Durban Website Designers

Freezing cold in Durban today - well, by Durbs standards anyway. Pouring with rain. A rare day to stay indoors.

We don’t get too many days like this in Durban and they afford the opportunity to remember days in England as a child - when there were too many days like this.

Joomla

Anyway, let me get Joomla out of the way first.

If, like most website designers, you design the template first and then fill it with content, Joomla will confound you. It confounded me which is why after playing with it several times over the years, I gave up on it. The idea of populating all the pages and then deciding what the site was going to look like was one that I couldn’t grasp.

Anyway, a couple of jobs came along fairly close together that required Joomla so I thought it would be the only way to learn the damn thing. One was a site of around 40 pages for a local operation. The other was a completely different beast and involved a migration from an existing site.

The first website (right) was for a local home schooling operation. It came through at about the same time that Joomla moved from version 1.0 to 1.5. I decided to use 1.0 because 1.0 was well supported and would continue to be so for some time. It was also likely that 1.5 would be full of problems. That was nearly a year ago and the client still has not come up with the final content. The site was 90% complete by March 2008.

I have been over there three times, there has been change of contact person and a change back to the original contact. I have told them that if I have to go back again, I will charge them.

The second site was developed using Joomla 1.5 because the client wanted open source and 1.5, with all its teething troubles will eventually be the main version. The client is an international NGO so the site will be busy. The problem with this job was the migration from the original website. Apart from being a god-awful thing, there was a basement chock a block full of all sorts of nasties. There were more than 4,000 links coming out of the site.  Several sections of the NGO had got so fed up that they had started their own websites but hadn’t quite dragged themselves completely away from the main site.  Several website designers had quoted and withdrawn after seeing what was involved.

My own quotation quadrupled as I found more and more stuff. The problem of course was that I knew that there was a lot I didn’t know. Still, it was a challenge.

The other challenges are not technical. There are ten people actively contributing to the site and there is a rapid staff turnaround. The contact I was dealing with first, left in April. The big boss changed over in August. The office manager there changed and my current contact is leaving at the end of September and the client still owes the balance of the bill.

Fortunately, my contact is excellent, fends off a lot of trouble from the contributors and learns quickly.

Joomla Websites

A lot of people learn Joomla from scratch it seems. What is also apparent is that they have little idea of site structure, layout, graphic design and quality content. There are seemingly thousands of dreadful Joomla websites out there. Frequent problems include poor alignment of components, substandard graphics and the usual problem with Joomla - we have all this stuff so we’ll throw it all onto the front page. The result is a pig’s dinner of redundant and unnecessary rubbish.

Joomla is ’simple’. Yeah, right.

It is patently NOT simple. However, if time is taken to master it - or at least get reasonably familiar with it, it is very powerful. But, as mentioned above, because there are something like 3,500 addons, every one gets tried and squeezed in.

Design is a problem with such content management systems. I can usually tell whether a website has been designed using one by the ‘blocky’ appearance of the pages. There is no room for clever design and it takes real knowledge of Joomla to produce something that is understated.

Search optimization is another challenge with Joomla. Yes, there is Search Engine Friendly mode and there are SEF addons but it still doesn’t offer me the freedom to really get a website SEF.

The end of a fairly typical week I suppose.

On Monday, unusually, I had two appointments. The first was the employer of a friend who had expressed an interest in a having a website designed. I had to go to Kloof and was bowling up Fields Hill behind a couple of cars, doing about 90kph when this white 4×4 drives right up my rear and starts flashing its lights.

If there’s one thing that’s going to get me to co-operate its having a plonker up the rear flashing his lights, The hill was busy as usual, we were doing a fair speed and I was blowed if I was going to move. So I gave the character the usual sign which resulted in a variety of expostulations behind his wheel.

Right - so two can play.

I slowed to 40kph - in the fast lane mind you. Then selected second and accelerated. Now the Red Rattler, the 1987 Golf 16V may be elderly but it can take off. I left the idiot 400m behind trying to find a gear.

Nevertheless, he passes me on the inside on the last bend and flies off. Talk about survival of the fittest on the roads in this country. It gets worse as time goes on.

Anyway, I had prepared a quotation which was gone through minutely and was told to wait for a reply - maybe. I could acommodate all the prospect’s requirements bar one. He wanted to be able to automatically decrement a number as a candidate enrolled for a course. Couldn’t see any off the peg PHP scripts so I told him he would have to engage a custom PHP coder.

In the afternoon, I had to go to Umhlanga to another prospect. I was given directions that took me behind Gateway and I couldn’t find this wretched place.  It took three calls until it appeared. After the meeting I asked for the best way out and it turned out that this crowd were practically on a major road to Durban - within 50m!

Workwise, there have been several jobs on the go.

I’m doing a Joomla site for a client - in fact two Joomla websites for two clients. One is version 1.0 and the other, version 1.5.

Now, Joomla is the pre-eminent open source content management system (CMS) - and with some reason - but I’ll talk about this in the next post.

The other job is the development of another website design website for the business. I have four domains but I will let one lapse. This is the third but I have another - website-designers.co.za that has been filled with some old content from the original website - warthog.co.za for about a year.

I always wanted to do a grey website - different shades with a contrasting colour. In this case, maroon, although I might make it another colour as it may conflict with the visited link colour.

I came upon this in my archives yesterday.  It typifies the actions of both public and private concerns:

In the beginning was the plan

And then came the assumptions

And the assumptions were without form

And the plan was completely without substance

And darkness was upon the faces of the workers

And they spake amongst themselves saying

“It is a crock of shit and it stinketh”

And the workers went to the planners and sayeth

“It is a pile of dung and none may abide the odour thereof”

And the supervisors went to the managersand sayeth unto them

“It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide its strength”

And the managers went to the directors and sayeth

“It contains that which aids growth and is very strong” 

And the directors went to the vice president and sayeth

“It promoteth growth and it is very powerful”

And the Vice President went to the President and sayeth unto him

“This powerful new plan will actively promote

the growth and efficiency of the department”

And the President looked upon the plan and saw that it was good

And the Plan became policy.

 Some websites are not too much different.

In big corporations, a number of areas will have their finger in the website design pie.

There will be sales, marketing, design, customer service, IT all having their six pennorth. Let’s not forget the MD who, not to be eclipsed, has his own - mistaken - views on things. The end result is a mishmash of marketing hype and redundant content that lost its focus months before. Finally, the poor sod who’s the website designer has to cobble this clown’s trousers into a website.

Yes, there are plenty of small operations with dreadful websites but that is for a different reason. Usually they don’t appreciate the advantages of their website and they get bamboozled by smooth talking webbies promising them tsunamis of traffic if they would only get out of the Stone Age.

Big corporations make mistakes not because of lack of talent, knowledge or funds but in a similar way to small business, they do not appreciate what makes a successful website.

Moral? Focus on your visitor.