@Afam
I love the fact that you believe in your self and your products but one thing we should always consider when designing websites is aesthetics. Its like buying a car, the design counts alot.
The main issue here is a corporate website and a webservice. If gmail or google.com or blogger.com is going to be visited by millions of people a day, then removing most graphics and making it simple is the way to go. But if I am building a site for UBA, or an online furniture store. then the site has to be highly attractive so that my client's clients will be willing to stay on the site and buy, and at the end my client will also be able to pay me for my work.
All in all blogger like you said is not a valid example, search google for any wood works or related websites and see how attractive their design is.
Why all this grammar sef: all we wanted to say is please consider your designs, no matter how you do it.
if I am posting this is because I was already thinking there are some young guys in this forum that might take your advice and start producing sites with low aesthetics.
Usability is good but aesthetics is what is making Windows out smart Linux [ think about it ], of facebook outsmart myspace

@poster
you are a lucky guy, beg the connected guy to give you 50% or less and let him get the contracts [ooh boy your still king because you are the one with teh skills] come rain come shine all the clients will somehow get to know you or the connected guy will never be able to do anything with out.
so just go in for it

@Iyabo
I love your point of taking high value adsense keywords into consideration when putting content on your site.
But one thing I realy dont like [ but I dont think your a victim though ] is the fact that guys forget that a website is not based upon adsense its based upon value. Some people start websites just for adsense keywords even if they dont know anything about a subject matter. For instance: just because you said "quit smooking" has highly paid keywords, some guys will just go and register a domain and start talking about quit smooking, while they know nothing about quit smooking. I believe guys should do what they love and understand, this things [blogs, web 2.0 sites] are driven by love then the money comes. So if you dont have the love for the business and rather think you will just use keywords and play a game of money making with Google, its a faillure.
But its amazing that even if you love it and do something of great value and traffic, you still earn less in Africa than someone in Europe or USA. well like you said its because Adworks is not used by African Business'

well Afam
you are in direct contact with the clients so you can best take the decision. visit www.oswd.org which stands for open source web design. we all love open source and it simple means the templates there are open source. you can take them customise them and use for your projects.
I guess there can be a template there for you

well well well
I mean no harm
but Afam I strongly would advice a change of the design. It will cost you nothing to download a template and use.

@iyaboo
google adsense was created to monetize website traffic and website traffic was not made to get google adsense. What I am saying is: I hate people who go arround chasing adsense and keywords while the real sense of a website is to provide value to the world. So create your website to add value to people's life and when the traffic is good consider monetizing it with google adsense or any other program.
But the problem stays thesame, in Africa the money you will get is realy small

Active records is a new way of querying a relational database without hand coding or thinking about the sql yourself.
now let me give an example
if I want to get everything in a table of users I will code it like this

//construct the sql
$sql="select * from users order by dateregistered desc";
//execute the query ingnoring the errors
$result=@mysql_query($sql);
/// now fetch
while($record=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
echo "username: ".$record['name']."<br>";
}

thats realy boring and I can't remember the last time I wrote codes like that. imagine coding a solution as big as twitter and u have to write such codes. it will take you 4 months.

now lets do it with active records

//instantiate the active records database class
$db=new activeRecordsDB(array('host'=>'localhost','username'=>'root','password=>'passwod'));
//order the query by date registered
$db->orderby('dateregistered','desc');
//execute the query
$records=$db->get('users');
//loop through the records
foreach($records->result() as $user){
echo "name: ". $user->name;
}

with active records we have more readable codes and easy to work on by many other developers. nowadays I work with projects with guys in India and Europe with active records our codes are easy to comprehend.
active records information can be read from wikipedia following this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record

@tunde
nice post but I have some reviews though

1- I personally don't like procedural codes so if someone working for me wrote those codes I will think its nasty and difficult to debug

2- I think magic_gpc_quotes() addslashes() are not best against sql injection. mysql_real_esapce_string(): is actually the best against sql injection

those are my main reviews to that code.

as for what the code is to do, I believe that part is trivial, using AND and OR depending on how you the developer wants the search to operate and thats what I have not understood from your post

@ yawa-ti-de
I think one of the problems is the fact that guys are not original but even if your original the money you will make from your project in Africa is far less than what you will make with same project in USA. And thats my main cry.

@tunde
Nice site, I was wondering if you have a personal blog so i could follow, or maybe chat on YIM ??

am not in Nigeria but am part of Nairaland and I am in Africa so i decided to drop my solutions

www.studentnetworks.in ( still beta testing)

www.webyfolio.com ( work in progress )

ok cdeveloper
nice write up but I have practical proofs to show that drupal is better in terms of flexibility and what you can do with the CMS. To build news sites like this one I themed www.edennewspaper.com with joomla is very easy and with drupal its almost same thing but more difficult to setup.
but this is a full blown social networking site like myspace, www.adrenalinehub.com it was built entirely with drupal and drupal plugins , if you try that with Joomla you wont get upto half of that functionality. for more information about adrenalinehub solution follow the drupal page http://drupal.org/node/98134

Most developers like myself like solutions that are highly flexible and Joomla is too rigid in terms of what you can do with it. But Drupal comes with more flexibility but a steep learning curve.

nice write up tundewoods
I just want to add www.startupping.com [ where I found my Indian partner and investor ] to the list of sites realy full with resources.
Africa centric ones are sites like http://whiteafrican.com/ www.startupafrica.com www.startupsnigeria.com www.afrostartups.com
or an Indian centric one like www.pluggd.in

Also some good startups in Africa coming up are www.blueworld.co.za and www.kerawa.com

well poster,
those libraries are there to help you do your job, and no matter what you use to do the job, if your comfortable with it and your client and users are also comfortable. then I dont see any reason why you should switch. To me jquery is working and its my best, but you can prefer YUI. almost all you can do with YUI I can do with jquery and the file size is not much of a difference. Kehers prefers prototype good, if he did his mobile site with prototype, then he doesnt need any other thing. So to me the best library can never be declared

I work with Actionscript 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 but I use flash sparingly regarding our bandwidth in Africa and the browsers mostly lacking the flash plugin here in Africa.
I worked with prototype and scriptaculous, way back in 2006 and it was too heavy for my liking,
I later on went with raw javascript ( objects, and XMLHTTPRequest) the bugs could kill me but I was getting smaller file size. With soo much headache I decided to work with Google WEb Toolkit, which got released when I was actively following Google events. I loved the fact that I will code in java and it will do the javascripting for me, very easy with good debuger. So the bugs detecting headache was gone. But when one problem get solved is like another one gets created, GWT was creating too many javascript files which were too heavy for the african audience. So I didnt use it to build any business application, finally I had to swtich to jquery.com which is my favourite, I have used it on www.ubstudents.com www.webyfolio.com, on www.theinvestor.in and also on www.studentnetworks.in
but I use it sparingly on some projects because it ads 22kb just for the framework.
jquery is easy to learn and use if you are good to go with java or C# and I think it doesnt need much documentation.

I always feel depressed when doing business as a young man, and I decided to write an article about that on my blog, I posted it here on Nairaland hoping others might be having such problems too and their views might make me feel better and take it normal.
below is the article extract from my blog:

I am a young Entrepreneur below 25 years in Africa and I want to put some of the problems I face alongside what some of my peers have been facing while doing business in Africa.
Unlike in the 1st world where age is just a number and guys like Mark Zuckerberg (24 yr old facebook.com guy), Blake Ross (22 yr old Firefox browser guy) can do normal business , here in Africa its a whole different situation.
Below are a couple of the problems:
- Young is equal to Wrong: As a young man, doing business in Africa, when you have a client who is an old man, about your dads age or a few centuries above you, he considers that you are not skilled enough and you could make soo many mistakes. No matter what portfolio you present, it will take the client a second thought and lower pricing to award you that project. The worst part is when its time to hand in the initial funds, they will prefer that you do the work they see before they hand in the initial funds. In other situations, if you want to tell them what is correct professionally, they will tell you to sit quit you are still young and they will say come let me advice you. Can you imagine someone with no skills in,
more follow this link http://mambenanje..com/2008/06/problems-faced-by-young-african.html

I would like to know if others are faced with such issues, thanks

@kehers
nice site, web 2.0 very good, I got abit mixed up ont his post http://blog.ngbot.com/articles/54/ with views 21 comment:0 thinking it was 21 comments and when I went down I found no comment, but now I see.
on a small resolution the display is abit confusing.

A2J
are you the administrator of this site ??
dont you have manners ??
you just come up here instead of getting what I am saying and giving your views you attack me personally. If I posted same stuff on facebook the answers I will get will be abit different, this is why we Africans ( including myself ) cant grow. They dont like debate, they think life is about voilence, and not debating to get things to change.
Man you guys have to learn

well well well,
when you go to Rome do what the Romans do
when I came in here I realised guys always post review or new forums they just installed, and when you post something worth an argument all they do is insult you   [insults cant change people when they believe in themselves ]
I also support Afam because most webmasters here don't have the skills in programming, they just use any software and patch up html and pictures and host, finally we get a website review.
I personally think its time we start thinking of things like organising events ( barcamps ), business strategies for webmasters, web programming and things like Ajax programmig, infact the forum should go from mere design to Technical stuffs in DHTML, XHTML, XML, JSON, better scripting practises, database abstraction and things like caching.
well the list is endless

Kudos webMonk
I saw the redesign yesterday and I was very happy, and I have also hosted the member ship logo on my blog to support the unity check it out on this link at the right http://mambenanje..com

am not encouraging them, rather am making them realise why they should stop. its not worth it

I realy wonder why Africans scam at all, regarding the nature of their work and how they get all stressed up just to make a couple dollars ( not even in the thousands ). You see a young african openning many tabs and posting ads of pets or fake items to sell and after that starts receiving and sending all sorts of mails just to convince their soo called 'mugus'. In the west where this scamming all began, guys build server farms of computers, where they host parallell ( multi threaded) computer softwares that send and recieve such mails along side informing them when there is a potential mugu. For example there was this scammer in USA that was caught last year and he had to settle with about 9 million USD after guilty in court ( an African scammer will rut in jail ). How many Africans can even make a million from scaming, to me they should stop scamming because all they do is spoil the African name and the money the make is not even worth the name they "spoil" (kill). Rather than scam you soo called slave like scammer should go to the farm and it will help you alot because farming is far less stranous than what you are doing.
Due to lack of skills you can't make real scamming business that can back you up when the interpol comes in, and I pray webmasters don't build such for them if they can.
why would you open 1000 tabs to post spam while someone has his computer posting the spam for him while he is in Wakiki with some girls ? to me Africans scammers should not even think  they are scammers please better go to the ' mortor park' or go to the farm or get an "okada".
The bad side is if you get caught you will rut in jail and the small money you think you make wont help you.

I want to know if there are webmasters who also hate this idea of scamming and will refuse to build such systems??

ok
let us just agree to disagree, i wont post on this anymore. we r all enttiled to our opinions.
thanks

I think you are right about drupal,
I prefer drupal to all of them, I used it on this pet project www.theinvestor.in , just to get hands on experience.
I advice technical savy guys to go for drupal

ok ok
let me ask questions:

how did tab browsing come about ?

can I open 1000 classified ads sites like www.kerawa.com on the same browser window and post same advert on all in a short period of time ?

can captcha stop me manually posting stuff on craiglist ?

is it bad for a particular computer in a cyber cafe to consume all the bandwidth in that cyber by opening many tabs per window ?

is it possible as of now to control the amount of bandwidth a computer eats up ?

you kind replies will help me next time
thanks

wordpress is the best for blogs, I second Niyie on this,
Drupal is the most scalable ( if scalability and customisation is what you desire )
Joomla is easy to setup and maintain but not easy to customise and scale up.

So depending on your expertise and needs each and everyone has its pros and cons

ok thanks to all the comments I realised the title was not the best so I have changed the post title, I hope it now reflects what I have in mind.

@Niyie
Mozilla came up with the tabbed browsing thing, but it was not witht the Firefox browser, but Firefox browser is what has pushed it to the world. Just like Netscape started javascript and Ajax way back in 1994/1995 but Google has actually pushed it wildly to the world.

Well well well Tundewoods, moderator
I must say you guys must be making your points clear to me, but if you have been reading blogs regularly, you will see soo many guys giving their own point of views on anything. You can call it dumb, but its my observation.
I am not to be sorry for thinking, and your words wont hinder me to think of anything anytime. But I must say your comments can help me think better next time. Actually this is my point of view "Firefox pushed the tabbed browsing system in to Africa and now most african scammers are using tabbed browsing to send mails faster, and it hurts me because they also disturb bandwith by eating up all the bandwidth with many tabs", so if I write about what I observe, how come you guys tell me the observation is dumb.
Who introduced tab browsing into the web [ if am not mistaking, its Firefox ]
is it correct for one computer to eat up the bandwidth in a cyber cafe [ netiquette: its wrong ]
So if Firefox didnt push the tab browsing, the other browsers wont copy it and this our soo called manual scammers wont be using it .
its my observation and I use it to attract readers, call it dumb, but even Windows Vista gets negative critics everyday as a bad operating system, yet it keeps gaining market share. So no matter what you say if people criticise yet they read my blog, I have nothing to loose I will keep writing dumb because its whats on my mind and to the best of my knowledge the dumb stuff I write is working for me. We blog to expose our minds to the world, now I am getting some exposure but as usual some critics must be there to kill my work.
So to you what should I blog about ??
" How Tab browsing is good for internet surfing " ? do you realy think that will make you read the post
well well well, if it hurts you guys soo badly am sorry but men I will keep writing dumb posts because they come from within ( inspiration ) and thats what I am comfortable to write about
let me go now to work and we will see in the evening after work

Waaooh you speak french, men you have all the qualities to take the career in marketing and using big words to market products.

Ok try to be smart now, if i didnt type that post will you be commenting ?
if I am realy dumb as you say, then will you be telling me that I am dumb ?
dumb people dont understand and so why do you want me to understand I am dumb
you get the sense, if I am mad so are you, and since we can communicate only mad people can communicate with mad guys, all classifications you give me classifies you.

Hey buddy, its just a blog post, you can take it or leave it, Itoro and uncle che commented, and they didnt blame me for sharing my point of view to the world.
My blog remember my blog
guess your new to the internet and blog marketing
bye for now

hey debosky
I forgot to thank you for giving me the new idea " how Gmail auto save draft technology helps 419ers send mail faster".

regarding those your words in this last post, they make no sense to me and what you dont know doesnt hurt you.
I am sorry you are feeling too bad because I am criticising scammers. Besides you just have to give me your points cos you barely know me
i could be your dad or maybe James Gosling
take care budy and stop biting yourself, all those words wont change the post, it will rather market the post for me
thanks for the marketing and please consider a career in internet marketing cos you know how to use bad words to cause a viral effect.

@debosky
I didnt know it will hurt you that much talking about scammers, if you are one I am very very sorry
just one question then I am done with you:

Which browser pushed tab browsing into Africa ?