Durban Website Designers

Warthog has been around since 1997 and is in its 5th reincarnation. This however is still about 8 years old - light years in terms of the Internet. CSS had just arrived and all the tricks that browsers recognized were employed. The stylesheet is monstrous and around 40kb. I did tweak it a few years ago but a some weeks ago, a prospect noted that the site looked ‘old’ - which it does - and provided the necessary spark to tackle a revamp.

The first site was wonderful - all the techniques that are big NoNos today. There was a splash page with a leather background tile. In the middle was a punk warthog with Mohican orange hair, an earring and, even worse, an eye that winked showing a little heart on the eyelid.

The new site will employ new techniques but the emphasis will be on improving the content. I’m still not happy with it after all these years. Should be about a week until it appears.

ModX

About a year ago, I did a site for Ace Ministries. A Joomla site. I was not thrilled about it, or about Joomla. It was my first Joomla site and took a while to cobble together. The client took almost two years to finish it off and in the meantime I had done a much larger Joomla site for Civicus. The last Joomla site was for the local History Museum and I got really frustrated with its size and slow speed - particularly in the development.

The fellow Ace have temporarily looking after the site has managed to delete all the Components. I suggested to them that they do a reinstall and repopulate the pages to clean all the shrapnel from the CMS. They’re not keen and will probably fiddle their way through it. However, as an exercise I converted the site’s 50 pages to ModX as an exact replica of the Joomla site. It took three hours - mostly reformatting the content - and I was quite impressed. Replicating the whole look & feel and getting the accordion navigation right took less than an hour.

Its up at http://search-optimizers.co.za/ace/.

There’s something both touching and pathetic about England’s relationship with its football team. On the one hand, the media builds up huge expectations and on the other, the team’s performance is almost always substandard.

Anyone watching England’s games in this competition over the last few weeks would not have been brimful of confidence regarding their further progression.  The players are certainly capable of better but seem completely bereft of any motivation every time they put on an England jersey.

And so it was yesterday at a match that should have been the pinnacle of a footballer’s career we saw the usual execrable performance - lack of commitment, poor positioning, poor tackling etc. etc. It’s no use blaming the manager, there’s something systemically wrong with the team itself and no guarantees that if you condemned the rest of this pitiful bunch to the bench, you’re not going to end up with the same woeful performance from another team.

It’s also a waste of time blaming the poor decision making of the officials but at this level, it’s insanity not to employ the same technology that is used in other sports. Even with this, the score would still have been 4 - 2.

The latest in a depressing string of mediocre performances stretching back decades and yet the players are not about to commit seppuku (as they deserve to) but rather refer to the game as an ‘off day’. I feel for sorry for the fans who spent hard earned cash to see their team. Perhaps next time that England play an international, no-one turns up.

Yesterday on Sky News there was the unedifying spectacle of the new statue of King Shaka being removed from its plinth outside the new King Shaka airport. The reason - if the local rags that pass as newspapers are to be believed - is that he looks ‘more like a herdboy’ and not a Zulu monarch. This from the current Zulu monarch, King Goodwill or his advisors.

The big gripe is not really that - although anyone who knows this country will know that herdboys are precisely that; boys in early adolescence which the statue clearly doesn’t depict - King Shaka is not manly enough and is without his spear or shield. Out of shot, on either side of him is an Nguni bovine.

Any casual student of Zulu traditions will also know that cattle are wealth and power and so would still form part of Shaka’s life. Shown in the photo are President Zuma and the Zulu king, all decked out with the leopard skins.

Now, no-one knows what Shaka looked like. He was born around 1785 and died at the hands of his half brother Dingane  (as was usual) in 1828 at the time when photography was restricted to Daguerrotypes. His contact with Europeans was with a couple of the very early settlers from Port Natal (Durban) and with Portuguese traders from Delagoa Bay (Maputo).

His fame results from the fact that he united a collection of small tribes into a cohesive nation with a formidable army which he used to crush more small tribes. He also invented the ‘ixhlwa’, a short, sturdy stabbing spear. No much of a soldier could you be when you heaved the last of your assegais hopefully in the direction of the enemy. However, with your pal next to you prising your opponent’s shield away from his body, you were lethal.

My biggest complaint possibly is that he doesn’t look like a Zulu.

The question of course is this - were all the required people approached before the statue was commenced? Given the sensitive nature of the piece, I cannot believe that the ‘main manne’ were not approached. If they approved of the draft and if the final result was the same as the draft, it’s too late and they should leave it where it is.

I think we’re going to get a black Arnold Schwarzenegger with an AK47.

A very good ezine to subscribe to is Gerry McGovern’s. He takes real world examples of websites that are - at one end of the spectrum - subject to some usability problems to those at the other end that are completely awful.

I tell clients that they might approach an ad agency to have their website designed. It will be a many splendoured thing when it arrives. It will probably cost three times what I will charge (or more). A minor detail, however, more importantly, it will come with built in uselessness as far as search engine friendliness is concerned. I will quote from the latest McGovern newsletter:

No, I will quote the whole lot because it is worth reading. . . . . .

“THE REASON WHY AD AGENCY WEBSITES ARE TRULY AWFUL

Advertising agencies don't get the Web because the web is the
place people go to do things.

In 2004, I wrote an article advising companies to never, ever
let an advertising agency near their website. Back then, ad
agency websites were a total joke. If you wanted to find out the
very worst way to design websites all you had to do was look to
Ogilvy or Saatchi & Saatchi.

So, have ad agencies changed? In 2010, have they gotten any
better? No. If anything, they're getting worse. And there's a
reason. Quality web management requires a set of skills that are
almost diametrically opposed to the skills classical advertisers
have.

Marketing and advertising on the Web is about paying attention
to what the customer wants to do. Google doesn't try to sell you
diapers when you search for life assurance. It gives you ads for
life assurance companies in your area. This is the new
advertising. It's about paying attention. Being useful.

Traditional marketing and advertising is all about getting
attention. It's all about emotion and perception. And that's
fine, offline. However, the marketing and advertising tactics
that work online are almost the exact opposite of the offline
attention-getting tactics.

When you go to Ogilvy.com, the first thing you see is a huge
Ogilvy logo. How ridiculous is that? Of course, the deep
thinkers at Ogilvy will smile benignly and say it's a branding
statement. Imagine if you went to Google and the only thing you
saw was the Google logo.

I have seen data from a major website where this sort of useless
logo intro page caused 17 percent of the audience to leave
immediately. I have seen lots of other data that shows that this
sort of brochure design hugely irritates customers. And it's a
tactic that's used by so many ad agency websites.

Also, if you examine ad agency websites you will notice that
they're big into handwriting. The Ogilvy logo is handwritten.
And Leo Burnet states that, "Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils".
Do these people ride to work on horses? Someone tell them about
the Apple Mac. 

Practically all these ad agency websites use grey text because
grey text is cool and 'creative.' And of course those who want
to be super cool will use white text on black backgrounds
because that's what truly 'creative' and 'innovative'
'creatives' do. And the supersonically 'creative' ad agencies
play background music when you arrive at their websites. 

One thing that has struck me over the years is how utterly
uniform and predictable certain 'creative' people are. Ad
agencies are black sheep in a flock of black sheep. The
saddening uniformity these websites exhibit is quite ironic
considering that uniqueness is supposed to be the hallmark of
such agencies.

Ad agencies may well have genuinely creative people but their
websites do them a huge disservice. It's the Web. It's not
print. It's not TV. Truly creative people know that web design
is also about making things work well. As Steve Jobs puts it,
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is
how it works." And as James Dyson puts it, "Styling for its own
sake is a lazy 20th Century conceit." 

Time for ad agencies to stop creating 20th Century websites."