Durban Website Designers

I get a client who is unusual. He is happy with what I produce the first time he sees it. He has all his content reasonably put together and paginated and he has a full complement of graphics and knows where he wants them. Oh, and there’s no quibbling about the fee. He also has no unreasonable expectations of his position on Google for the first few months. He also expects there to be loose ends that will be tidied up in the first week or so of the website going live.

Contrast that with most clients who have no idea what they want on each page and if they did, they wouldn’t have the content anyway. Such content as he provides is of the most poor quality, insufficient both in quantity and in content and it takes months  to get to that point. The graphics are scanned from magazines, the logo is presented on a business card and there is a quibble about the fee.

Having a client that is jacked up is not only good for you, it’s good for the client. I feel that I now have some spare time to devote to extra work for him that will really polish the website. Rather than trying to remember where you were months down the line when some bit of desultory content dribbles in - and also the ‘now how/why did I do that?’. The organized client will get a top notch website, the other will get a so-so website because after months of silence, you have lost enthusiasm.

Having an organized client means it’s much easier to organize yourself.

Basically - Vote for any Party but the ANC, even if you support them.

Got this in the mail the other day and it is passed on without comment.

I don’t normally get involved in politics, but this should ring true for every South African! Read and pass on to every person proud to own a green passport! quite like living in South Africa, now is quite an important time for you.
Instead of using clichés like “the future is in your hands..” or “make your mark, let your voice be heard!” and other ineffective drivel, I am going to just draw your attention to the following:

Bob Mugabe had to amend the constitution of Zimbabwe to allow him to remain in power as president, long after he had reached his intellectual sell-by-date. (Before this, as in all “democracies”, there was a limit to the number of terms which a president could serve). Having changed it once, he did it again. Then he was on a roll. The rest of the story we all know very well. With hindsight, we can see that had he been prevented from taking the first step, the whole sub-Saharan part of Africa would have been spared quite a lot of bother.

It seems to have flown. I still haven’t done what I had hoped to do. The reason being that I have been requested to modify and update a number of existing websites. There has also, for some reason been an avalanche of queries for websites which has necessitated meetings hither and yon - about eight in the last two weeks.

Before I forget - a gripe concerning that embarrassment of a national airline. After being bust for drug smuggling into Heathrow twice in four weeks under the heading ‘why don’t they learn?’, I see that SAA may be in danger of losing its landing rights there. I think that they should remove them to focus their attention, particularly before 2010. It’s a disgrace make them land at Southend.

Several years ago I flew to Bangkok on an airplane that appraently predated Bleriot’s. The thing stank, rattled and a sizeable number of the overhead bins failed to lock.

We were sitting in exit seats adjacent to the door to get leg room and were ordered to move our belongings in a very rude and aggressive manner by the cabin attendant. At the safety briefing, she was absent (a breach of international aviation law I would think) and left the other cabin attendants rolling their eyes and shaking their heads.

Just before the plane left Joburg an oriental fellow boarded and with no room left overhead, was told to leave his carryon behind the seat adjacent to the bulkhead. He was three rows forward and to the left. On arrival in Bangkok the next morning, his money and passport were missing. I would lay bets on who lifted them during the night. The general cabin service was execrable - and I had it all to look forward to on the return leg, which proved to be equally disagreeable.

After that, I refused to travel SAA long haul. Just the other day at OR Tambo on the way back from India, we were 5kgs overweight according to the weighbridge at the checkin. I had weighed the luggage and knew we were close - but not 5kgs. Never mind, the check in individual refused to chek the two bags in unless the R130 or so was paid for at the SAA counter.

While I was doing that, he let a black couple on with 60kgs of baggage (according to my wife who read the scale) notwithstanding the fact that they also had the bit of paper with the amount overweight on. Unfortunately a) I didn’t see it and b) we were close to boarding for Durbs otherwise I would have had his supervisor down, demanded an explanation and had the bags retrieved from handling. Coincidentally, in the local Joburg paper on the flight, there was a huge complaint about a related issue from an irate passenger.

On tonight’s Carte Blanche we have yet another ‘official’ telling us all very gravely that ‘Yes, there is a problem’ and that ‘There is a lot of work to be done’. Yet again, another incompetent backside is occupying an expensive leather chair that could be better utilized. We are never told who is doing this ‘work’, what the nature of the ‘work’ is, what the expected end result of all this ‘work’ is, what the projected timeline for all this ‘work’ is. Time after time on Carte Blanche these fat backsides tell us in a condescending tone with as much gravitas as they can muster that there is a ‘problem’ but things are in hand - I could suggest what might be better employed in their hands.

In amongst these debacles with SAA, the ex CEO is being investigated for his shambolic management. Who gave this character the job? What were his credentials - and did they have the slightest bearing on the actual responsibilities required?  Who also applied for the position? etcetera . . .

Very reluctantly.

Been back more than a week now. Last week was spent dealing with website design enquiries, spam and assorted gripes. This week I thought I would be getting on with work.

Joomla - again

I am putting together a website using Joomla 1.5.8 and although the site design is fine, the time it is taking to do simple things is making me tear my hair out - particularly when I compare it with the productivity of static websites.

Chief culprit on all the Joomla sites I have done is page rerendering after editing. You have to go through hoops to get the new page up.  Anyone who does websitre design knows that the processis iterative. Make a change - check - make another change etc. Joomla is all well and good but if I don’t get this fixed, I’m going to Drupal or similar although they don’t have all the doodads of Joomla. As long as when you make a change, you can see it. I’ve put a post on the forum but I am not holding my breath. To make matters worse, the error is not consistent - occasionally, the thing works.

Summary of the Trip

Well, now 10 days have elapsed, it’s time to assess the trip. Was it worth it? Of course. Main impressions of India - dirt, noise and intrusive touts. Would we go back?  Yes but to a different area - the south. There are other places I would rather visit in the meantime - Cuba for a start. Before the Yanks stuff it up.

I have put 4hrs of tape onto disc and am in the process of extracting stills to flesh out the blog entries. Give me 2 weeks.

I swore I would not bleat about things here after India, at least for a week - and that’s gone so I can whinge and here goes. . .

Orange Juice

Whatever happened to orange juice. We produce thousands of tons of the things but try and find pure 100% orange juice. You’ll find 100% juice, 100% fruit juice blend but I know of only one supplier of 100% orange juice without cheap extender. The other stuff is packaged into Breakfast Punch and Berry Blaze & etc. This means the juice they have left over. If I want lychee juice, I want lychee juice not mixed with deflavoured apple juice. It’s only there because it’s cheaper than lychee juice. I won’t opine on the diabolic mixture of dairy products and fruit juice.

This is another sad example of being dictated to by the big food cartels in SA. I have see numbers of apparently popular food items come and go over the years. Unfortunately they almost always seem to be replaced by junk - or simply disappear.

SA Passports

The news of the day. After warning that chronically unmitigated disaster of the Department of Home Affairs to get its house in order, the UK has clamped down so SA citizens will now add R900 to their travel bill because of rampant, unabated and galactically out of control mismanagement and corruption. Three other countries now also require visas - wonder who they were?

Durban Street Renaming

I see that the ‘black sprayers’ are still spraying the new signs. I’ll donate a couple of cans of black paint. Messrs Sutcliffe, Naidoo & Co. seem to live in the stratospheric layer of society where the good burghers talk with big numbers about ‘development’, ’social upliftment’ and similar. I bet that when gathered together with their pinkies in the air during afternoon numnums that they don’t talk about Metro Police corruption, potholes, the latest score at the Musgrave/Berea Road intersection, verges that would do Umfolozi proud, gutters full of filth and similar.