www.Naeem.co.za

Recently I have been subjected to a spate of emails and telephone calls from friends and strangers asking me to host their website.  I’m no web hosting guru, and do not plan to be one.  Yes I have a the odd dedicated server, shared hosting and so on which I use to host my own sites and a few close clients.

Everyone else? Allow me to recommend a few companies.  The first two I can personally testify to their excellent service and competitive pricing.  You get what you pay for and the $1.99 rubbish from the so called companies, well that can only end badly. (more…)

The Autostyle Motorshow is a favorite in Durban’s motor enthusiast calender. Every year we hold a street festival outside our Umhlanga-Ridge store.

Back in 2003 we had this silly idea of a motor show and if 20 cars pitched, we were happy. Were we shocked when the day came, at 10am there were well over 100 vehicles and thousands of people dropping their jaws at Durban’s finest automotive rides. Rest assured the show was a huge success and immediately we planned for the next year.

As the years went by, it grew exponentially, we learned from previous years mistakes and fortunately I seem to have grown a bit in graphic design skills.

Below is a collection of each years poster. 2008 & 2009 were done in Photoshop while the rest were in Corel Draw.
I cringe today when looking at the first few years. Personally I think 2008 & my version of 2009 are the best of the lot.

These posters are somewhat of a juggling act trying to keep all sponsors happy by placing their logos, adding as much information about the actual event as well as making it as visible as possible. These get displayed on street poles, magazines, newspapers, leaflets and store windows.  2009 Autotrader came on board as a title sponsor and had their designers update the poster accordingly. The last image below is the Autotrader version while the second last is mine.

Click on the images to view a larger version:

Online fraud. Cornerstone of any successful ecommerce store. Autostyle is no exception. Every week we cancel a bunch of orders which slip through the banks, slip through the online gateways and end up ‘approved’ in our mail boxes.

We do have measures in place to prevent this and having less then 5 charge backs over 3 years is a pretty good average I think.

The scammer below sent us a copy of his credit card and Identity Document as part of our verification process.

I’m offended, at least have the decency and professionalism to send proper ‘fake’ documents instead of this newbie induced photoshop vomit.

Seriously – this is the original image he sent.

Nice to see Jump Shopping, the guys behind the South African E commerce Awards, giving a physical recognition for winning an award.

Autostyle Motorsport has won the award for Best Automotive website in 2006, 2007  & 2008.
Will we win 2009? I sure hope so.

A layout overhaul is already underway and should be up in a few weeks time and and a few other plans are in the pipeline to keep us ahead of our competitors as well as grow our online presence.

March 2009 saw Autostyle receive its highest ever traffic, 144 000 visitors viewing 1.79million pages. I’m curious to see where we rank up on WASA (websites association of  South Africa)

click to enlarge

I started a little crowdsourcing project at Autostyle.co.za -

The contest is simple.  Design a T-Shirt for us, winning design gets a R2000 Autostyle shopping voucher.

Visit the Autostyle Blog to find out more on about this. Rules, closing time and our logo are all listed there

Why crowdsource?
For starters it’ll bring some new perspective and fresh designs.  Normally we would choose from a handful of designs for t-shirts.  Getting the public in on it brings tons of new designs and concepts.

It creates a buzz around the Autostyle brand too.   Bloggers have written about it, twitter uses have retweeted my messages, forum users discuss and exchange ideas.