Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Wordpress

  • 1st WordPress Meetup Cape Town – Post Mortem

    After struggling to prevent a few business people from hijacking the session with their own off topic focus, not mentioning any names, we managed to get stuck in talking about a few pertinent issues.

    Callum explainaing a few things about migrating to wordpress

    Those who attended were:

    • Organiser, Callum Macdonald – Nomadic entrepreneur & web developer/blog master from Scotland
    • Marc Pelteret – Business Science / Computer Science Graduate with an interest in open source development
    • Christina de Silva, Online marketing strategist and wordpress enthusiast – AlterSage.com
    • Nada Jones, sales & biz development executive – Work Online Interactive
    • Chris – iMod
    • Rob Wilkonson – Butlers Pizza (Energy Crisis Maniac) 🙂
    • Will – 2oceansvibe.com
    • Grant – mobi me
    • Jamaal – Web Strategist at Jayz

    What was spoken about?

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  • WordPress Meetup Cape Town – Monday 18 Feb

    Finally it’s here, something I’ve been wanting to organise myself but haven’t managed to get around to doing, an (un)conference style wordpress meetup, and hopefully only the first of many to happen in Cape Town.

    Callum Macdonald, nomadic web worker and travelling entrepreneur hailing from Scotland was responsible for setting the ball in motion after the recent Open Coffee which was recently held in Cape Town.

    Visit the wordpress meetup google group or the blog to catch up with developments. Tomorrow is the first meetup and you’re required to register just so we can get an idea of the numbers for catering and logistical purposes.

    The River Club[1] can provide us with a venue for R175 per person. That includes tea and coffees on arrival, a light dinner in the restaurant, and reasonable use of the internet (web only, no heavy downloading). So I’ve confirmed that booking for Monday 18th.

    Leave a comment on this post to confirm attendance.

  • Why use Design in business

    The Business Case for developing a more Design Centric Operation

    Why use Design in Business

    The aim of this article is to bring out some of the benefits of having a design centric operation, one which appreciates the value design has to offer to all aspects of ones business, and using design as an integral part of a profit generating strategy.

    As a designer I am always questioned about the need for design within a business and the value or purpose it serves. A discussion with one of my peers lead to some introspection and research to uncover the facts behind this supposed mystery.

    How do we quantify Design Value?

    To many business people it’s difficult to quantify the effect design might have on their business. This is true for all aspects of the business and all forms of design, be it web, print, internal(within the company), external(customer focused), for products, services, communication and aesthetic purposes. The best way to quantify the value design has to offer is to analyse how design has added value to companies who are Design Centric. Design Centris meaning those who appreciate and employ design to enhance business value.

    Insights from US & UK Design Research

    Research done in both the US and Britain have shown conclusively that design has a positive impact on the performance, profitability and positive image of companies across a wide spectrum of industries. The “Value of Design Fact Finder” study, done in the UK, had the following to say about the impact of design on business performance:

    Businesses which use design perform better than their rivals. There’s unmistakable proof of that in our Value of Design Factfinder, a unique online information tool.

    The Value of Design Factfinder was launched in June 2006 and shows the positive impact of design on practically every measure of business performance, including market share, growth, productivity, share price and competitiveness.

    In businesses where design is integral to operations, over three quarters say they’ve increased their competitiveness and turnover through design. Similarly, four out of five (79%) businesses that believe design is integral to their business think that design’s importance to competitiveness has risen over the past decade.

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  • A few new tools in my belt

    Testing, testing, windows live writer blog post no.1. I’ve just connected my blog to Windows Live Writer, a desktop application which allows you to write & posts from the comfort of your PC’s desktop. I’ve experienced problems writing and editing posts at times when my Internet connection is unreliable so I hope this little app will solve some of those problems and make it easier to work on drafts and stuff like that.

    The cool thing about this little app is it plug into your blog software’s API and allows you to create posts while viewing your post styles. You can upload pictures and add them to your post. It’s got a nice spell checker for spelling baddies like myself and makes writing a post extremely quick and easy.

    livewriter

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  • Web Guru Spotlight 3: nomad-one meets adii for coffee

    Yesterday met with Adii(Adriaan Pienaar) of www.adii.co.za for a coffee and a chat. Adii is someone making quite a bit of noise in the South African & International wordpress community. He’s a self styled WordPress Rockstar and online entrepreneur of note. Though I’ve interacted with Adii digitally through his website, facebook and email, meeting someone in person still is the only way to get a real sense of the personality on the other side.

    Web Guru Spotlight: nomad-one meets adii for coffee

    So who is Adii (Adriaan Pienaar)

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  • I won twice in constructive criticism blog commenting

    I’m ecstatic at the moment after receiving word from 2 online commenting competitions that I’ve been nominated as a winner. Woohoo!

    Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.

    The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.

    I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.

    Constructive Criticism

    The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.

    It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.

    Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.

    Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.