Web development

Setting up or improving on an existing online presence for a small business or startup can be a daunting experience. This is especially true if you don’t have a trusted in-house team to rely on to build a great web or mobile site. There is a minefield of designers and developers out there who can take you for a ride and exploit your inexperience for their own gain if you’re not careful. Here are some tips for negotiating the minefield without ...

Social networking has become a huge phenomenon, with a couple of big players dominating the market. Yet if one looks around the web you'll find that anyone can in fact build a social network. Whether it's for your local bowling league or a company's workforce, there are various solutions out there that already have all the pieces. All that's needed is someone to put them together in an inventive way to create a budding new social network. These networks offer you the ...

Web designers have been on the frontlines of the browser-war battlefields for some time now, dodging the shells of legacy browsers exploding all over carefully-crafted pages. Even the design of a simple page would require the designer to have an arsenal of hacks and tricks to ensure cross-browser compatibility. But is it time for the designers and developers to stop fighting the good fight and move the industry forward by refusing to design for legacy browsers? Certainly with the advent of ...

I’ve seen a few blog posts and screencasts over the past few weeks about Drupal’s ever-growing list of modules. Most notably, Matt Petrowsky’s outstanding screencast “Top Drupal Modules” at www.gotdrupal.com. While useful to those new to Drupal, they all seem to focus on the modules that all Drupal developers know about, or should know about at least. I use modules like Admin Menu, Views, CCK and the Date modules as often as I breathe air, so I thought I’d go through ...

I think the digital industry in South Africa is on the brink of some major changes. In fact, many of these changes started a few years ago with a flurry of major acquisitions by big media and advertising groups of digital agency businesseses. AquaOnline was gobbled up by WPP, Trigger went to Aegis, Prezence to Primedia, and Amorphous to Avusa. A little more recently, half of Gloo was purchased by Kagiso Media. The recession then put the brakes on the consolidation, ...

Developing a website on the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) not only means professional, high-quality online products, but it also addresses some very salient business issues when conducting business online. A website built with Drupal is easily updateable, flexible (both in terms of functionality and aesthetics), expandable and wonderfully portable. If ever there were good reasons for outlaying slightly more money at the beginning of the process of getting an internet presence developed, those would certainly be in the top five. Before ...

A web form is like a solid wall between you and your customer. The customer wants to buy your product. You want to sell your product. But in between there’s the form… and everyone hates filling in forms. Making your forms easier-to-use can have a dramatic effect on your company’s bottom line. Jared Spool has written about a form redesign that increased a company’s annual revenue by $300-million. At Flow Interactive we have seen as much as a 125% increase in ...

There was a time not so long ago when I could dictate to businesses exactly what they needed, when they needed it, and at what cost, without even bothering to mention what else was available on the market. Not so anymore. Suddenly I find myself needing to defend my online solution with each new client that walks through the door -- and it's a good thing! Business people have become extremely web-savvy and are doing the right research before upgrading their ...

In my view, usability is often the most overlooked part of the digital marketing mix. When J.B. Watson developed his behaviorist approach in the early part of the 20th century, he focused on the notion of what you see is what you get, and what you can't see and don't get, doesn't exist. I will not attempt to delve into the details of behaviorism and its shortcomings, but the reason I have included this, is for the purpose of focusing on ...

Having been involved in this industry for a very long time, I have the benefit of a long and wide perspective of the business of making the web. This sometimes narrows my thinking, and I have been accused, for example, of not recognising the importance of mobile, or the revolution that is social media. However, it does allow me see how this industry has evolved, and to plot more points on the graph than many others. That doesn’t make me ...