We’re in for some fun on this new experiment. Before digging too deep, let’s see how are the current state of affairs. First things first. The major target for the site being the Mauritian population. On its “About E-Government” page, the site states:

The vision of the Government is to provide an effective and efficient delivery of services, on a 24/7 basis, to citizens as well as to the business community. In this respect, the Government has invested in the necessary infrastructure, namely, the Government Online Centre and the Government Web Portal as a gateway to provide Government services online.

This calls for some thought. Delivering quality information first comes through delivering it easily. How are these services delivered then?

The loading time question.

The government website is a public service, hence needs to be effective and practical but the first thing that many users see of this website is the time it takes to load. So let’s dive into this.

Swift page loading is a must today. According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, web users are ruthless, they have very little patience and page loading time is a huge drawback. (Source)

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

[...]

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

Consequently, people get bored with the loading time of websites and end up not using the tools built for their own use. We should also take into consideration one important element, the evolution of bandwidth. With more and more bandwidth available, less time is needed to load a page. In the late 90s, a decent load time was tested and set at 7 seconds for a page on a 56 kb/s dialup. Today, this is measured in milliseconds and under 4 seconds for a page.

Load time testing.

So we did a small research on the website’s loading time. The government’s website has been tested on Pingdom Tools. On a T1-ADSL network, the site takes between 13-14 seconds to load. The full test is available here.

To get a clearer view, some Mauritian web users have been asked to test the site from different locations on the island. Here are the results:

Around 15 seconds on Orange ADSL 512 Kbps @ this moment(1.28 PM) on Chrome! Fond du sac North!
Source : on Twitter

Takes approx. 18sec to load www.gov.mu via Firefox/ Emtel Wimax
Source : on Twitter

My.T 512k. Actual speed is around 90kbps | Firefox 3.5.7 – 94s | Opera 10.10 – 102s | Location: Triolet
Source : on Twitter

The good, the bad and the ugly

The good thing is that, depending on the bandwidth, the site meets only nearly twice the late 1990′s recommendations, it might have been really bad. Who are we trying to fool here ?

The bad thing is that, on the actual standards of bandwidth consumption, the site is 4 or 5 times slower than what is usually seen around the web nowadays.

The really ugly thing about all this is the way local users have not been taken into consideration as well as availability. How? Some points discussed online.

Many Mauritians don’t have ADSL/My. T & Emtel. I expect it would take more time(over 4 mins) when being used on dial-up.
Source : on Twitter

A gross estimate is that there are around 400k Internet users in Mauritius… & around 60-70% of them are dial-up/Nomad users.
Source : on Twitter

As an aftermath, more than 50% of Mauritians need to wait over a minute to load the first page. Now that’s what cannot really be called service.

Sources

This loading problem on the website might have different sources:

• Server capabilities. The server can have difficulties delivering pages. Modern browsers also accept Gzipped pages, thing that the server does not actually do.
• Code. Messy code is present everywhere and each page is a great example of what should not be done.
• Seperation of content and layout. All are tightly mixed making it difficult to read for any browser.
• Excessive use of unnecessary javascript.
• Javascript not loaded in external files.
• Technology used. It seems that the portal runs on a java or ASP cms and that no page is optimised in terms of code. (Can someone confirm in the comments please?) Standard fast PHP and MySQL might be an interesting try.

SEO Friendly?

Ok, lets admit that some persons care about SEO for such a portal, why would it matter? Simply because people need to find the information. It comes to the quality of the information delivered. For the time being, no real user-centered information is delivered. Just have a look at how the site’s whopping near 60 000 pages look like when indexed in Google.

An example of SEO necessity can be a person having to re-issue his/her id card. Typing the term “mauritian identity card” in Google gives this:

Another fail maybe, but why take this into consideration? Google Webmaster Tools has been updated to include page performance tools. One new criteria in site crawling is now SPEED. This is linked to the load time problem. Another thing is that, content remains king and is a better king if easily found through search engines.

Every web designer had his/her way of writing mark-up. If you usually start out writing your mark-up with all your classes and ids, PrimerCSS is the tool for you. Just drop in your mark-up and it’ll extract a primer stylesheet with all of these to get you up and running in no time.

An idea?

An idea just popped like this some days ago. It was a simple, somewhat crazy but cool idea which might have some great impact, at least some minor incentive, on the Mauritian Web Design field. This crazy thing is currently called the “2010 project”. A better name might be found later on. Now, the cool thing about this idea is that this project will have a collective aspect. Yes COLLECTIVE in the sense that the Web Design Bureau’s (small handful of) readers will be associated to the project.

Why?

Why associate the Mauritian readership? Because the project concerns them, the project’s subject is some kind of representation of Mauritians all over the world. Yes you are right! You’re getting the idea of this project and what it will consist of. And you will participate!

What?

As said earlier, your representation on the web: the Mauritian government thing (yes, you can’t call that a website). The idea is that, as time goes by, more and more information is being added to this site. It is currently impossible to know how many pages there are in that site, how it is really organised and what SEO/SEM strategies are applied to it. I tried a spider simulator on it and ended with an #epic #fail (hello Twitter world) with a lot of 404 errors and a whopping 69 links in only one page while getting you lost in there.

So here is the project. It’s not said that it’ll be a killer success but it at least is an attempt to provide and alternative. The project is therefore a redux of the site.

How?

I have no idea yet but the concerned persons are Mauritians first. So we need to address the Mauritian public, well the site needs to address the Mauritian public. This is why major decisions on the design will be set as polls open to the readers. All ideas will be welcome and active participation will get interesting. No code will be generated, it is only a graphic design redux of the site just to imagine how it would have been if the right questions had been answered when necessary.

Let’s do this!

Ok, this project can be a huge flop but it has the advantage of budding (at least). The idea is not to take the place of anybody nor steal the job off anybody either. Just the fun of trying a real project management challenge on an equally challenging subject along with the web friends.

End of year approaching, I am starting this little series of post to look back on the past year. Actually, it is a look compared to the previous half-year because the Bureau is only a year and a half old. Among many other things we can look at this year’s best posts, at least this year’s most interesting posts.

People love winning

Ok, these were real traffic oriented posts but hey, they did get some success. People love winning things. Free is good! So those posts having attracted the largest readership were the contests the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius did over the year:

1. Google Wave invites
2. Free vector packs
3. Designing for the web (the comments are a must read)

Counsel and How tos

A lot of the advice, counsel and how to posts also got their share of readership. Though not as much as I would have liked but they did make their way and are still here to guide those is search of information. Here are those having made the list:

1. Why so much SEO? on the need to include SEO in design.
2. Are Mauritians that bad at design? on the fact that the government of Mauritius outsourced the designing of the new Mauritius logo.
3. Showing off your design work on how to increase your contacts and contracts with your past design work.

Chronicles

Chronicles are a new part of the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. I’ve held a personal blog for the past 6 years but with the management of e-reputation and the need to protect my private life I closed it down. The Chronicles section here is not very old and allows me to blog on a more personal level. Short but sweet, they are still in “budding” mode. My favourite one, and also the one I’m most proud of is The Mauritian in Me. I’m also a guest author on Island Crisis now, solely blogging in French.

Conclusion

All in all, 2009 has been a nice year for the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and some new elements have set their pace in the Mauritian web world. Twitter, for example is generating more traffic on Mauritian blogs and sites, the web community is getting larger, the Mauritius Blog List longer and a new year for more great experiment.

I was toiling through my huge RSS feeds list and was somewhat surprised to see that Six Revisions had published yet another retro colors showcase and tutorial. If I’m not mistaken, the retro trend had its days of glory in 2005-2006 and was less used nowadays though still a sure bet. Even Jonathan Snook came back to it just last month. The idea here is not to delve into retro design but into the assumption that all the web design clichés that we now have are here to stay for ever.

Clichés you said?

Some call them trends but all in all its like this. Someone gets an idea and builds a site with a specific style and layout. This is new and fresh. Web design showcases and popular magazines put this site in their never ending lists of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. Then, some other guy will draw inspiration from it and mix it with the inspiration from another list of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and come up with a new site that will itself be part of a “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. And this will start a never ending cycle.

Back to the future.

After some time, when new trends will be catching up, the older clichés will tend to get into the background. New elements, new ideas, new “past” inspired clichés will come up making web design seem bland after running around the same type of sites all the time (this explains why the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius ended up with a really “common” theme). You can’t avoid it, you need to get inspiration and your clients will have seen a lot of the surrounding sites around before asking you for a specific design.

Then you get that little miracle spark. One designer will click around in those “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” archives and get his/her eyes watery of the reminiscence of past styled designs. He/she would think “Hey, why not go back to this? It would be a real change and an adventure!”. And there you go again, a new venture with elder styles.

What next?

Well, the elder styles mix up with the newest “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and you get another new new old based trend… and the uroboros is complete. This is how the clichés will carry on living in web design and will still be served in some way or another.

Its just like those trainer-problem filled trainee(s) cliché film scenario that Hollywood just seems to have the secret:

A great trainer (sometimes retired or having left the competition because of some sad life changing experience) does not want to train some guy or team. The trainer has his own problem and the trainee or team also have theirs. There’s a lot of misunderstanding all around but somehow they get to build up a relationship and solve their problems together while winning their contest and living happy lives.

How many of these films have you seen? Even the award winning “Million Dollar Baby” is based on this scheme proving that this still works. Another award winning one in this category is “Rocky”.

Conclusion.

So, as a bottom line, we could say that Web designing is like being the “Karate Kid” :

Wax on, wax off !

“Form follows function”, most of us have heard this at least once in our lives. This catch phrase is one of the bases of architecture. Its primary meaning is:

The principle is that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

It has lead and still leads to hot debates on its intended purpose. We can however take it literally and analyse it from a Web design angle.

The need for function.

Why would we need function in the first place, especially in the world of Web design? We’ve already seen how to optimise a site for search engines even before its coding:

• 5 tips to a successful seo oriented web project
• The Head element in SEO basics
• SEO in your code

This is one aspect of Web site designing. The other aspect remains the fact that a website has to fulfill a purpose. There are some real world cases that IT experts tend to forget. 90% of the persons out there are not that at ease with the web or a computer as we are. Its so easy to just say: “Ok, they’re not my primary audience so what the f***?”. This is where the leap has to be made.

You’ve integrated the concept of SEO, now integrate this one: people buy products and services, not search engines. Design your sites accordingly!

Be effective, profitable and convert.

Web designers, this is not about you. Many a time a web designer can end designing a site with this idea in mind: “how will it look in my portfolio?”. Its not about your employer also (if you’re in a company), you’re out there to answer to a need, conversion. This is where your work gets interesting. In the current credit crush and economic crisis climate, a website must not be a cost to a business but a real revenue center.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is that web users, though not all computer savvy, are getting more and more ruthless and demanding from websites as well as a huge demand for simplicity. This takes user experience from yet a,other angle and calls for more usability for more profits. An example is the lack of conversion tricks on some of the Mauritian websites.

DHTML, JQuery, Ajax…

Eye candy! That’s one word that sums it all! We love that, we love the animation thing, the out of this world experience that lasts… 10 minutes. Yes, once the user has seen it, it gets boring to him. When I started my Web design career I was so easily influenced by all those javascript and DHTML tricks that would make a whole page go pop. And we didn’t even have ADSL at the time. I would script for the sake of scripting but there was not any real function to it. This where we fail to understand the function of a site.

Giving more importance to the form turns the site away from its goals and the project as well. A website designed like that will not work (in terms of returns on investment)!

Let’s be honest for a bit. Web design is evolving in Mauritius at a slower pace than everywhere else. There is still a lot to do and a lot to learn. As constantly stated on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, there is still a gap to bridge between marketing techniques and web design here. This brings up the problem of conversion. There’s a lot of Web design companies in Mauritius and all in all you can get at least 50 new websites launched every year. The main problem is that those sites is that conversion is not maximised.

A hotel website.

Let’s take a real life example. A lot of websites are “tourism” oriented in Mauritius. These are great for promoting beaches and hotels. Below is a screenshot of one of them (I deliberately took only part of the header and the footer off to concentrate on the content) :

Looks like a normal website. There is a problem here though. No element jumps out to your face. No element drives your attention. No element makes a “call to action”. You might have read a lot about these “calls to action” but they are not yet integrated in the Mauritian “web design culture”. So what is a “call to action”. This is what really makes a site convert an visitor into a customer. It is the way a website builds its return on investment.

A call to action is that element that would take a website to a higher level. So how would it be done on the basis of our example website?

Content and conversion.

As stated before, knowing your clients’/site’s content is a must. This is the core of your website. Knowing the content will help you understand (and it is better if you work with your client) the main objective of the website and how to make it convert. In our particular example, it is obvious that the main element of the site, the one that converts, the one that makes the site work for the global enterprise is… “reservations”.

Being a hotel means that getting reservations is the most important element of the business. Thus, this should be set forward. Here the problem is that the reservations tab is nowhere to be seen at the first glance. You have to read the whole menu to find it.

Solutions

The available solutions are fairly simple. They imply knowing and understanding the aim of the website and setting some elements to the forefront. Instead of showing a redesign of our example, it might be better to show a series of inspirational “call to action buttons” that would help transforming a visitor into a customer. Note how all these are built and are set to maximize the conversion of visitors into customers.

Conclusion

As you see, all these sites have a call to action button that incites the visitor to do an action. This button stands out and grabs the visitors attention. This is one of the most common and efficient ways of converting visitors into customers.

As a web designer, a lot of responsibilities lie on your shoulders. The present article stresses on the fact that a web designer should also delve into a lot of other web related skills to improve his/herself. Well I’ve always stressed on this point in any case. The reason is simple: make a site’s web design work for it, helping it converting visitors into customers. One of the usually overlooked aspects is “images”.

The usage.

Custom has it that the web designer chooses some attractive images that go in the line of the client’s message or the client simply gives a CD with a number of stock images or images it has collected. Many a time the client’s desired images are not the best ones but the worse can be the fact that they don’t carry the message that benefits the client himself. It is the web designer’s job to get as close to ‘image marketing’ and explain things. A pretty face can push visitors away as clearly illustrated in this article.

Choose.

After explaining the concepts and alternatives to the client, choose the images for it as per your wireframe. But here again do not fall in the same trap as the client. You might want a “CV” image but make sure that it carries the right message. Below is a part screenshot of a big Mauritian company’s website offering career opportunities and showing a resumé:

Where it goes wrong.

You’d tell me that its ok, they’ve put a “resumé” image illustrating the main idea of the page. There still is a problem around here. Yes, the resumé as it is, in this image is crumpled. You might be offering career opportunities but you are also supposed to respect your future and current employees. The crumpled resumé is currently sending the wrong message while in the same page it is stated:

[The group's] regional presence and culture of excellence can help you build an exciting and gratifying career.

You might be on the job market but you sure want to be respected for your skills. The same applies to business partners. For some, the value you give to your workforce is your value.

Your job as a web designer.

As a matter of fact this stresses on the essential information that, your implication in a web site is not only to get the best gradient colours and pixel popping but showing your added value by understanding each page’s content and concept before choosing the best image to illustrate it. This also adds value to the site you sell as you are able to maximize conversions.

This is a major question that has been running over Twitter, Facebook and some major Mauritian blogs these last days. It has its roots in one thing only: the new Mauritius logo.

Ok, this is not another “this is a crap logo” post. We all know it and accept it. If you need more info on this deceitful and completely biased logo you can head to SJDVDA’s blog or Guillaume’s article to get a general view of the subject. Not that I wouldn’t have liked spilling some dirt also on Acanchi’s horrible work when you think that they spent 18 months to come to such a mess but something more disturbing has caught my attention.

When will Mauritius, in general, let go of that “occidental supremacy” scope? This logo demonstrates that this state of mind still prevails in Mauritius. How? By asking a British company to analyse OUR culture. If that project were to be given to a Mauritian company (admitting that it is a honest and working type one) the internal workings would make that the project would recognize better traits to Mauritius than the Pieter Both Mountain. The mixed culture and the core of the tourism industry would have been the driving forces. A foreign agency would not have a view of the inner workings of our society to reflect the quality of our hospitality.

Second thing. This logo branding has cost 31 million rupees to the state. That would be around 3000 31 (thanks Bruno) rupees per Mauritian, any age, any class. This money comes from the income taxes the government gets from the people and what do we have here? 31 million rupees going to the UK. What about 31 million rupees going to a Mauritian company and re injected in the banking system or the Mauritian economy?

Third thing. School kids in Mauritius have better ideas than the guys at Acanchi. Are Mauritian designers so bad that none has been able to enter the call for projects? Where are those companies? How come no Mauritian body has been able to defend a project that should represent any Mauritian design company’s pride? Are we that bad?

EDIT
Published in L’Express today, the Director of Circus Ads says that the Logo is great. The Logo has been made by a “Mauritian” agency having its roots in France.

One of the students in the design school I work for said, during his final presentation: “Excellence is in the detail.” That student was working on a product for a 150 000€ high end hi-fi product that went directly into production. I was astounded by the quality of the work and the actual attention his whole team had for detail. One thing that web designers tend to have in common with this product design student is the attention to be given to detail.

Too much detail might kill a design. This is the major drawback we had some 2 years ago when the “web 2.0 eye candy” was at its peak. Too much detail from too many styles. It was overflowing with eye-candy. Then usability and accessibility came round and toned down things a bit. We now have some real user oriented web applications that work like charms. However, detail is still a problem. Not in design actually.

I’ve come across a lot of showcases over the web and on some (especially Mauritian ones), grammar is simply horrible. This is even more astounding when texts are in French as we are supposed to master both English and French. This must be a major advantage for Mauritian designers in general but showcasing texts like “tout une vie de…” or “fait parti de” shows a real lack in interest in the project. A designer and web designer tops the design world when (s)he shows that (s)he pushes detailing even in the text. This is where the excellence of detail can be met.

Sorry, it took some time but the contest winners are finally here. Its a bit deceiving to have had only a few people participating but hey, that’s life and luck for everybody else. Here you are guys, the following people will be contacted by Alex from Designious to fetch their prizes.

• Nav
• Joyshan
• sjdvda
• Yarekh
• NirvanKnight
• Kurt Avish
• Kishan Jeetun
• Carrotmadman6
• Esther Ang
• Sun

Have fun guys!

I was reading an article published in May 2009 on the fundamentals of web designing when I came across this excerpt:

Pay attention to your homepage. That is what the viewers will first see. The home page should be attractive and provide useful information. If it doesn’t satisfy the mentioned criteria then the readers will move on.

This is a great piece of advice. The home page should be attractive. I like to compare it to my version of one of the most futile sayings out there: “Judge the content by its cover…”. You can have different types of users for a website and some types of users judge more on the eye candy than on the information available. This is where your design gets into the game. Give the eye candy to keep “eye-candied driven traffic” and give the content to the more “content-minded traffic”. However, there seems to be a hiccup somewhere around.

“That is what the viewers will first see.” This is what strikes me. With the evolution of search engines, the complexity of algorithms and all the work around SEO and separation of code and content… does the “home page being the first thing viewers see” hold the line? If I look at the traffic generated by the content of this site or any other site I manage, the home page is not the most viewed page or the most important landing page (therefore not the first) on any of the websites. If your content is well built and optimised (content being the core reason of maintaining a website or blog), each page is evaluated and included in search results.

So, is the home page really the first page that a visitor will see? Should it be the most well designed page in a site? The level of design should be the same for any level of a website and the fact that user habits have changed should be taken into consideration to maximise conversion rates through each page of a website.

This is a kind of trick question in itself as everybody has a personal point of view. We can however offer some directions in terms of web design. We do have trends in the web design world. Showcase galleries and trend setting sites like Smashing Magazine or Noupe are great web designing elements that witness the good health of the industry. The 2.0 trend in the web world is not only the eye candy overflow to which some web designers stick, it is the coming of age of tools, applications and their use by any person, programmer or not, web designer or not.

Will there be a Web 3.0. I don’t know. To me it will only be another shift in the use of applications and technology. Huge quakes are shattering the technology world (Oracle and Sun, Microsoft and Yahoo!) and they all have a certain impact on the way the web will evolve as well as its use. The forthcoming innovations might as well change our perspective. What about the full Web OS that certain people used to talk about? This would imply that the whole concept of web designing would change. Accessibility, usability and so many other fields would take new ventures.

Even today things are changing. The web designer’s work’s breadth might change. New tools are currently allowing the user to change its use of the web. An example is the customize your web plugin for Firefox. It gives the user possibilities to modify the view of a page. Add colours and even move blocks around the page.

What this plugin presupposes, is that the future of the web might just be the construction of a canvas that people will customise just like it is for, say, iGoogle. All websites will be personalised at large according to the user and by the user. For example Paige Hemmis might as well turn the Web Design Bureau all pink and lovely just as she browses over it (which I’m sure she never does ) but anyway, you grab the concept.

This would actually be a pure offspring of the Web 2.0 culture: the user taking even more over the web by taking over the website itself. This would also mean that accessibility would be modified to its core. A person might need more contrast and instantly redesign the site and use it, another might as well strip the site of its images… This might just be what’s in for us web designers.

A new version of the HTML 5 draft is currently available. It has been published yesterday (9th of September 2009) and is still in its working note form. It is interesting to read about the conception of this new version of the future web. Most of it is based on the HTML Design Principles that explain how a browser, whatever its age is supposed to behave when set in front of any kind of code.

What looks weird though is that the point of view of HTML through this document is biased. It does not look like it has been written so as to give a basis to browser manufacturers as well as web designers to build good websites on one part and good rendering tools on the other. It still proposes new angles for web designing but it sure looks like someone just went around and asked Web Designers: “People, what would you like to have in your specs?” and that’s all.

True enough that standards were more or less for browser manufacturers at some point but let’s not forget that there is still a big gap between browsers used worldwide. IE 6 is still here and being aggressive and standards are not fully understood by everybody. Today it seems like the new standards are only for Web Designers and I think that it is a huge mistake. I just hop that things will get altered until 2012.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has made it to its first showcase gallery over the web. After the last HTML 5 redesign of the Web Design Bureau, the WordPress theme running this blog has been submitted to the HTML5Gallery, the premier HTML 5 showcase and it has been listed. There’s still a lot to be done to improve the Bureau but the Mauritian reference site is making its place in the sun.

You can view the entry here and vote for it. Make sure you give it the stars you think it deserves. Just to brag a bit about it, even Jeffrey Zeldman himself commended the HTML 5 Gallery.

Some months ago I was promoting this entry on the major presence of typography in web design: 95% of web design is typography. It is true and proven that typography is what builds layout. The major problem with typography is that the average visitor is used to the stock fonts found on the Windows. Now the average Web 2.0 amateur web designer will try to use those stock fonts as default on their website. This will eventually end up bringing down the user experience.

The best solution for the professional web designer is to be aware of the limitations of the web in terms of use of fonts and optimise one’s knowledge of typography. Mark Boulton states in his book Five Simple Steps to Web Design that his education in typography and his unique grasp of layouting (based on typography) is what his clients searched for when they came to him. Conclusion, having the best knowledge in typography will get boost your web designing.

How can you do that? By following typography sites worldwide or by getting into a typography course which seems to be a rare thing (believe me, I’ve been trying to find a crash course near me for the past 3 years). The web has a lot to offer in this field. Here are the two fresh sites I’ve been following recently.

The first one, just because it allows me to follow the other sites without having to actually skim through all their RSS feeds. Type Daily. A great type oriented news aggregator.

The second one is really font oriented. It will help you reach new heights in terms of typography mastering and design skills in general. This one is a real must. FontShop Education.