As Nigeria celebrates 51 years of independence, we invite Nigerians to reflect on the past, consider the future and answer the question - Where does Nigeria go from here?

This is a contest with cash prize awards and is intended to spur discussion on what the country Nigeria should do in order to be successful in the coming years.

The prizes are:

- 1st Prize - $250 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 2nd Prize - $150 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 3rd Prize - $100 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 4th to 10th Prize - $50 Amazon.com gift certificate each (7 prizes)

You can participate in the contest at: http://www.nauna.com/?module=Forum&action=ForumDetails&topicid=1&pos=1

As Nigeria celebrates 51 years of independence, we invite Nigerians to reflect on the past, consider the future and answer the question - Where does Nigeria go from here?

This is a contest with cash prize awards and is intended to spur discussion on what the country Nigeria should do in order to be successful in the coming years.

The prizes are:

- 1st Prize - $250 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 2nd Prize - $150 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 3rd Prize - $100 Amazon.com gift certificate
- 4th to 10th Prize - $50 Amazon.com gift certificate each (7 prizes)

You can participate in the contest at: http://www.nauna.com/?module=Forum&action=ForumDetails&topicid=1&pos=1

As Nigeria celebrates 51 years of independence, I invite Nigerians to reflect on the past, consider the future and answer the question - Where does Nigeria go from here?

rooks

Nice to hear such stories as this. Gives hope for even better things.

Wow. That generator that uses only air sounds very interesting.

Check out http://www.nauna.com

Hi All:

The Global African Community for Social and Business Networking - NAUNA will be opening on Wednesday, April 2. We are making the website available to webmasters in this forum for a prelaunch review and feedback. We take feedback seriously - this is a community website. Please send an email to teamnauna@nauna.com for signup info.

Best Regards
Team NAUNA

Web 2.0 is a solution that enables the collective wisdom of many to be harnessed and used for the greater good. In the earlier days of the web (Web 1.0), it was assumed that knowledge was concentrated in the domain of some experts. Communications was always from them and pretty much was a monolog. In Web 2.0, it is assumed that knowledge resides in the community. The Web 2.0 tools enable that knowledge to be expressed in such applications like Wikipedia (encyclopedia by everybody), LinkedIn (business directory), etc.

Web 2.0 applications become very powerful tools in places where little or no information exists and the cost of gathering it by an agency will be prohibitive. Harnessing the information is much more efficient and relatively inexpensive.

Very nice website. I like the use of watermarks in the bios and other places in the website. The design looks clean and you have left a lot of white space. I did not carry out extensive tests like my2cents but here are things you may need to pay attention to:

1) The main picture on the homepage (the flash object) contains too generic images for something that draws that much attention. It will be nice to use unique pictures that draw attention to the specializations of the law firm, work they have done in the past, etc. There should be more marketing here.
2) The font that you used in the main menu (inside pages - top) is not very legible and looks more high tech than legal. It doesn't appear to fit the industry that you are using it for. You may want to play around with fonts that make documents look legal.
3) The side menu items (inside pages) appear to be crowded. There's not much white space there. Maybe reducing the font size a notch might help. They may also look better without the red triangle bullets and the line below each of them.
4) The line spacing in the paragraphs of the website may need to be increased to 1.5. The text in your paragraphs look crowded.

Overall, I also think this is a very good website.

my2cents:

Good try about opening the site now

I've got to say that I am really glad that this conversation has gotten to this point where folks are saying, hey let's see what you have and lets critique it. Part of the learning process for us is getting people interested in the idea to the point where they want to see it. You are not going to find many books on that subject specifically for the African community. However, we are all seeing it play out and learning from it. We don't know it all. The moment we do, we have become fools.

Listening to what webmasters in this forum have to say about the website is key to us and we'll be looking to incorporate good suggestions into the website now and after it launches. Development is never going to stop. We'll either be working on fixing something or implementing something new. We'll definately be providing access to web developers just before we begin testing by invitation of users, so watch out for the announcement in this forum.

Thanks again for all your input. They are very much appreciated.

Mambenanje, I appreciate your explanation of my comments and you got it spot on - apart from the lashing out on not understanding English. Some may find that a little harsh especially since you live in a French speaking country.

We are building a website that will become very popular. Obviously, we want a lot of people to sign up on the opening day - that's one reason for this communication. Another reason is that we believe that Africans are just as talented as people in the West or anywhere else in the world and we want that to translate into much more income for improving the lives of people in African communities.

Particularly for webmasters and designers in this forum, there will be a minimum standard for ads posted on our website (and websites that they link to) and we'll need to refer individuals/businesses to local professionals that can create better quality ads and websites for them.

We are going to reveal almost every aspect of what we are doing in our blog www.naunablog.com and when we become a very popular website, anyone that has been following will have the key practical steps to creating your very popular website or service offering - not just the technical side, but the operations, management, marketing, etc. Knowledge sharing is key to developing communities and we are committed to doing that.

Please see my comment on the post https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-107217.0.html and by the end of today, the blog at www.naunablog.com.

And here's what you see when the brown curtain is rolled back - http://www.nauna.com/nauna_home2.png

Many thanks for the comments about the website - both positive and negative. We don't like sugar-coated comments. We want to hear what people really think, so thank you for all the comments.

It's very easy to understand the scepticism about a website of this nature and it appears that this is a broad-based view. We had exactly the same view as well, which is one of the reasons that this website is being developed. It is also understandable to think that the website may be successful initially but fail over time.

This is not a hobby on the side and the slogan 'Connect to Success' is not a cliche. We are really looking to achieve development in Africa by getting the creative works of people, regardless of where they live, in front of the whole world in a very inexpensive (free in most cases) manner. The aim is to help you advertise your products or services, get good professional advice, get access to the required additional resources including capital.

At best, you'll get good entertainment from the existing portals/social networking websites, but reality hits you hard when you get off your computer. NAUNA will help you to turn your dreams into reality (regardless of what you do and where you live) and you'll have fun along the way.

We are looking to change the way people think. Looking to remove the insecurity of producing good quality products because of the time and effort it takes to do so. Time and effort that may lead to nowhere. Looking to get people to produce products and services that add true value to the lives of other people.

We believe that we can change physical communities through an online community and that's what we are setting out to do.

My2cents:

Thanks for the feedback. The reference to the big websites - yahoo, facebook, etc was just regarding functionality. The main contributors will be Africans but the audience is global because the world wants to hear what Africa is saying and they want to benefit from it.

Niyyie:

I'm surprised you did not see the clean look of the www.nauna.com website

The intention was not to mislead people. As you can see, there were no ads or gimmicks. Your attention was being drawn to a portal that will be launching in a couple of weeks.

Even if the website was launched today, you'll still be disappointed due to minimal user activity. The aim (and this was done by a lot of websites that you now patronise) is to spread the word, solicit questions (like whats differerent about what you're doing?), give a couple of people backstage passes to the test server to take the site for a spin. That is why this post is being made in a Webmasters forum and not in an end user forum.

Lastly, you get to experience first-hand how popular websites are built.

NAUNA (http://www.nauna.com) is launching very soon. The aim of the website to enable people to establish the necessary connections required to be successful using the talent they possess or skills they have. This also includes webmasters. The website blog is located at http://www.naunablog.com.

Webmasters, prepare for an explosion of website development activity as a lot of companies and individuals will be able to get the necessary visibility on NAUNA that they currently don't get on the big name websites. Since this is also an African website with a global appeal, there will be opportunities for earning foreign income.

The website is also going to feature a development API for developing NAUNA applications for a very wide range of uses - finance, travel, real estate, ecommerce, health, education, entertainment, games, etc. Your aplications can be targeted specifically to the needs of the community that you live in for resolving unique problems.

Get prepared folks and let your imaginations go wild.

Please respond with suggestions for the type of data exchange required to build the applications that you have in mind. You can send your suggestions to 'devapi at nauna dot com' for privacy.

Thank you

I see your point. There is a blog at www.naunablog.com that addresses this point. Interestingly, Nairaland is also a local community with different types of features organized in a forum layout. And, you can see the result. Membership is still on the increase.

Cool. www.nauna.com is supposed to be Facebook + Yahoo + LinkedIn + Digg + a couple of other really cool websites all in a neat package and completely tailor-made for Africa. When you pull down a country drop-down box, you are able to select states or provinces in each country (not just for the USA alone - don't you get tired of stuff like that?). It was developed ground up. It was not developed using remnant code from the other websites.

Finally, Africa gets the portal it deserves.

There is another clean social networking website on the horizon. This time it is African - www.nauna.com. Watch out!

Friends will be much easier to find on www.nauna.com when it launches.

Are there any companies out there that carry out development of Flash games? Please provide a link to your products.

Thank you

Hey My friend from Atlanta:

Therein lies the problem. It is assumed that once the website is developed, the job is completed. That's just like any company manufacturing products and hoping someone would drop by to purchase the product without any active marketing.

One of the main issues is usually a lack of content one. The website owner does not network with parties that stand to benefit in order to get them to contribute their works. An easy way of doing that is to advertise that you need a product that does such and such.

As people respond, help them to get the products out into the website. And use other methods to get the word out too. People need to use very innovative approaches to selling themselves.

What is probably required is a local website like www.elance.com where individuals or businesses can post samples of the IT projects that they have completed in the past with a view to responding to bids from potential customers. This should attract individuals/businesses without deep pockets.

As the service providers demonstrate very good quality of work and diligence (demonstrated by good feedback and ratings) at good rates, the bigger clients will come. Maybe this is a project for someone out there.

Nigeria should NOT be outsourcing IT to other countries. It should be the other way.

BTW. Does anyone know where I can get access to online games developed by Africans or Nigerians i.e. games that reflect the Nigerian or African culture.

Thank you