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Web development in Nigeria - slow but steady progress
Posted by Afam on December 26, 2007, 4:00 pm
Viewed 24 times
It is good to know that many Nigerians are beginning to realize the many advantages of using the internet both for business and personal use.
Owning a website is easy these days, the quality of websites being developed is improving even though there is still a lot of room for improvement.
In the past we saw some PTOs charge as much as N150,000.00 for less than 10 pages static website while asking for up to N15,000.00 to add a picture to a web page.
How time flies, today with a fraction of that you can own a complete CMS (Content Management System) that will allow you to add, edit and remove content anytime you want without having to break the bank.
Many people now own personal websites in the form of blogs without even having to spend a single naira as some service providers offer free blogs to the public, the only problem here is that the content on your blogs is owned by the service provider and not you because the service provider can decide to delete your account at any time, without any warning and you cannot do anything about it. This is why it is important for you to carefully read the Terms and Conditions of Service before clicking the I Agree button when subscribing to anything online.
If however, you choose to register your own domain and setup a web hosting account then you can talk about being in control of what you have on your website.
A major cause for worry in the web development industry today is the web hosting where individuals and companies have embarked on a price war in a bid to attract customers.
Unlike tangible goods where fierce competition will result in forcing the price down, on the internet it is a different ball game as the reliability of servers depend on just more than disk space management and bandwidth available. The number of websites on any given server has a direct relationship to the reliability of the server itself. So a server with just 500 websites will be more reliable than the same server with 50,000 websites.
Unfortunately, many will choose the cheapest options around and one can never tell which is better until you actually pay and experience first hand the performance of your website.
The number of web programmers is increasing which is really good news as these are the people that make things happen on the web. A good web programmer can web enable any business process and believe me this is usually the most difficult part of any dynamic web project.
The job of web designers has been made simple these days thanks to thousands of templates out there. These days one only need to take a look at a good looking template and from there come up with a very nice design of his/her own. Apart from the abuse of Flash, the average web designer in Nigeria is doing ok.
Content is one area where many website owners completely miss the point. A very nice looking website without content the visitor is looking for is pretty useless because people don't just visit your website to praise it but to achieve a task. And remember that people do not have all the time in the world online, just give the average visitor a puzzle to solve on your website and he/she will hit the back button pretty fast.
A good and functional website is easy to setup and manage and should meet the following criteria
1. The web pages must load fast. Websites that take a lot of time to come up don't do well because a lot of people will not even wait until it comes up. 5 to 30 seconds is a good time frame not 10 to 15 minutes.
2. Graphics, audio or video must be properly compressed and added to the web pages in such a way as not to hinder the smooth browsing experience of the visitor.
3. The content on your website must be readable. Color combinations must not be harsh to the eyes. Black text on white background remains the best combination for majority of people.
4. Consistent page layout and logical navigation are very important. Links should be descriptive and not misleading or meaningless. Visitors to your website at all times should be able to tell where exactly they are relative to the other sections of your website. All the pages on your website should have a consistent layout even though major sections may have minor changes (but nothing drastic).
5. Your website must be task focused. Remember that people do not aimlessly browse the internet just to randomly see websites. People visit websites to look for information on products, services, deals, news etc. Information that is useless to the visitor shouldn't be on your website.
So, the best websites out there are websites that allow visitors to complete the tasks they have come to complete in shortest possible time.
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