It's good, but the background doesnt fit in, I mean the flame thing and the gray color. One suggestion is using a color that blends with blue as a gradient in the bakground or leaving it white, or probably very light blue like #fafafa, #f2f4fa or something similar

Hmm, dis online payment integration thing. The thing is that it is pratically impossible to integrate CC processing without an external connectn (address, bank account, , ). As with many thing on the internet though, there are work arounds. But you c, ds work arounds, many of them are illegal and dangerous.
There are many guys that claim to be able to register a genuine and legal paypal account (which can b used for such) for Nigerians though but I cant say anything on dat as well.
Hoping to hear from other people with experience too,

What server side language do u design wit? U dont really need any special software. If u use PHP for example, u can simply get the ip of the visitor from the variable

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

and I bet there will b implementations in other languages as well.

You may also want t ocheck out http://gettyimages.com as well

By the way, have u guys heard d gist dat the following banks UBA, GT BANK, FIRST BANK, INTERCONTINENTAL BANK, FCMB, ACCESS BANK have blocked their cards from online use. Is this d death of online ATM card payment integratn?

Paying with ATM cards is just the easiest form of online payment around for now. And to this the options are Interswitch and eTranzact. Unfortunately eTranzact is just out of it AFAIK for now coz they only issue ATM cards for 2 banks (at last check) - meaning that using their online integratn mean only users of ds 2 bank cards and other custom card holders get to pay on your site.
What I'm I driving at? With Interswitch probably outa d way, what other options are available to people looking forward to integrating online payment in their site?

Okies, will let u knw if I find one

You failed to mention what the whole idea is about. That may be a good starting point IMHO

@nikejoy
Haba He didnt say he has problems with his Vista PC now. If he cant cope wt it, he def wouldnt be asking for a way to use it to design sites

A script? Bet u have no idea of what you are into. You probably need a CMS engine and not a script. Running some search with Google may come handy here. You may also want to check out the engines: Joomla or drupal. I'm not sure it is what you need though but it is something to start with.
Best of luck.

A lot to say but here are the crutial ones:
1. Banner height too much. I guess what you are trying to achieve is placing the text "FULLMOON MINES/RUBBER & TIMBER EXPORT CO.LTD" on the banner but hey, the text floats over the banner and into the black background of the body on some browsers (bet you develop on IE). As a developer, one rule of the thumb is checking having a couple of different browsers and testing your [url=http://'']design on them[/url]
2. What about centralizing the whole content instead of having it come to the left?
3. There is something wrong with the site's contrast - your use of black and white. No, its not that there is something wrong with using just black and white. Its just that there are better ways to work with two colors to achieve better look.
4. And then your font sizing. Consider reducing the size of the top links and increasing that of the body. Also consider changing those words in capital case to normal case. Writing sentences in upper case (called shouting) doesnt really look good. You may also want to change the color of your heading texts to something different from white so as to emphasize them from the normal body text

I don't get. Toolbar for forum? How are they related? What is your own definition of a toolbar? What will/do you want the toolbar to do for your forum?

If you are having problems getting a FTP software or you are looking for a quick workaround, try the web based FTP site: http://www.net2ftp.com

AFAIK, NIRA is still the only way out. The other option is paying someone to do it for you , of which he/she will still go through NIRA. By the way, what type of difficulties do you experience when trying to set things up? I mean what exactly do u mean by saying "NIRA has gotten me nowhere"

Woooo, I av been missing on the gist, cant believe people are already up with Chome. Yet to though but I've been checking a couple of reviews about it, Heard the gist about its speed and there is a reivew about that around here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10030888-92.html?part=rss.
I still kinda wonder why Google loves this idea of designing the installer in a small size and that downloads the rest online (Just like their Gears). This makes it difficult to install offline.
Whatever sha, I think Chrome will seriously rock the browser world. The missing features can be pardoned for now (being beta) and I bet they will sure do something about that. Depending on what it turns out to be, after download, I may still stick to Firefox - if only for the developer addons I use on it. But I bet Chrome will in no time catch up with Firefox in terms of that, being open source.
More talks, when I download mine

What sitemap do you really need? sitemap for SEO (for google sitemaps) or sitemap page (i.e a page containing links to other pages in your site)? Whatever, I dont really think you need a sitemap as ur site is a one page design (I think). However, if you mean sitemap for SEO, then check out www.xml-sitemaps.com/. If you mean the link page, simply create a page with all intra links withing ur site arranged there, better still check a couple of sites, and see how they did theirs.

@ viper
While it may be well argued that etranzact is flexible, when it comes to online payment with ATM cards, interswitch rules. The thing is that interswitch issues most of the ATM cards around. Etranzact runs for just 2 banks (if im still correct) and u see the funny thing is that u cant use an etranzact ATM card on a site dat runs on interswitch's payment integration and viceversa. For this reason, some sites integrate both payment solutions. For the sake of it, eTranzact's payment integratn cost N120,000

:d
@yawa:
Looked into privacy issues.for 1,u can turn off ur visibility.in ds case ur presnc is not broadcasted but den d app is stil useful as u can gt to knw wen u are near tagged places or (request) places/visible people around u.
2. Cellids (which d system is based on) is only accurate to some meters (even few kms in some instance),so dat settles d kidnappg issue.
Was i convincg enough?

I'm working on a new idea I call 'Where u dey?' and seeking views.

'Where u dey?' is a Nigeria 'places and people localization' initiative. This simply means that at any point in time, people can track their current location, places around them and as well broadcast this to subscribers of their presence. There are a lot of significance to this. You can let people know your current location, track location of friends or items, get to know places (that you may not be aware of) around you, discover people around you and many more.

The system rely on mobile phones, using a special application, to accomplish this. It simply works by using 3 network values in your current location to tag the location. These are the network code (mnc), the local area code (lac) and the cellid of the network tower (the so called mast) transmitting to your mobile phone. The network code is a fixed value that identifies the network you are using. The local area code and cellid however changes as you move from one point to another. While the local area code is the same within a local area (across tens of KMs), the cellid changes more often as you move from one point to another (within a short distance) - infact, you can get more than 5 different cellids in a stationary position. You can then identify this cellid(s) to your current location (called tagging), and with the 'autosync' feature on, notify subscribers to your presence - friends or social network, about your location at certain intervals or at change of cellid. This feature also helps you track your phone in case of misplacement or lost as long as the phone is still on and the app is still running and broadcasting.

By aggregating tagged locations and cellids from users, other features come in.
1. Places around me: By syncronizing your currently reported cellid/lac with tags of the same cellid/lac from other people, the system can notify you of places around you and in your local area.
2. People around me: You can as well easily get a list of people around you (with the same cellid as yours) or in your local area (with the same lac as yours).

I have spent the past few weeks researching into the whole idea and the pros and cons. The biggest challenge of it all is the support on the various phone OS. It is just of late that phone manufacturers found the need to grant apps access to these network values. In other words only newer phones support access to this network codes and even then, their implementation varies from phone to phone. Another thing is that while it is a nice idea for users to personally tag their location as the cellid changes, having the app automatically get the location by matching the cellid with a standard database from the network operator is a better idea. Meaning the app can automatically show you the name of your location. These will however require the operators releasing the db of their cellids and name/locations which I bet they won't want to. The work around to this however is that with time, we can build our own custom cellid names from users' tags - which in another way is better because of flexibility.

So what's next? Getting my butt down and developing the mobile app. I currently program mobile devices with java (J2ME) and will be bringing out the first release of the app (as will as with the Facebook app and source codes) for Sony Ericsson JP7 phones (K530, K550, K610, K790, K800, K810, S500, T650, W580, W610, W660, W710, W830, W850, W880 [my phone], Z310, Z610, Z710, K850, W910, Z750) - the phone series with the easiest support and which I can test well on for now. Motorola comes next, followed by either of some Samsung phones or new Nokia S60 (Symbian series 60) phones. Depending on response from people, I may go into native C++ coding for S40 and old S60 phones but that will mean getting new phones for tests. Blackberry and Smart phones that run on Windows Mobile will come far later. And iPhone and Google Android? A talk of another time.

To contribute to the initiative, simply post your ideas, suggestions and feedbacks as comments or drop me a mail via ray[AT]ngbot[DOt]com. Or better still a beep via +234 (0) 8066887840. Thanks

For users of the YUI framework, here is a glimpse into the version 3 release:
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/08/13/yui3pr1/

It depends on the type of site. For my startup I had to, becaus I need to open a cooprate account for online payment pending interswitch's ATM payment integration. Registering a web business can be funny though, I had some very funny experience when I was doing mine (blogged about it here: http://blog.ngbot.com/articles/49)

This really sound yummy. Domians below $3 when I pay around 3ice @ 007names?
I bet there must really be a catch hidden somewhere along the line,
007names for example gives me full control of my domiain names - talk of transferring domains, renewing, changing name servers, etc.
Is it the same wit ds gees?

One of the strong points of web design/development is browser compatibilities. A site that may look like heavens on IE (Internet Explorer) may look the other way on another browser. As a good design pratice, it is therefore required for developers to test their designs on various browsers to see what it looks like. The problem with that however is that it is not that possible to have the numerous different browsers on your system. In fact, it is practically not possible to have two different versions of IE on a Windows OS. And here is where browsershots comes in. Browsershots (http://browsershots.org) let you see how your design looks in over 43 browsers. Just put the link of the site in it and submit. Depending on the number of current requests, you will be put in a queue while the screenshots are being uloaded. All you need do is refresh the result page intermittently to see the screenshots as they are uploaded or wait till your queue time elapse to see all the screenshots. What's more, you can download all the screenshots.
While browsershots answers browser compatibility as regards design, browser compatibility as regards functionality when it comes to client scripting, with javascript especially, is another thing. And to that, the way round it, as far as I know, is using a standard framework that have been tested across browsers by the developer. Personally, I recommend prototypejs (http://prototypejs.org). It is hoowever not a bad idea to keep a couple of browsers on your machine - atleast the most used ones like IE, Firefox and Opera to test designs before they even go online.

@webguru
Bet Ya-wa didnt put up the post to hit anyone.
Talking reviews, let's keep it coming, I personally believe there is no know-all and that knowledge can be gained from anyone. From suggestions and critics, we can always gain one thing or another.

At last check, CuteFTP isnt free. Is it now? I personally use filezilla. Its free and has versions for various OS

Put together an article over the weekend on a trick I use to cache mysql queries in sessions. Due to code syntax color highligthing, the article is published here:
http://blog.ngbot.com/articles/58/ and you can check it out.

Haba!
Are you gees dissing naija webmasters? LOL. Actually agree to all ur posts but then I still belive there are a couple of good webmasters out there.

I think the issue here is the definition of the word ugly. As far as webdesigning is concerned, ugly simply means a site that is poorly designed and really not because it lacks graphics or 'effizies'. A site can as well have beautiful graphics and as well be ugly due to poor color combination, heavy graphics use, poor griding and alignment, poor font use, inconsistency across pages to mention a few. From whatever angle u see it however, everything boils down to content. If a site has what a user wants, over time, the user will overlook the site's look. On the other hand, a beautiful site with nothing to offer will only get that first time attraction and will loose it over time.

Just d missing/blank pages

Working on a crash site for a client that I'd like critics and comments on: http://demo.devedgelabs.com/njc/
Note however that it's in a demo stage so a couple of things are missing out.

My vote goes to PHP any day. I actually started my server side journey wt ASP but went phut before long due to reasons like little online support (even hosts), too cumbersome db connections (probably from my own view then). PHP is very simple to learn and hey there are a lotta support for u out there talking of hosting, knowledge base and watever. Besides, there are a whole lot of available extensions for other libraries - talk of zip, flash (swf), java, pdf, socket protocols (http, imap, pop3, ssl and co), tidy, xml, even running command line programs and dlls, and a whole lot.
Talking security, everything boils down to the designer. Once security holes like sql injection, XSS, session fixation and stuffs like that are well handled, then there is alittle to worry about