I tried a couple. Caching plugins are pre-loading page designs and content to serve them quicker to visitors. That is an important ranking factor.   E-Commerce WooCommerce is the e-Commerce platform for WordPress covering pretty much all requirements there are and since a couple of years is owned and improved by Automattic the founder of WordPress. From basic online shop and payment processors to sophisticated e-Commerce solution with all sorts of extensions to cater for most online sales business needs. There are other e-Commerce solutions out there specialised in certain aspects like the accommodation or appointment booking area as outlined here, that could be more suitable, even so WooCommerce does cover these also too.   Security Advanced Automatic Updates as the name implies takes care of keeping the WordPress environment and its features automatically up-to-date. Some hosting service providers do that for you automatically as well. That is an important feature to minimise bugs and vulnerabilities, yet that can become problematic if you have custom functionality on your WordPress website that might be altered due to up-dates. Generally keep your website as up-to-date as possible and please do not forget the server environment which needs to be updated as well on a regular basis around once year, i.e. for newer PHP version. All In One WP Security is a very comprehensive intrusion prevention plugin that protects from most common attacks on your WordPress website and is free. Be warned, all these security plugins have a lot of settings and if wrongly configured could lock you out or make your website inaccessible. UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore is one of the few backup solutions I use and tested. As not testing a backup solution is like not having one because it might not work properly on your environment. I made my fair share of unpleasant surprises when a restore was needed and the backup would need a lot of manual tweaking to get it restored which was a time consuming and painful experience.   Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO plugins like The SEO Framework or Rank Math SEO are important to help with on-site Search Engine Optimisations. These are tasks to make sure that you have, i.e. ALT attributes on all images, TITLE attributes on all links, a sitemap, proper title and description definitions and structured data definitions for content in place. All these are essential optimisations that help to improve the ranking of your website due to it being properly categorised and cataloged by the search engines.     These are just a few core ones I prefer to use on a regular basis and therefore are only my recommendations and might not suit your requirements or preferences. The listing here will change over time as things progress. There are many more plugins for various purposes and use cases to specialised to describe in a paragraph, some of which I have described in more details in different posts, like this one accommodation or appointment booking solutions. All plugin developers really appreciate your feedback and support.   Word of advice: One should get plugins only from the WordPress.org depository or vetted and trusted sources! Read the full article

If your business needs to schedule an appointment or book an accommodation, an online booking system will be helpful. There are specific calendar booking solutions in WordPress available to match various requirements. Over the years I have implemented calendar booking systems for three different scenarios.   Read the full article

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is a website project for the Tenshin Aikido Club in Auckland, New Zealand. Also here the main requirement was to update the look and feel to a more modern style. For that the website needed to be moved with all its contents to my hosting service provider Panthur. The Blog is based on WordPress CMS requires LAMP know how but also modern Front-end Design skills using HTML5 and CSS3. I used an Elegant themes template called Divi as a basis for quick results and customised it to suit the updated design requirements. As is now common practice also this website is mobile friendly and to round things up I optimised Accessibility and SEO for all pages. Read the full article

Website Development for the Indian Musician Dhyan Pradeep to show case his performances in Indian Classical Music. And he is offering also Indian music instruments, training, chanting and Kirtan classes. First the requirement was to update an existing Website adding new music and video footage, but it was on an older standard and would not fulfil another requirement to allow the owner to make his own content changes. I decided to create a new Website using the WordPress CMS, ensuring it is future proof and SEO optimised. As a WordPress based CMS it required some HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, PHP and JavaScript customisations and extensions, to change the look and feel and adapt it to the requirements. The template also provides "responsive" web design standards to make it automatically adapt to different screen resolutions. The overall development process took so far 59 hours and was published in April 2013 in its first design instalment and took 96 hours and was published in December 2018 in its second design instalment. The renewal was required as the old design template framework was not supported any-more, the look and feel was aged and would not provide the functional and security standards needed for present day WordPress installations. It is built on State of the Art standards and optimized for present SEO requirements. I also supplied my hosting and domain name registration services for this project. He has kindly provided us with his testimonial Read the full article

December 2018 was a big month of major WordPress updates. WordPress introduced its new 5.0 version in beginning of December 2018 with many bug fixes and improvements. But the most outstanding is the implementation of the new content block editor Gutenberg, please see this complete Gutenberg Editor guide for more information. Gutenberg will surely make it easier for bloggers and content creators in their process of creating and structuring content. Yet if you did not use the default editor before due to using other content structuring tools then you might be surprise as things might suddenly not work as expected. I was forced to install and configure the official Classic Editor plugin and deactivate Gutenberg due to problems. WordPress has made three more releases as of this writing so we stand now at version 5.0.3. Also the new WordPress version 5 has triggered an avalanche of updates by many plugin and theme creators seemingly adapting to the new environment and ironing out issues accordingly. Or trying to implement new features like for example Contact Form 7 plugin did. Contact Form 7 plugin update and its negative side effects Some plugin developers obviously took the opportunity to introduce new features and abandoning working ones. A quite famous and widely used plugin is the Contact Form 7. For unknown reasons they have just dismissed the use of the Google Captcha v2 and now fully support only Google Captcha v3!? You normally would think that is a good thing as that will surely be an overall improvement. Yet there is the requirement to replace the existing with the new Google Captcha v3 keys in the Contact From 7 application. This might take around 15 minutes (if you include the logins to all required accounts), but if you have a dozen or more websites to maintain this becomes quite a work-out spending a couple of hours on this "little" change. But now you are faced with two things a new Captcha system that has to relearn what is spam, via user interactions. So the system starts from scratch, hence you will all of a sudden get way more spam then before until it has caught up with everything, which will take longer for websites with less visitors. And secondly you have now the Google Captcha batch icon on all your website pages. Besides not looking to great it does slow down your website a bit, so what can you do!? Luckily there have been already solutions sussed out by various users. To ovoid the move to Google Captcha v3 with its disruptive logo on all pages the best option is to get and activate the Advanced noCaptcha & invisible Captcha plugin, configure the Captcha v2 key in there and then put the shortcode  on the contact form instead of the default . Yet to have to install and configure another plugin and the time wasted to find and test such a solution was quite a nuisance, including to down grade to Google Captcha v2 again if you enthusiastically upgraded already. Especially at this time of the year, what were these guys thinking, to present us with such Christmas gifts!? But such is the world of programming, not all improvements are really ones. Read the full article

I did use the default WordPress design templates in the beginning, like 2010, 2012 etc. or even more basic ones like bones and underscore. Basic design templates require a more hand coded approach to get the required functionality together. And when completed usually include only the code required to make it work and look as intended, nothing more nothing less. Therefore these will create fairly lean and fast websites which is good in regards smooth user experience as well as search engine ranking (SERP's). Often a lot of customisations and or plugins need to be added to get there. But if not maintained and updated they will eventually be outdated and therefore create problems, i.e. new WordPress functionality requiring up-to-date JavaScript libraries or it might not support the updated plugin features any-more, etc.  Hence I had to replace a couple of those hand coded and out-dated templates which were creating various problems, starting from simple functional issues to e-Commerce problems and even security issues. Hence I found hand coded and therefore highly customised templates to be more trouble over the years than an advantage in keeping up with all the changes of WordPress, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and overall plugin functionality and security related changes or even just design trends. Essentially it meant to switch to a different template to stay up-to-date with recent developments and that created of course extra efforts and costs. After going down that path myself I decided it was best to let others do the grunt work and benefit from their skills in keeping up to scratch with everything platform related. So I started using various template design frameworks, like Genesis, Envato, Woo and Elegant Themes which all are kept up-to-date by a team of developers. A downside on relying on Design frameworks is that they are often bloated with functionality that slows down a website and or are difficult to learn due to their special ways. Another is that it can impact your design via their main design framework updates, which then again require corrections. Hence I am using the main template design framework to cover the functional and design basics but create a child theme for the desired look and feel. And to protect the website design for the most part from any design changes due to template updates in future, as it is recommended by WordPress themselves, click here for more information. The really big advantage is that these stay fairly up-to-date and therefore create hardly any issues as mentioned before in  hand coded templates. That allows for a cost efficient and Agile implementation and some, like the Elegant Themes framework, come with a visual page designer making it easy to create well structured and attractive content, even for a layperson. Besides it allows for quick addition of further functionality that is shipped along with it, i.e. SEO, search,  galleries and sliders, etc. Overview of the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress template design frameworks   Read the full article

The short answer is not much, if your customers are NOT residing in the EU. But if they are then you would need to make your website compliant to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European Union. The regulation was implemented on the 25th of May 2018 and requires any website owner to specifically take steps allowing visitors/customers to let them view and or delete their collected data from your website. Failing to implement these regulations could result in hefty fines. The regulation covers all Personally identifiable information (PII), like... Read the full article

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