One of the reasons why this site has been so neglected with no new content is that I/we’ve been incredibly busy with a few projects. The one I’m announcing in this post, is the birth of eFrog Digital Design – our brand new premium WordPress theme shop.

Another theme shop. Yeah. But while there are dozens of generic theme shops all over the web, we are a little different. I’m obviously biased in saying we have some good talent here, so visit the site to see what I mean. And we have George for goodness sake! George is the frog, and our mascot :)

This post has been in my drafts for a while, so I’ve had to edit a bit to make it seem like its news on the bleeding edge. Well, bleeding edge for me meaning not too old for purpose :P A lot of people that check this blog will already know about eFrog, but remember that its still news if its news to you.

So have a click around the site. Let us know what you think. We always love any feedback. I’m very proud of the team that made it happen. To you guys: Sue Rutherford, Christopher Mills, Mark Bloomfield, Barry Roodt, André van Rooyen & Rou Mills, I tip my hat and raise my glass. Heres to a great future of continually producing awesome themes.

Sorry if you’re old school enough to like your content fresh and helpful, but this post is just my self indulgent way of documenting stuff.

The team I work with is quite small (but awesome!), and project work flow generally goes faster if the design and front-end development isn’t both done by me. Since at the moment I’m the only one doing front-end, unfortunately I don’t really get to design websites as often as I would ideally like. Although, changes are a-brewing, which will free me to do more design work, which I’m chomping at the bit to do.

I know you care deeply…

So even though Cape Accommodation‘s redesign went live a long time ago, and looking at it now there are already quite a few things I’d change – I’m putting it up here because I designed it. I warned you it was self indulgent :)

The original site looked like this:

Almost 10 years old, the site acted as mainly a feeder directory for a more substantial site. With no database (yes, that meant manual updating of HTML), and an almost unusable navigation that listed endless properties by only one criteria at a time, it was my job to come up with something that was way more current, usable, and added lots of functionality.

Using WordPress and with a design brief that I had to use the colours orange and blue (honestly, not my favourite colour combination) I tried to keep it as clean as possible while still giving it some vibrancy.

The most important functionality to add was for decent ways to search for accommodation on the site. It needed to be able to drill down from multiple search criteria. Since WordPress isn’t brilliant at this, I was grateful for the SQL and PHP skillz of colleague Christopher Mills to get this vibing. Apart from that I introduced a visual way of searching where possible with JQuery thumbnails for regions & activities, advertisement slots, and a JQuery featured property section in the sidebar, amongst a bunch of other cool stuff.

So to you, the legend who read till the end of this post, I salute you. You poor bastard.