Why is it that we seem not have a sense of decency? Naija companies websites suck except banking sector. i went to dangote group http://www.dangote-group.com/. It looks like geocities free websites.

What needs to be done fellas?

1) We need the talented web developers to step up their game with respect to advertising. This will attract business their way as well as provide a benchmark between their sites and those of newbies.

2) We need to educate clients on the need to spend on their websites. Right now, it seems clients are playing the miser game. Right now, with every okoro, akpan and babatunde learning "web design", it is easy to pick up a "how to in 24 hours" and call oneself a "guru" or "webmaster".

3) Perhaps some sort of certification. Not in the traditional sense of "cram and learn nothing" but in terms of quality, as judged by peers. That way, again, once advertised, just like in the case of periwinkle unions (come on now, we all know they exist ), when you contact someone to get a website done, you know it is nothing but the cream of the crop that you are hiring. This issue in particular is one of the reasons behind my founding of www.webmastersofafrica.com .

The major cause is the companies, they usually settles for less! which means they get monkey services. check out my own site@ http://ngex.com

Good and great designers are available to work in Nigeria, Companies need to re-organize to include the online community
There needs to be paradigm Shift and Education on what the internet technology can and cannot do. not all companies may deem it fit to implement a web strategy. Recognising the need to implement an online strategy should first be assessed commencing on any form of implementation.

The best thing one can do now is to hold seminars on Usability, Graphical User Interfaces, Human Computer Interaction

This could be a step forward for developers in Nigeria looking for a way to improve and better the IT scene in Nigeria.

Lack of exposure is the cause! Education is therefore the key here. Majority of our people don't know anything about websites let alone what a good website should be.

Given the level of unemployment, youngsters take a two weeks crash course on FrontPage and dash out to town looking for website jobs. When the designer have no idea and does not take time to research and learn, he is bound to come up short all the time. The business owner is even less informed. Issues of content, usability, target audience, accessibility and interactivity are Latin or Greek to both.

Another issue is that of attitude of both the designers and the business owners. The business owners do not take time to prepare or do any kind of research about putting their business on the Internet. They just want to have a website. You get calls like "In need a website how much will it cost?" or "Give us a proposal on n-page website". Then you have the boss who just contract and build a business website without consulting any of his/her employees.

The designers sometimes are extremes- too needy or too greedy. The needy ones accept website project without analyzing the project in terms of fixed cost. You may see one accepting a website job for 7,000.00 Naira including domain name registration, design and development and hosting. The greedy ones charge plenty Naira and put up a FrontPage website with broken links. Both may abandon the project and run.

The end result is the mom and pop websites that populate the webspace for Nigeria. Interactivity = animated gif floating left, right and center all over the web page.

There is hope though we are improving everyday!


Devine R.

devine8,

You need to write a book for real. When it gets published, mark me down as buyer #1 because your analysis hits the spot 1000%

Last month, some guy approached me online asking what I could do to "make his site look better" . Apparently, some guy had charged him N40K for basically a crappy site and I told him so. He even agreed with me. To make matters worse, since he had paid the guy in full, the "webmaster" had vanished. Now he was stuck with a crappy site and having no knowledge of what to do to make it better.

Of course, I offered my services, but my price was out of his league and so I respectfully declined the offer. In the end, I helped him, given the limited resources available via YIM, to change a few things and his site looked a little better.

This is why I advocate a "certification (not in the traditional "cram and learn nothing" sense but in a "if you hire from one of us, you know you are getting the best services" sense)" approach (not necessarily a union as I hate price and policy controls ).

As you have said devine, hopefully we are getting better.

Interactivity = animated gif floating left, right and center all over the web page.

LMAO. Let's play an exercise to prove this right: Look at the following sites and tell me how long it will take b4 u feel you are being hypnotized http://www.unionbankng.com/ and http://www.akwaibominterest.com/

GREEN WHITE GREEN, horse, flag, font size, audio sounds hew.

oh well no comments there are numerous other ones like those

I believe good designers should start or ensure they turn down web jobs where clients are thinking their skills for peanuts.

The akwainterst site layout was great but the animate gif marred the site. Union banbk site? I'm shock. That's poor.