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

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.

Ok, so I am going to use my revamping of the dating site as another topic for this post. As I identified in the previous post, we have inherited the code from a previous developer and are making improvements to the site.

The previous site was almost completely table based - yuck!! Dan Cederholm has a chapter in his book Web Standards Solutions, which is titled “Tables are evil?”. Now of course tables should be used when one is displaying tabular data, but in this case there is no tabular data on the site, maybe just some on the administrators CMS.

The “old” way of using tables for layouts is just so blotted and messy. Having tables within rows and doing styling within the code and not in the CSS, makes the site soooo difficult to manage and I am already seeing the benefits which the W3C have brought to website development.

So, some of the immediate benefits of not using tables, which I have been reminded of are the following:

• Much less code - which means smaller files - which in turn means less space on your web server
• Less code means less bandwidth and if you have a site with thousands of hits a day, this will have a huge impact on overall performance.
• The ability to access the site with portable devices-mobile phones, PDAs etc.
• It’s much easier to update layouts and styling via the CSS

I know that there are still loads of sites out there that are table based and which work perfectly. So I am not saying that it’s completely wrong to use them. It’s just that it’s so much easier not to use tables and there are lots of additional benefits which have become apparent in recent years.

Over the past few weeks, I have been brushing up on the semantics of XHTML and how these impact on CSS, search engines and accessibility of websites. I have been reading Web Standards Solutions, written by Dan Cederholm and I have realised how beneficial it can be to write semantically correct code which is W3C compliant.

All this being said, a thing which has astonished me was published on 456bereastreet, where Roger Johansson pointed out that Google is not adhering to Web standards. I think that this is quite ironic, because Google has become a household name and an industry leader, who have become a role model to a number of businesses in the IT world.

What makes it even more ironic is that semantically correct code is meant to improve search functionality and the most popular search engine isn’t adhering to these simple standards.

I just think that Google have a responsibility in ensuring that they set a good example to web developers throughout the world….