Peeled Carrots by Stephen Blake

We have finally got the site up and running and are getting some really positive feedback from the web commuunity. Not just in South Africa, but in other parts of the world as well.

The guys at cowboysengines wrote a pretty cool article about the conference idea and they are giving us some solid support!

Please visit the site, at www.technologyforafrica.org and give us some feedback, so that we can give feedback to the speakers, justify sponsorship and organise a really worthwhile event.

Cheers

During my morning feed reading I have again been reminded about how valuble a critical mass of users can be. Flickr have launched a camera finder section on their site, which identifies what camera is used to take a digital photo. This data is extremely useful to the camera industry, flickr users and photograpers.

The “Flickr Launches Camera Finder” post on Mashable gives a really good summary the details of what the new feature entails.

I think that it is about time for our team at Technovated to release one of our products, which we have been putting on hold for so long because of client work. Come on chaps - lets stop talking and start working!

Over the past few months, I have been working a a number of quite different projects. But, even though the projects have been different from one another, I have encountered the same problems on each of them.

The problems I have encountered generally relate to project requirements and client expectations. What I have realised is that for a project to be successful and to be delivered on time (which hardly ever happens with IT projects) it is incredibly important to agree the requirements before starting.
Once these requirements have been agreed, there should be a line drawn in the sand. From that point no changes should be made to the original agreement.

Another thing that I have become aware of, which relates to expectations is that the average person wanting a webiste doesn’t care about technical specifications. As long as the site “works” then they are satisfied - They don’t care whether the site is table based and are more worried about the design then about fuctionality. This brings me to my “analogy”.

Whilst at lunch one day this week, we come up with “The house analogy” - lets call it that for now. What it entails is that I want to compare building a website to a house. When someone wants a house built they need to get a plan, blueprints, approval, building suppluies and other resources. What I am getting at is that there is a lot of planning reuired to build a house - you don’t just decide to build a house one day and then shoot from the hip.

I believe that the same should go for a website. I can’t get my head around the fact that people want a site developed without ever going through a process of planning. It is not sufficient to just provide a developer with some design layouts and then expect him to magically create a new website.

You can’t just give a picture of a house to a builder and say - “Build it, I want a new double story house with a balcony”. I am sure he would tell you to fly a kite! Well being a developer, it is so important to have proper requirments. I am talking about wireframes, process flow, sitemaps, information architecture and design. Not just a few pictures of a site.

The bottom line is that generally the average joe on the street wanting a webiste doesn’t want to spend extra money on that sort of planning detail and would rather go for the cheapest and quickest option. Sad but true!

All I can hope is that in the future, web standards will become more important and proper planning will become integral. This will make life as a develope lot easier!

With the onset of an extremely cold snap of weather on the 1st November, I am longing to go back home to soak up some rays from the hot African sun during Christmas time.

Instead we will be hard at work in a cold and gloomy London, which is really not as bad as it seems. One of the things we have been working on is a project which is really close to the heart and will hopefully benefit the whole of Southern Africa.

The aim of this project is to hold a “web and emerging technologies conference” in South Africa. We want to get international speakers, who are industry leaders and who would like to give some advice to Africans involved in the Web and IT industry.

I have been doing quite a lot of research over the past few months and I really believe that a conference of this nature will be beneficial to the “African technology community”

We have a site up at and running (www.technologyforafrica.org), which is still undergoing some final testing before we start to contact Southern African companies involved in the IT industry. However, if you have any comments or suggestions please contact one of us, or just post a comment to this article.

I am hoping that we will get positive feedback from the majority of people who we contact because I think the concept of “Technology for Africa” is a fantastic opportunity.