Durban Website Designers

Well, there are two other machines in the house but I like using the laptop. And now for the finale to the laptop power supply saga . . .

An SMS arrives telling me that Santa has arrived with the power supply so I present myself at HiFi Corp Service centre with receipt grubbily in hand. I am confronted with the sight of a woman screaming “You stupid TW*T” across the counter. The * was not an ‘I’ BTW - and this from a woman. The guy in front is demanding his money back for his defective Philips DVD player. I tell him that mine went back to the local agent twelve times in 12 months. The man’s demands grow more strident.

Paperwork is exchanged and signed and the little packet containing the offending article is handed over like a priceless R399 antique. So, now we’re in business and the woman is glaring at the assembled hopefuls.

So, where were we?

A little ray of hope.

Weeds from an empty lot are growing on our electric fence. Anyone who has had the misfortune to have to call City Health knows of the terminal frustration and impending futility coming down the pike. No-one answers the phone and when, a dozen calls later you get an email address, no-one answers that either.

However, a man and helper turned up out of the blue on Monday to examine said fence. Let’s see whether they lean on the owner of this large plot - who, incidentally, whilst having a postal address, has no phone or fax.

Work

I’m reworking this website. It has good search position but not enough enquiries which means that there is something wrong with it - possibly the home page.

Looking at it after a year I would have to say that its too long. So, it is being shortened by at least half. Trouble is that half a page means half the information - that’s needed for humans and search engines. So the task is to design a page that has loads of info but doesn’t have the wall to wall appearance of most websites.

I also have a sneaking idea that dark background colours are intimidating to some people so the colour scheme will change too. Should be about two weeks.

Many years ago, I was approached by several people, independently of one another, to assess a number of curricula for website design courses. Local colleges offered these courses either on a fulltime or part-time basis.

I found that all the curricula were, at first sight, impressive. A long list of very arcane techie-terms. Wow, I’m going to hit the ground sprinting after this course!

A closer look established that a lot of the items would either never be used by the student or would be used so very rarely - and at a high technical level - as to render them useless.

Although the bulk of the work across my desk is designing websites, I decided to offer a website design course. In this case, there would be substantial differences with the commercial courses. Firstly, the curriculum would cover the sort of stuff that would be used on a daily basis by a website designer. It would also not be restricted to ‘a’larnin’ HTML’ but also include online marketing, search optimization, criteria for assessing a website’s usabililty.

Another change would be that the tuition would not be of the ‘Open your books at Chapter 23 . . ‘ type but would be individual. Both the content and the speed of tuition would be geared to a student’s expectations, requirements and ability.

Since then, there have been students with programming backgrounds but no graphics knowledge, students with graphics background and no coding knowledge and students with neither of the foregoing. The worst of course are those with ‘I have done a bit of webdesigning and just want to brush up’. In other words, Front Page. There’s always a huge wrestle with these.

One of the most frutrating types of students, which I have all but stopped are those sent by their boss to learn how to ‘tweak’ the company website. They can’t do it of course.

There is always a demand for the course, which is good and there’s always a demand for evenings/weekends. This we don’t do. There is a limit to how much time we want to spend on the machinery. Also, the students generally come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings which gives them time to develop questions for the next session.

The latest student was of the ‘I don’t know nuthin’ about computers’ type. Brilliant!

She asked - as do others - what she might learn. The answer is always the same - “confidence”. The course gives students the confidence to attack a website project knowing where to go from the beginning. There is no meandering about trying to extract questionable resources from hither and yon.

Students are also given all the good resource websites and a disc of software and ebooks.

A slightly different website design this time. The client makes handmade soaps - the original recipe as great granny might have made it type. The client has also been hinting for some time about getting it done and then changing a bunch of things so the incentive to finish the thing was somewhat less than compelling.

I decided on an Edwardian style to emphasize the ‘old fashioned’ nature of the product. Most handmade soap makers go for the ‘ecofriendly cottage craft’ approach, full of earthy colours and leaves.

I have several old Victorian books and magazines so the artwork was based on those. A single colour background with watermark graphics and a few flourishes. I went against my usual tendency to use sans serif graphics and used Bookman Old Style/Times New Roman.

It’s not quite finished yet but looks uncluttered yet with an Edwardian ambience.

I am trying, as years ago, to use a single stylesheet and it almost worked this time but good old IE6 fouled things up as usual. I used to design for IE6 and then fiddle around with the other browsers. Now I design for Mozilla and fiddle IE into shape.

In this case, there were a few positioning problems and getting the footer graphic aligned with the top graphic. Because the bulk of the stylesheet was fine, I used Microsoft’s IE conditional statements to insert MSIE styles into the sheet. A year ago, I would use a browser sniffer and two stylesheets.

The site is search friendly. The title text is real text and there are additional keywords under that. Other than the word ‘TRADITIONAL’, every piece of text is real text. It’s only been up a couple of days and Google hasn’t found it yet but I’ll keep you up to date.

A Bleat

Apologies to both my readers for the enforced absence.

I normally write this on my laptop, sitting in bed, late at night. However, the power supply went ‘phut’ a few weeks ago. This was not the original HP power supply - that went ‘phut’ several years ago - this was a HiFiCorp replacement generic thing.

I could have used one of the other machines but it wouldn’t have been the same now would it? Anyway, to my most pleasant surprise, after a bit of impromptu digging for the receipt, that it was two days within its guarantee. This is a real first. It’s usually the other way around.

So I hotfoot off to Springfield where there was much examining and noting about the guarantee. I was told that it would have to go away and that the repair would be 7 - 10 days. 12 days later, I enquire and get the ‘I’m afraid it has to go to Joburg’ story. Not putting up with this, I get the number for the service folk in said Joburg.

It transpires that on the 29th May, they still haven’t got the thing and eventually find that it’s been sitting in the repair area in HiFi Corp until May 28th. It’s now 11th June and I am told by HiFiCorp that I may just get it next week if Saturn doesn’t annoy Jupiter.

This is a thing the size of a tiny box of chocolates. What I might, if I’m lucky get is not a repair but a replacement for a gadget that cost all of R399.