We’ve recently created this brand and website for Virgin Holidays company Travel City Direct.

The website is to inform and assist families traveling to Florida and Disney World. A fully content managed platform features specially commissioned videos on location to accompany each page of the site and even a forum to encourage user to contribute and share tips.

Its been really well received by press and public alike, check it out for yourself here www.floridababy.co.uk

Some snaps from the 2011 photoshoot for Mark at Hugo Morris, art directing at his place is a pleasure being surrounded by such lovely garments.

After a few previous lacklustre ads (by their standards), Honda back on form with this zeitgeisty little number.

Our work with Avery made it onto GQ.com this month. Read here

This is a great article for all us designers to contribute to, to help our future creatives. Via

Tuesday May 25th and Avery finally opened the doors to its new store in the heart of London’s Mayfair district. We’ve worked with internationally acclaimed creative director Lilian Driessen to launch this brand. Check out the website we designed and built here and the interior below.

Custom designed WordPress blogs are the easiest way to promote your destination, upload great content, photos and videos through Flickr, twitter, YouTube and many more Social Media applications. Spread the workload and enrich your blog with multiple authors, from the core marketing team to your roving reporter, publishing a new post is easy, even for a novice, and only takes a few minutes.

Some of the amazing features of a WordPress blog include, up-to-the-minute stats about your visitors, whilst the ‘Pages’ features turns your blog into a fully content managed website, allowing you to add corporate content such as ‘About Us’ or ‘Bookings’. Available in 50 languages, with a community of 18 million worldwide, and perhaps the most cost effective method of publishing on the net, a custom blog is a simple choice.

The blogs featured in the image above can be visited live here:

Pv-Holidays Blog

Visit Guernsey Blog

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We are always on the look out for talented individuals. If you are a graphic designer, web designer or web developer then please feel free to get in touch.

If you are interested in working with Republique on a freelance basis then please send an email to simon@republiquedesign.co.uk with the following details:

• Your contact details & CV
• An overview of the graphic design or web development experience you’ve had
• A PDF version of your portfolio or link to your online portfolio
• An outline of your charges and standard turn around times

Please note that we do not work with recruitment agencies.

If you’re responsible for a destination blog, here are a few tips to help you get the best out of WordPress. With an abundance of plugins its difficult to know where to start, and what works. All the tips below are chosen for their reliability and ease of use, they offer you the chance to gain more exposure and create a more enjoyable/rewarding experience for your viewers. Feel free to let us know of any Plugins we havn’t included that could really boost your destination blog.

WP125 (Advertising)

This is the easy way to get started with managing ads on your blog. If your not into automated ad networks such as AdSense and your priority is promoting your own brand, then WP125 maybe the best ad managing tool for you. Simple to configure, you can choose the layout of  your ad space, show as many or little ads as you like and even pre-determine the period of display (no more out of date ads!).

More importantly, WP125 will provide details of the ads click history.

AddThis (Social Media)

Whilst really scratching the surface of social media plugins, this is perhaps the one to get started with. The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows your users to bookmark your site easily with over 200 popular services, and to share it with friends via email. Our button is small, unobtrusive, quick to load and recognized all over the web.

If you sign up for a free AddThis.com account, you can see how your visitors are sharing your content: which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more.

Please keep an eye on our blog for future posts explaining social media, and the best ways to make it work for the Travel & Tourism industry.

Google Analyticator

Downloaded 7000 time on the week prior this post, and 732,000 time in all, this is a heavyweight in the world of WP-plugins. Google Analyticator easily adds Google Analytics tracking support to a WordPress-powered blog. Google Analyticator also comes with an easily customizable widget that can be used to display specific information that is gathered by Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API. It supports all of the tracking mechanisms that Google Analytics supports such as external link tracking, download tracking, tracking without counting administrative users, and any other advanced tracking the user wishes to add.

RSS

WordPress come with a RSS sidebar widget as standard. It’s very easy to use and quite simply pulls in relevant content of your choice, and displays a pre-determined amount of post headlines in your sidebar. There are more sophisticated RSS plugins available, but if your new to the concept, give this a go first. After all the content is live with no archiving, so if you want to upgrade in the future, there’s nothing to loose.

Flickr Gallery

This plugin will allow you to quickly and easily incorporate your Flickr photos into your WordPress pages and posts. You can display a quick gallery of your recent photos, photosets and most popular photos, display photos from a custom search, or specific group or photoset.

This is great for displaying up-to-date photos for any given venue/location, in a nut shell, when you update your flickr photos, you automatically update your blog!

Google Maps for WordPress

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Maps into your blog. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type (street view, satellite, etc), activate zoom using mouse wheel, and more.

Opinion Polls

Another standard feature of WordPress, adding an opinion poll to your blog encourages interaction with your visitors and provides you with essential feedback. Adding a poll will set you back 2 minutes and who know what you might discover!

WP-Email (Send to a friend)

Simple but effective. WP-Email allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. For those who would rather not (or can’t be bothered) to open their email application, copy and paste a URL, WP-Email does the trick.

Thank Me Later

Thank Me Later (TML) will automatically send an e-mail to your those who leave a comment at your blog. Use this plugin to say ‘Thanks’ to your visitors, and prompt them to further engage with your blog. TML is highly configurable. It allows you to create multiple e-mail messages and to send the message after a pre-defined amount of time, making messages appear more unique and people-friendly. This is great for encouraging further interaction with your blog, whilst providing a direct promotional opportunity to visitors, more importantly the email will be timely, sent whilst the visitor has your brand in mind!

WordPress PDA & iPhone

WordPress PDA plugin enables the wordpress blog viewable for PDA and iPhone browsers. It is really simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of wordpress theme.

WP-Weather

Weather.com widget – shows up-to-date forecast information for a location. Displays image related to current conditions. This is a great little addition to any location based post, if your promoting last minute holidays in the Sun, there’s nothing like real time weather info.

Commissioned by VisitNorway.com, www.visitnorwayblog.co.uk is a multi-language blog dedicated to the awesome phenomenon that is the Northern Lights otherwise know as Aurora Borealis. The content of the blog is simultaneously populated by 6 Norwegian press offices across Europe and the USA. Fans from across the globe can browse through the blog and contribute their thoughts to this jaw dropping event.

The project saw Republique create a custom WordPress design, and apply a number on useful plugins, including a great sidebar gallery feature, social bookmarking, multi-language administration, and auto browser language detection.

Feedback from the blog

“Hey I landed on your page by chance on msn while trying to find something really unrelated but I am really happy that I did, You have just caught yourself another subscriber. “

“I want to thank the blogger very much not only for this post but also for his all previous efforts. I found www.visitnorwayusablog.co.uk to be greatly interesting. I will be coming back to www.visitnorwayusablog.co.uk for more information.”