www.Naeem.co.za

The Autostyle Blog is my latest project to boost our web presence.  Its been active for little over 6 months with a decently 200+ daily visitors. However since listing on Amatomu.com, South Africa’s leading blog aggregator, my new goal is to push this into the top 20 blogs of South Africa.  As i type this we are at no. 40 and a week ago held a 473 position.

Substantial growth, however as with all improvements, consistency is the key to staying on top. In todays digital age, popularity spikes are common and it’ll be quite a challenge posting new content regularly to build up a bigger readership.

Advantages are invaluable with direct customer interaction, having a blog gives a human face to a business and a platform for customers to interact and to some extent influence our product lineups.

About the theme:  I previously used a premade wordpress template, Tiju
While it was impressive and worked well, as with all my Autostyle work, eventually I prefer to design my own custom look and feel and keep things more Autostyle branded, especially the colors & layout.  While the white is new to our usual darker colors. It is much easier to read. Theres no better reading then black text on a white background

visit: blog.autostyle.co.za

This past week saw the launch of MyUmmah.co.za -  Somewhat new and dare I say unique to the South African muslim web community.   Using the Digg philosophy of user generated content and submissions.   MyUmmah allows anyone to register and post articles, links, editorials and more.   These then go into the ‘unpublished’ area.   Depending on the quality of content, visitors to the site can decide to vote for it.  The more votes it receives, the better its ranking which ultimately leads to being published as well as pushed to the top of the listing.

Quite new technology to me, i’v utilised Pligg  for the entire system. An open source script, hacked a few modifications to the look and feel.  Hopefully as time goes by I’ll modify it further.

Traffic wise it looks promising.  In the first week the site has received just over 1300 page impressions with a tad under 500 visitors.  While very little SEO work has been done, I have had the good fortune of being backed by Al-Islaah & MuslimsAtWork who’s email newsletters  have a combined membership of over 35 000 subscribers!   Incidentally I provide them with the mail sending service pro bono. 

Exciting times ahead with Drink Nos finally taking shape.  We (myself, Autostyle and Raceline) have secured the rights to distribute the Drink Nos range of energy drinks in South Africa.  

The website went live last nite with a handfull of changes left to do. A massive print & online campaign is planned.  Huge collaborations with Autostyle Online, Speed & Sound Magazine as well as hard work and lots of dedication will bring this to the mainstream.  Yes we are competing with a certain bull which loves to fly.

The site is my design, my lecturer at SA Photo College, Udo, assisted in creating the stunning photographs of the various drinks. 

About the website:  Its completely CMS driven, with all pages accessable through a secure backend section. This allows myself or my colleagues to easily edit and update infomation without the need of an html editor or even html knowledge. A WYSIWYG editor is thrown in to make editing a breeze.  Opted to outsourced the programming bit and using MSN with an overseas freelancer, in less then a day we had a complete website!  Given there are a few key updates which will make its way online as soon as the various documents and signed and submitted.

About the product:  Well visit the website for more,  in a nutshell.  Cans are bigger then competitors, one flavour has a resealable bottle, while I stand to be corrected, is the ONLY energy drink which has this feature.  Tastes alot like passion fruit with no bitter aftertaste commonly found with other drinks.

Check it out @ http://www.drinknos.co.za/

Anyone who knows me, knows www.autostyle.co.za is my baby which I’v nurtured since 2000.��
What started as a basic online company profile soon became our product catalogue.� Between 2000 and 2004 there has been several design changes but all sported the same 100+page html backend.� Not the most efficient or standardised method but hey, it got the job done.

In June 2005, we launched a full blow online ecommerce store and� in mid 2006 I gave this a slick new facelift.� Having overseen the backend development, I chose to allow I-Group to design the front end look & feel.�� Now I’m not saying they did a bad job, it worked, it worked well for 10 months but the time had come for a new design and this time I made it a point to improve the layout, colors & general feel of the website.

Today, the stats read:
96 000 monthly visits
1.6 million monthly page impressions
12800 registered shoppers
27540 e-newsletter subscribers
Google Ranking of 5 and counting.

Fitting that we receive the award for 2006 Best Automotive Website, beating the likes of Autotrader, McArthy and more.

Now thats how we start the new year!