₦airaland Forum

I personally don't like the idea of a developer using CMS like Joomla, Wordpress and co. My reason is, it kills the industry and produces a lot of look alike websites.

You can change the look and feel, or even tweak things around the CMS, but from a quick look, somebody can easily tell it is similar to another.

I will rather we start building real web applications because that is what will get the name of the country on the development market. We can also build our own CMS platform is we are serious about leading the Africa web development market.

If the niche is for lies, then it will be wise to use lies as part of the domain. It is a good strategy for SEO.

Joomla is not a web development platform like Dreamweaver but just an already canned website framework you can modify or build templete(themes) for.

A professional web developer should learn how to design its own website from ground up. That is what makes you a professional.

I think the reason most webmaster are quite poor are:

1.) Africa companies and businesses are yet to understand what a properly developed website is hence the very low amount of money they budget for their web projects. This also has affected the level of professionalism in the industry. Imagine I have to build this project (www.rentwiseghana.com) for a company for just N30k. I didn't have a choice as man needs to eat.

2.) The web development market is very competitive right now with lot of outrageous and crazy prices being advertised out there! You can see a project a professional will build for say $2000 and a novice will offer for just $300. Most companies are looking for very cheap bargain and they will always say that they just want a website and nothing serious.

3.) Checkout most government websites in Nigeria, you will laugh at the level of ignorance being displayed. Most gov websites are poorly designed. It is a good reflection of how the nation sees the skills of a webmaster. Go to places like India, China, Russia etc, you will understand how a web application programmer is regarded.

4.) Webmasters in Nigeria are the most selfish and disorganised set of people. You can hardly see any group project around. It is always a solo thing everywhere. We need to bond, get an umbrella organisation and get very organised and sophisticated to allow for growth.