Project management seems to be one of the major problems web designers as well as web design companies seem to face in Mauritius. This is because there is still a change in perspective to be made as companies in Mauritius still see the Web as a copy of print communication. This is the first problem. The second one is the lack of insight and step by step project management, what comes first etc. This also implies that the consulting job must be done before even coding.

Know the content.

Your client wants a website. Know his content. Make him/her think about it and work on it with him/her, this will help you understand his/her field if you’re unfamiliar. You’ll also get to understand the objectives of the site in its field.

Determine each page.

With the content, you can determine which pages will be built and how to order them in the site map. At this very moment, you’ll be able to prepare your metas (title, description and keywords) according to the content. This will help you point the keywords of each page out.

Manage page levels.

Steve Krug pointed out in his famous Don’t Make Me Think that he was surprised that web designers never built past level 2 mockups for pages. Knowing what a page will be like in any circumstance will greatly help you determine if you’re still following your project guidelines as well as work on some url-oriented seo tricks.

Use inner pages as basis for the homepage.

The problem on many homepages is that they look like “Uh, we put this here because we didn’t know really what to put.” Here’s the solution. On building your inner pages first (in theory) you’ll know what are the main objectives and what are the information that have to be pulled to the top. This will help deeplinking as well as conversion.

Build a consistent wireframe.

A consistent wireframe will give the structure of each page. This will be the basis for the graphic designer (or yourself). It will give a well defined field of work and the graphics will eventually abide by the priorities of the website. This is done to improve user experience and give a clean doorway to search engine robots.

What must be kept in mind here is that content is the basis of it all and the project grows and evolve around it. In this order there are better chances for a site to be well indexed and easily ranked.

Being a musician, I couldn’t go by without reading Heavy Bag Media’s evaluation of web strategies in the musical instrument business. The evaluation is to the point and shows that the Web is gaining on in terms of solutions in the musical instrument business. This however underlines some major issues. Businesses like instrument building are based on skills that are not “web oriented”. Many of these have websites that look quite unprofessional like Vigier Guitars for example. On the other hand, others are going fast, ESP guitars‘ website, while others are taking the most out of social media like Youtube.

This eventually brought me to think about how businesses are using the web in Mauritius. Talent exists as well as ideas but the involvement of high profile businesses in the Mauritian Web world or on social media remains poor. Online sales is still trying to catch on. Rogers Group has a site that looks more like a series of print outs pasted on web pages while it could have a really colourful and high user experience website showing it knows how to use this new media. The same goes to Happy World where its value added service like “Pizza Hut” is just lost somewhere in a page talking about the company today. If we had to talk about food, maybe Kraft Foods‘ website would be an inspiration. What about a Pizza Hut Mauritius website?

Loads of businesses are lagging behind in terms of web in Mauritius and it really looks like rogue websites are cropping up every now and then and left just like that. It might seem bold on my part to say this but all these businesses will one day see that the Web might have a real added value, just like instrument building companies are going towards social media (music being social in itself), Mauritian businesses will have to make a real move towards the web, not in terms of print-pasted like websites, but in terms of community building, user experience, offers, sales and much more, not to forget the added value of being competitive over the Net.

What businesses do you think would benefit from a real web strategy in Mauritius?

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius is happy to announce the release of its first free WordPress theme: Marmelade (French for “marmalade”). The theme is only in French for the time being but will be translated later. More info is available on the Marmelade theme page.

SEO strategists out there do know that one of the classic ways of netlinking build up has been launched by blogs with their blogrolls. Evolution has it that blogrolls are now mini RSS threads not only linking to a said blog but also to a specific page and sometimes to blog post excerpts. This had the drawback, for the Google bot, of indexing excerpts more than full text. What with the increase of SPLOGS (Spam Blogs eating up content) this is a real case for concern.

Back in December 2009 2008, Google Blog Search team applied a patch to the Google bot to modify its algorithm concerning blogroll indexation. But it was still cranky. Many blogs saw their full content being indexed while others saw a huge loss in presence in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) as well as, more important, a huge fall in the number of backlinks.

In an end of March update, Jeremy Hylton of Google Blog Search announced that the patch is now up and rolling and that it will influence indexation as well as ranking.

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

Expect major changes in your Google index visibility (especially if it is based on blogroll links) in the coming weeks/months.

Ok people, for once, the Web Design Bureau is not publishing an article on web design. This is a special call to all Mauritian bloggers and friends out there to blog on one specific subject. This is just to pull the leg of so called specialists having fake theories on Mauritius. Let me make my point. This link has been running over twitter since this morning. In French/In English.

It states:

Seven pyramids have been identified on the African island of Mauritius. Remarkably, in construction, they are identical to the ones found on the island of Tenerife, an island on the opposite side of the continent. It underlines the likelihood that one civilisation sailed to various islands off the coast of Africa and constructed these structures.

Now all Mauritians know why we have those rock hills on our sugarcane fields but these so-called specialists are genuinely decided to say that we have had those pyramids (made when the new motorway to Plaisance was being made) far long ago made by strange “Sea People” for astrological deeds etc. These pyramids are supposedly the same found in the Canary Islands.

So here’s the joke : it’ll be too easy to write about it saying that its not true and that their theory is just a way to get themselves known on fake subjects. So let’s do it the other way. Those Mauritian bloggers who want to can write a post on the subject saying that the real “Mauritian Pyramids” have been found and that the world will now know that Mauritians once had strange people who used to greet aliens and worship them from those pyramids. The top of the pyramids were flat because small “vimanas” came and landed on these.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has been working on a Twitter plugin to be released by next week : the twitter follower killer.

The concept.

You have a Twitter account and are being followed by numerous people. People chose to follow you and can decide to stop doing it but what if you don’t want some specific person not to follow you. Say, an ex-girl(boy)friend, your employer or all the members of your company, or even an enemy.

The groundbreaking solution.

A bookmarklet built by the Web Design Bureau is currently undergoing tests and will soon be the object of a public release. This bookmarklet will allow you to kill your follower, meaning that the follower will no longer have access to your tweets. The plugin acts directly on the followers database.

Testing.

Testing is underway. The code is complete and I will be testing it on my own twitter account: http://twitter.com/sachindb. The aim of this test is to delete all my followers by next week meaning that you can subscribe to the tweets and be banned by next week. You’ll be able to re-follow me afterwards.

Stay tuned for the coming release.