A few digital bits… and shout out to South Africa!

Ok who gets excited about websites?

I mean, it makes sense if you’re into branding or design. Or if you’re in the marketing game (hi, Scott). Or if UX is your jam, so to speak.

But I’ve been part of a few website projects, and it can feel like you spend months on end tinkering away, moving words around, changing images, and debating where things end up… just for most people to scroll through without giving stuff a second thought.

Maybe I’m being cynical. A solid website does pay dividends in the end, and we’ve got a decent dose of that going on at the moment… So I’m told!

And I suppose that matters more than ever now. People don’t hang around online. If something doesn’t make sense within a few seconds, they’re gone. Onto the next tab, the next supplier, the next whatever.

So when it does start to click, you feel it.

Certain sections and corners of our site are starting to behave exactly how we hoped they would. Nothing dramatic, may I add. No sudden flood of overnight success or baffling blog virality. But it’s pulling its weight…

People are finding us, sticking around, and generally getting a better sense of what we do without us having to explain it fifteen times over.

Which is pretty damn handy when you run a business like ours.

It’s taken a while to get there. (Longer than I’d have liked, if I’m honest). But that’s usually the way with these things. You don’t really notice the progress while you’re in it – but when you lift your head up you realise things are a bit more joined up than they were six months ago.

And once you’ve got something working in one place, you immediately decide to do it all over again somewhere else.

So… to South Africa.

We’ve just rolled out a dedicated version of our website there. Not a copy-and-paste job, but not a total reinvention either…

More a case of taking what we know works and shaping it properly for that market. Different emphasis and use cases, a bit of careful rewriting so it actually lands as intended. Makes sense, to be fair. It might look familiar in places – because some of it is – but the detail underneath is where the real work’s gone in.

And it feels like the right time to be doubling down out there. Despite all the well-documented challenges – power, logistics, rural crime, you name it – there’s a huge amount of energy in that market. Businesses are adapting quickly, and there’s a real appetite to do things properly rather than just patching over problems.

And this web project’s been a really good exercise, actually.

Courtney has been right in the thick of it on the marketing side – learning as she goes, getting stuck into SEO, doing all the bits that nobody really teaches you properly until you’re in it.

And Danna has been doing what Danna does: refusing to let things drift, making sure plans take shape properly.

The South African arm of our business is starting to stand on its own two feet commercially, which is a big moment when you think about where it was a couple of years ago. And having its own dedicated site feels like real substance in that.

So a huge shout out to those two for their hard work.

And I’ll ask again: who gets excited about websites?

Me, it turns out.

Anyway – if you’re curious, the new site is live now: https://www.smoke-screen.co.za/.