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Treat People nicely, you need them
We leave in a social world, no Man is an island as they say, as humans we need one another to survive. One reoccurring phenomenon with most of the developers/designers I’ve met is the ego problem,  most developers treat their client and colleagues ( web workers: web developers and designer) as ignorant, this does not produce any kind of positive result.

As a web worker, you learn from both your clients and other developers. On the client side, I learnt a lot about online marketing from a client, a medical doctor for that matter! At first it was intimidating when I didn’t have a clue of what she was saying, she introduced me to services like aweber and mailchimp. Through her I found out of their free packages and free HTML email templates that come with them, I walked out of her office that day with more knowledge of email marketing and free HTML email templates.

You also need to treat other web workers well too, make friends where possible, like the saying goes, iron sharpens iron. Relating and Sharing ideas with other web workers makes you a better web worker, it keeps you more informed and more connected.

I remember meeting and becoming friends with Ebiwuari Williams in 2007, I learnt web design in Photoshop and slicing for design through him, without meeting him, it may have taken me more time to discover such a technique. One year later, we were both learning CSS together. He went on to become a java programmer working for Tenecee, while I majored on php and asp.net. I can recall meeting romeo who introduced me to joomla, reading smashingmagazine which introduced me to WordPress, I also got to know about smashing magazine from another developer I met onetime, too bad I can’t recall her name.

Apart from the many benefits ive had from physical relationships with other web workers, I’ve also benefited immersely from online forums and blogs of ther web workers like css-tricks.com, noupe.com, designm.ag, sixrevisions.com, hongkiat.com etc, I’ve Discovered lots of stuff from these blogs and their authors, in my opinion, making and  keeping friends in web workers is important!

See yourself as ignorant
Yes, ignorant, and I mean it, ignorant. As soon as you start getting comfortable with what you think you know, you’d probably reduce your desire for more knowledge and possible stop learning altogether forgetting the fact that the web is never and would never be stagnant. There are new discoveries and new trends everyday and by that it’s an understatement. If you work on Or in the web, you could very easily get outdated in just one year, and as soon as you get outdated, you stop getting new clients and possible start loosing old ones.
I still remember learning web designing in early 2002, I remember the guys I was with, we learnt to use tables for our site layout, a couple of years later, we heard of divs and CSS, we all didn’t like it at first because it was different and so it seemed hard, but some of us worked towards knowing the concept and quickly adapted it, others never did, today, 95% of all those who never wanted to learn the new stuff are out of business while most of the remaining 5% just buy themes online which they use for their clients.

You didn’t develop the web, you’re not the one maintaining it’s standards, you don’t know everything about it, admit it!

Work on your public persona
Have you ever googled your name or your email address? Do it, you’d be surprised how much of yourself you’ll find! These days when I meet people for the first time, I google them immediately, if someone emails me for a project or anything else, I also Google their email address, I visit their Facebook, twitter, Pintrest etc profiles, to see what they’ve been up to! Don’t ask me what I find! The result of such a research helps me decide if I want to work with you or be your friend, it determines our relationship. With this knowledge, I advise you do research on your online persona, modify or delete past post, comments where necessary and possible, where it’s not possible, contact the admin of such a forum or website to do it for you.
You also need to work on your physical persona, pick your calls, reply mails, SMS, tweets, pings etc where necessary. When you meet people, clients or not, leave theme with a positive impression about you, this will at least give you one big thing you will forever keep needing, REFFERALs!

You need to become a business person/Entrepreneur
Three things about entrepreneurship, the product you have to sell has to be fantastic, it has to have fantastic marketing and you have to have fantastic financial management skill and guess what, there is no one person in all the world who can do these three things excellently well. The best of people have two of those three characteristics, there is no one person who can make it, sell it and manage the money, and this is another reason why you need people, why you must treat people well, why you should have some kind of outsourcing or partnership.

“You’ve got to be a good seller to be able to convince a company/individual to build a website. It’s not an easy job at all. The easiest way to go is to sell them the benefits they’ll derive and not the Jquery or animations you can do for them. This was part of the initial challenge for us as we quickly noticed that we needed to transition from web developers to business men. No one wants to know how good you are until you can prove how your offering can benefit their business” -CEO Unotech Media.

1. Security:
This is a continuous problem with the Internet, it will never go away, such that as long as the web exists, there would always be a need for improved security. New threats come to light every day and as a day to day web user, you may not be able to keep track of all these security loopholes as an individual, but your browser vendor does! When new threats are discovered, patches/updates or even a new version of your browser is released to curtail the new threat.

2. Stability:
Every day, the web evolves, every second, there are new websites that come online, new discoveries are made in this regard and these could make older browsers crash, even security threats can bring instability to the user experience online, you could experience browser crashes regularly as a result of a security breach or because your browser may not be capable of rendering what you where opening. To enjoy stability of your browsing experience, it is advised you update your browser.

3. Better Experience:
As technology evolves, so does design, and the evolution of these phenomenons affect the evolution of browsers greatly, over time, web browsers have evolved to looking nicer and slicker. This evolution includes the browser logo, interface and speed. Newer browsers have been known to be faster and slicker than their older counterpart.

With the advent of modern trends like CSS3 and HTML5, web users with older browsers will definitely not enjoy the best of the web, there’s also the possibility you may loose your password, credit card information and other private data to hackers, Please Update Your Browser!

Nigerian Website Designer: Getting a website is quite easy, only 4 steps are required, too many people are scared of the whole concept because they think its cumbersome expensive and stressful. Here are the four(4) basic steps required (from my perspective) in getting a website. here’s How to get a website

1. Discover why you need a website and what you want your website to do for you

Over the years working with clients, one scenario keeps repeating itself, some clients have no clue of what they want! This could be a problem for both the website developer/designer and the client (project owner). From the client perspective, he knows the internet brings exposure and he wants the benefits of that exposure and that’s all he knows, this state of mind can sometimes lead to insatiable clients, they may never be satisfied no matter what they get!
From the designer/developer point of view, this can bring confusion, when you don’t know what your client wants how can you deliver it? Experienced designers/developers know how to solve most of such cases (some can never be solved, trust me!)

2. Find a Website designer/developer

It is important you do this first before jumping to the last two steps, I’ve met clients who did this last and till today, they’re regretting their actions. Meeting a web designer/developer first can save you a lot of stress and money, the developer would help to guide you decipher what you really need for your company/ business/ church as the case may be. The designer/developer would also give you options as regards hosting and web technologies to be used, giving you the downside and upside for each option for you to make a choice. This step alone would shape the entire process, it would help you get an estimate of the total cost, information required and the roles you need to play in the whole process. click here to contact me to help you

3. Pick a domain Name

The importance of this is gross and should never be done without the advice of your selected web designer/developer, its implication includes SEO, uniqueness and many more.
The client (to be site owner) must understand the following things about domain names;

• Domain names are paid for annually forever!
• They are your trademark (there can be only one yahoo.com, it belongs to yahoo)
• Changing domains like hair styles and shoes is lame and would cause serious confusion for the client’s(to be site owner) clients(site owner’s clients), if I used to find your site at http://www.ibrucentre.org , I expect to find it there everytime I go to that address.
• Domain name extensions have meanings: .com –commercial, .org organization etc (I advice Nigerians to take advantage of the .ng extensions)

4. Get hosting for your website

It is important your web developer/designer help you decide this, two main reasons for this are stated below:

• The payment problem
  I’ve met clients who believed anything foreign was the best, they eventually paid for foreign hosting of which renewal became a problem and the unsteady nature of the forex market meant they couldn’t exactly tell the cost of their hosting monthly/annually as the case may be. In truth Nigerian webhosting companies don’t host sites in servers based in Nigeria since we do not have reliable power supply and quality/cheap internet services to power servers, they buy the right to use/control oversea servers and control it from Nigeria, and this makes it easier for prospective site owners since they can now pay for hosting in naira and in our local banks.
• The technology problem
  I’ve also had a client once who after agreeing with me what technology and cms, went ahead to buy windows hosting for a linux project, this made things very complex for me and the project was quite unstable until she realized and accepted the blunder and decided to buy the appropriate hosting with my guidance, but she had already wasted over $300 for the wrong hosting.

Note: payment for hosting like the domain name is recurrent of which can be monthly, annual, bi-annual payment as the case may be!

Request a Design Quote

Kindly mail me frank@frankwaive.com or leave a comment here for further clarifications

In a previous article, I had written on how to get a website, in this article, I’ll be majoring on Non government, non profit organizations (NGO’s), why they need a website, the immediate advatanges, how to take optimal advantage of a website if you already have one.

Communication is THE most important tool in promoting the cause(s) represented by any civil society organization(CSO), the internet is the fastest growing means of communication. 

The power of the Internet as a means of communication which has now becomes an integrated part of our society can be largely harnessed by an NGO which has a website.

The ability to spread your ideas, tell the how you do what you do, why you do it, where you’re doing it, why you need assistance in doing it is key to the survival of any CSO and a website provides you with that opportunity to a limitless audience, unhindered by distance and time, a websites have become one of the most effective means of communication.

NGOs and CSOs should take advantage of this modern and effective means of communication.

Here’s a list of benefits of a website to NGOs and CSOs

A website is an avenue to create awareness about your organization, its mission, vision beliefs and efforts

A website is a Billboard without the limitation of location and space where you could tell anyone with Internet access whatever you please

A website would provide your organization the avenue to showcase what it has done, what it is currently doing, this could go a long way to help get new grants

A website would provide the world with your contact information, the fastest means of research now is the Internet, but organizations without websites would not benefit really from such research. Say a donor organization was looking for NGOs in your geographical area that do what you do, how would they find you?

A website could serve as a proof of legitimacy and functionality in some scenarios

A website would increase public respect and trust for your organization

A website would provide your organization with reliable custom email address, unlike yahoo and gmail, your email address would be yourname@yourorganization.org

A website is also deemed to be an environmentally friendly way of carrying out a campaign as it reduces waste, could reduce travel, reduce postage. So, if you are a socially and environmentally conscious organization, it becomes unimaginable to think that you can continue to do your operations without owning a website!

Take advantage of this medium now and get a website, you could contact me to either build one for your organization or for further information

07030248027
or by email frank@frankwaive.com

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You could also go here to request a web design proposal from me.

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You could get in touch by leaving your comments and questions below

Over the years, I’ve been asked this same question over and over again, how do I decide which web designer to hire/employ? I’ve given several answers to this question both to prospective clients, organizations looking to hire a full-time web designer staff and other web workers.

The web design Nigeria market is quite crowded, with about 80% of the available options lacking the required skill and character set.

“I believe that any decision to do business with a service provider should be guided by the capacity and character of such a service provider.”

Your prospective web designer should possess the following skills and characteristics

• The ability to write code – Too many upcoming web designers these days are lazy, they never learnt to write code, even if they did, they’re not good at it and as such they can’t produce uniquely genuine designs, the copy works from other designers and sometimes even use templates designed by other designers, this category of designers mostly produce poor jobs and they charge pretty cheap too!
• Experience– While I believe fresh designers should be given a chance to show what they’re capable of doing, I would not want a web designer learning on the Job on my project, a web designer performing experiments with my project. I believe designs with experience, with a portfolio of past jobs should be top choice in your choice process. You could easily evaluate a web designer’s design capacity from his past projects.
• Business Oriented– Find a web designer that is interested in making his work achieve your business objectives, provide lead generation, increase sales and return of investment (ROI).

Here’s how I can help you

You could hire me! – Over the years, I’ve acquired the skill and character set required as stated above for web design projects, I would offer reliable business partnership

Free Consultation- I can also provide you with free consultation if you want.