We launched Pomegranite in the year that I turned 28. Which means that Pomegranite’s 12th birthday is also my 40th – just three days apart, if you’re counting.

There’s nothing like a milestone birthday to make you think about the ways in which you can spend a life. The writer, Zadie Smith, says, “Time is how you spend your love,”… and I suppose that work is how you spend your passion. Or it can be, if you’re lucky.

Have you ever tried to navigate a website with your eyes closed? Or on a laptop without a mouse? Accessibility is about more than good UX or ticking a compliance box – it’s about empathy and creating a digital space that welcomes everyone.

Clients often come to us wanting to update their website and are unsure whether they want to revamp or ‘reskin’ the site (i.e. use the current theme and structure and replace text and images), or whether they want to rebuild the site (build the site afresh on a clean WordPress install with a new theme, look and feel).

For almost as long as Pomegranite has been in existence, the annual Kingsmead Book Fair has been one of the highlights on our work calendar – a website we love furnishing with each new theme and author lineup; a social media calendar we delight in crafting; an event we dream about live posting both before and after the spectacular reality of the day itself.

Our society is responding to the rapid uptake of AI technologies in everyday tools in real time. We’ll look back and talk about how we first used and felt about AI. For some, AI conjures uncertainty – they’re the ones asking “Aren’t you worried about ChatGPT taking your job?” around the braai. For others, these tools are just another thread in the digital fabric of their day, making things quicker and easier. All of us probably underestimate how much it has touched our lives.

There are some tasks that are big, complex and important but not urgent. They easily fall to the bottom of your to-do list because they can’t be done in one go and they tend to hang around for a long time. It’s easy to start getting despondent about ever feeling the rush of crossing that sucker out.

Keyboards are an often overlooked aspect of ergonomics, which is a pity, given how many of us spend a lot of our workdays pecking away at these devices. Read more about finding the right keyboard for you.

Display Purposes is, as they describe it, an “advanced Instagram tool to unleash your Instagram potential and get more eyes on your profile”.

When we transitioned to working remotely, for the most part, we were quite conscious about finding tangible ways to weave the things we loved from our office culture into an online space so that we still felt connected.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Slack Masterclass, which focused on how to optimise internal comms within any company using Slack’s features. The class covered three main topics, and below I’ll discuss some of my favourite points from each.

September marked my five years at Pomegranite and it got me thinking about my colourful journey as an employee, from little 14-year-old me trying to earn some extra pocket money at the local stationary store to new product development at a dairy manufacturer with my best cousin (don’t tell the other 44) to Pomegranite (and a whole lot more in between). 

On 25 September it will have been five years since Melissa’s first day at Pomegranite. Five whole years of her Monica Gellar-level efficiency, dead-pan humour, expert spreadsheet-ing, kind support, and “safe” hands. Could we be any luckier?

Pomegranite has been building school websites for more than 10 years, and they remain some of our favourite sites to create. When we approach a project like this, we do so very intentionally, starting with the question: How can we capture this school’s unique magic in a way that really lands with their target audience?

An online resource library can be a key way to offer value to your target audience – but how do you design a knowledge hub that’s user-friendly and accessible?

One of my favourite things about being a Pomegranite is our systems. We review them almost daily and making an improvement to one of our processes…well that just gives me all the feels.

Feeling overwhelmed is a completely normal part of life. The trick is working our way out of getting stuck there. These strategies are helpful tactics to gain a little shift in perspective and keep moving forward with what we need to do. 

The title of my most recent skills share was:

Poetry.
(Again, I know. Sorry. Sort of.)

As you can see, it’s not the first time the team has been treated to a jaunt down this lane. My reasoning is not just that I love poetry. It’s that it’s such an interesting way to look at and think about language and meaning, and the ways you can bend it.

Graphic design can be a daunting task if you’re someone who doesn’t consider themselves a designer, but there are so many tools out there that can help you out on the daily, and make your workflow faster. In this post I’ve outlined 10 design-type tools everyone can use to make their processes a little easier.

We’re looking to find and partner with the right freelancers to work with us on future graphic design projects on a remote basis. We work with foundations, NGOs, changemakers and the education sector to tell their story through websites and social media.

We’re looking to find and partner with the right freelancers to work with us on future social media projects on a remote basis. We work with foundations, NGOs, changemakers and the education sector to tell their story through websites and social media.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago that – not to be too dramatic – shifted the axis of my life a bit.

It was with my friend Meg, and it was about self-care.

Wait wait – I usually glaze over at the use of that word too, but don’t go yet. This is quite interesting.

How do you use AI? It’s become an honorary member of social and marketing teams almost everywhere. It’s embedded in Canva, where Reels, text and art can be created with unique prompts, as well as Hootsuite, where text generation can be used for new content. Generative AI is available on social media platforms too, where LinkedIn now encourages users to “Start a post, try writing with AI” at the top of the main feed.

For my recent skillshare – the last one of the year – I decided to test the Pomegranite team on some of the 2024 social media trends we can expect to see.

Last week, our Operations Manager, Melissa, sent a link to our “show-and-tell” Slack channel about Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 – a term for “something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever”.

Forget the newest development in Taylor Swift’s relationship status, the latest travel trend you won’t believe – this is my clickbait.

The Meta Agency Summit was a really interesting online event held with the goal of helping agencies use the Meta platform better. I attended it on the Wednesday evening of its launch, and had to report back to the rest of the team about what I’d learned, because there were so many great points and takeaways that I’d like us to use for ourselves and our clients.