₦airaland Forum

itookool,

2 things jump out here:

1) It would have been nice to have explanations to go with some of them. For example, why is it a bad idea to disable the back button (#7). I use it all the time at work when, say, a user clicks the submit button to process a credit card. You don't want the user to click the button more than once so as to avoid multiple charges for the same thing

2) Why are these mistakes categorized as "solid"? Just curious. Does this imply that there are liquid or fluid mistakes or that you can make mistakes (for which I would disagree) and that some mistakes are worse than others?

btw, this isn't a personal assault. I am just trying to understand what's up.

Afam very true.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing that should stop anyone from coding a site for free. Personally, as long as there is no govt inteference and the individual is allowed to set their price, I could care less. I guess my point is, if this is what puts food on your table and yet you are barely making it to survive because the competition is keeping prices down, the motivation to continue, at least for me, will not be there.

I will give you a sort of similar example, if I may: In the states, a job as simple as cutting grass was being done by Americans for say, $50. Then came along the mexicans. They start charging $30 or less for their services. Next thing you know, Americans are out of work/moving on to other endaveours. In the end, it is good for the customer but not for the businesses who had to retrench pple in droves as a result. The mexicans could of course get away with this as they live 10 pple per house and as such are able to distribute their bills evenly. This can't be said of their single-family counterparts.

So, again, there shouldn't be a set minimum price, but at least the price should be such that both parties are happy in the end. Now, whether thatz 4K, 40K or 4million is up to the developer.

I will end with another example: There is a site I frequent a lot for coding inspiration. They have a "Request For Proposal" document that they ask prospective clients to fill out before they meet with them. One of the questions in the document is, "Your budget dictates how much time we can devote to your website. What is the budget for this project?". Go figure!

You know,

I have been thinking more about this. Y wdnt he want to quit when there are those of us back there who are charging N4K to code a website? Y wdnt he quit when the same pple who wouldn't give him a discount to buy their product are haggling him to death because he wants to charge them a meagre N70K? I mean, where is the money/pride in the business?

I predict that more and more of this will follow as the web dev field is cheapened. Again, let us have pride in our work!

smartsoft,

The guy is speaking from his heart. Let him be. Tis better to make N20K doing what you love than N100K because he "doesn't feel accomplished".

If he stays on your account and later hates it, he will blame you. Atimes, in life, you have to move on in order to pursue other things. If he doesn't succeed in music, he has no one to blame but himself. Besides, with whatever skills he has in web dev, he can always come back.

As always, my 2 cents.

millionair,

There isn't a set price, but there definitely shouldn't be a **cheap** price

Uhmmm Cactus,

Sooooo, what site are we reviewing?

you could also go to http://www.meebo.com - you get to log in to other IMs as well there

Weeeell damolat,

I wouldn't totally agree with some of what you had to say. You don't have to use floats/clears with positioning. You do have to use clear with floats as what a float does is take the element floated out of the normal flow of the document. Take a look at this post and what I had to say: https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-60804.0.html#msg1227199

You can position elements inside a floated one and vice-versa. In general, I don't like positioning due to, as you said, browser incompatibilites. However, there are times when you don't have a choice, that is, if you don't want to use tables. Again my link above should better explain.

Yes, you can design a site using 100% positioning. If you visit: http://www.csszengarden.com/ and click on "select a design" in the brown area to your right, you will see how the same page can be rendered in different skins all based on positioning. It's all about doing it well. Basically, the standard approach is to have a container div positioned relative and then have the one you want to move around positioned (within the container) absolute.

In general, there are 2 things that I have found throw a few developers off when it comes to CSS - the box model and positioning. These are very powerful concepts which, once mastered, will put you in the upper echelon. I wish I had the opportunity to visit home and conduct a seminar or two on things like this (hint, hint )


Sure, having to make things work across all browsers is a pain, but that is what you are paid for right? You shouldn't view yourself as an order-taker/code-monkey. You should ensure that your client gets the best user experience possible. Applying hacks shouldn't take that much time anyway


I hope this helps.

Why o why is it that, time and time again, a post deviates from what the original post intended?

Why o why is it that, most people on here take corrections personally and as an insult to their ego?

Why o why is it that, most people on here, even when not mincing words, can't seem to find the right way to convey the message?

The above are a few of the reasons why I am quick to remove my notification to a post, potentially missing out on posts I could learn from.

Please, let's learn to stay on point.

Thanks,

wow,

Allowing for those that have their own servers and accounting for the numbers provided by abhosts link, I think it is safe to conclude that less than 10,000 businesses/entities have a web presence. Even if I were off by a magnitude of 10 (making it a total of 100,000), this further validates my statement that now is the time to reap the huge benefits of web development in Nigeria.

In a country of at least 150million, assuming only 1% (1.5million) of those are involved in some form of business/ngo or the like, there is a huge untapped pool of money out there.

We go c how go dey go

Chei,

Naiijans, I trust una. We dey wonder y oyibo dey fear us. Keep it up and good luck! Very capitalistic of you

HTML is kind of outdated and will soon be kicked out completely because of the need for platform independency.

cuju,

Really? I didn't know that. Oh my God! The end of the world is nigh!!

1) "About the book", "About author" (graphics) and in general, the text on all the pages was hard to read for me.

2) I think you should be consistent regarding placement of your nav bar. In other words, why do you have it at the bottom on the home page, but the top on other pages?

3) The page seems to be "jumping" horizontally when moving from other pages to "The Book" page.

4) Maybe it's just me but the red on a black background didn't sit too well for me. Unless you are trying to portray a certain thought (as in death and darkness due to contracting an STD ), I would probably use a different color combination. Perhaps, though pre-marital sex is bad, you should focus on the +ve of not doing it, than the -ve. Then again, this is just me

I hope these help.

nduaj,

All I could see, in both IE and FF, is one big red screen. No offense, but is there some hidden text/graphics on the site that only the trained eye is supposed to see? Or is it the grade of Igbo I smoked this morning?

steepe,

I for call but I am way over 26. Too bad

You probably want to handle pagination better - right now, it just says "1 2" for example. It wasn't obvious to me whether those were just random numbers or what I should click to get to the next page. Secondly, if I am on page one, why is "1" hyperlinked? Finally, it would be nice to have a feature like "there are 20 words. page 1 of 5. Words per page: 20", or words to this effect. In other words, I was afraid I would be scrolling ad infinitum for each alphabet.

Other than that, great effort. The site is very clean and very "Web 2.0"-y.

Kudos!

This question reminds me of my days at unical - "This handout is necessary but not compulsory"

Just substitute "This handout" with "Programming"

That's my 2 cents anyways.

perhaps a URL would help?

kevin,

For starters, I would put some more work into the links. Looking at the "Crystal Perfume Bottle" link under "Product category", the code:

<FONT face=Arial color=#666666><a href="china_crystal/catalogs/crystal_perfume_bottle.htm"><font color="#666666"><span style="text-decoration: none">Crystal Perfume Bottle</span></font></a></FONT></font></span>

Could have been condensed to this at the very least, if not better:

<a href="china_crystal/catalogs/crystal_perfume_bottle.htm" style="text-decoration: none; color: #666; font-family: arial;">Crystal Perfume Bottle</a>

Of course, u r better off putting your styles in a stylesheet.

I hope this helps.

netpro,

pardon me for saying this, but I think the URL in your profile is wrong. I blv it should be "http://www.webtechdesigners.com/" as opposed to the non-existent URL "http://www.webtechdesigner.com/"

Just an FYI. You never know whose business you might be losing as a result

Thanks,

Server not found

Segebee,

Here is one, which some may know already, that I can share based on a site I just visited: http://www.akwaibomnnj.org

Now, if you are a smart web developer and use FF (which comes with a pretty nifty tool called "Web Developer Toolkit" , and turn on the table cells, you will see that whoever coded this site did a no-no in today's web dev world:

The person cut the header such that in the middle, the "home" et al links are cut separately and the last cell has a big photo, again cut in half, together with the background image. These images combine to be about 120px.

Now, one tip/trick would have been to take a very thin 1px width by say, 100 (or whatever height you desire)px slice of the header, use CSS to repeat along the x-axis, apply that as a background to a parent div, position that div relative[/b]ly, place the photo, as on piece, within that background div by positioning it [b]absolute[/b]ly. Doing this, in addition to optimizing the photo, would result in, at most, 30px or a [b]75% savings in terms of download speeds with respect to the header alone

In essence the code could look like so (I will embed the styles inline, though you should have them in an external stylesheet):

<div style="background: url(path to thin strp image) repeat-x; position: relative; height: 100px; width: (whatever width you desire)">
<img (path to image) style="position: absolute; top: (whatever distance) left: (whatever distance)" />
</div>

2 other tips from this example are:

1) using CSS, you could add a white border around the image so it has that actual photogragh look, thereby further reducing the image size.

2) rather than using "left" with a high number, you could use "right" with a low number as in this case, the photograph is closer to the right side of your screen (so it could have been "right: 20px" as opposed to say, "left: 300px".

Again, as I encounter more, I will indeed share. I just hate being put on the spot as I tend to draw blanks

I hope these helps.

sege,

Either I don't know that many tips/tricks or I do but don't have their official names

Either way, as I encounter them at work, I will surely share.

Weeeell,

Niyyie, I respectfully disagree:

[list]
[li]From my years of experience, I will tell you that there are occasions when tables are a must - for presenting tabular data. Sure, you could "div"-vy it all up or use positioning, but why? Tables nowadays come with captions and summary fields, to name a few, all of which make them readable by screen readers.[/li]
[li]Take a look at the W3C site: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.1. If you don't have the patience to read it all, at the very least, read the paragraph above the green text beginning with "note".[/li]
[/list]

The problem with the way some people use tables is akin to "flashterbation" - they abuse the use of tables, using it as a means to position stuff on the page instead of using it to present tabular data. Bottom line, you should use tables to present tabular data and CSS to style the table where necessary.

I hope this helps.

Sooo,

Since the question is "who" and not "what", then the end user/customer should *always* be the "who". If you are in a situation where they are carefree/confused about the software they want you to write, it is your duty to teach them (aka "knowledge transfer" or "training session(s)". That way, they don't come back to you with every little question which further reinforces their trust in you.

If you are ever in a situation where you feel the end user doesn't know what they want, it wouldn't hurt to walk them through likely scenarios. That way, you are not going back to make modification upon modification due to misunderstood/miscommunicated requirements. If you are producing something for which human contact isn't possible, then, as has been said above, a beta release is the way to go. Through feedback, you inculcate all the changes you feel are warranted (so for example, you wouldn't give the customer John the Baptist's head on a platter just because that's what they said they wanted ) before releasing the final product.

I hope this helps.

you will find a nifty CSS tip that I posted here: https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-60804.0.html#msg1227199

Enjoy!

Though I don't use DW and have no idea of its internals, I am forced to ask, do you need DW to do this?

Wdnt it b something like so:

If(photofield is blank)
print default photo (which wd basically be an image with text that reads something like "no photo available"
else
print photofield
end if

Just wondering?

Other than the fact that the right column graphic seems to be jumping from page to page which implies inconsistency (I am looking at it in Firefox), I like what I see.

I would probably also get rid of the intro page and remove the "@" in the email field of the "contact" page. You can always validate the email address on both the front- and back-ends.

Other than that, it's clean and simple.

I hope these help.

http://script.aculo.us/

http://www.openrico.org

http://www.jquery.com


I hope these help.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. He never looked happy at any game (always looking like he took mist alba or conquer mixture ) and threatened leaving the club (including leaving Beckham on the bench) when things weren't going too well.

To me, he was a fair-weather coach (every day can't be christmas, in terms of winning championships) and tis best he was let go.

In the end, he added another championship to his coaching CV and I am sure there are clubs lining up to make him an offer already. He does, after all, have a reputation of winning championships in his first coaching year.

That's my 2 cents anyways.

Well, why don't we ask David Beckham?

Direct your browsers to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfpm7FrdQyI and report back with your opinions

Oraxs,

And of course, where all else fails, you are free to choose from the 115 web developers (worldwide) available on www.webmastersofafrica.com. Just click on "Find a Webmaster" and enter your search criteria.

Regardless of which avenue you take, I hope you find a developer that meets and far exceeds your needs.