Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: Education

  • WordPress Super Survival Skills Course Cape Town

    My First Independent WordPress Course – Cape Town

    I’ve finally mustered up enough motivation to launch my own independent Public WordPress Course in Cape Town. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages since I’ve been teaching WordPress Development since 2008 privately, within companies and on behalf of Friends of Design Cape Town.

    It a litte, ok maybe alot of prodding from Faye Elliot, one of the delegates who attended my WordCamp Cape Town Presentation last year. I have to say a big thank you to Faye as I was making up all kinds of excuses why now wasn’t the right time. It’s amazing what an enormous effort it can be to get a small little course up and running especially when you have to find an additional 4 or 5 hours in an already jam packed schedule.

    Lot’s of Interest in the WordPress Course

    I hosted a Free Introductory Presentation to the course this evening at my favourite Coffee Spot, Escape Caffe in Bree Street Cape Town. We has a few people attend, not massive turnout but everyone present registered to take the course so it’s starting off with a bang already.

    We’ve secured a great venue at 200 on Main Claremont. Appropriately at the Executive Wellness Centre’s Gym Studio so I’ll be putting the WordPress students through their paces. There’ll be a few punching bags lying around when the code starts getting to your head.

    A Quick Outline of Course Modules:

    WordPress Newbie Bridging SessionDate: April 121 SessionR350
    WordPress Site AdministrationDates: April 16,192 SessionsR600
    HTML & CSSDates: April 23, 26, 30 & May 3, 75 SessionsR1600
    WordPress Theme CodingDates: May 10, 14, 17, 21, 245 SessionsR1600

    Venue

    200 on Main Building, 198 Main Road, Claremont, Cape Town – (Executive Wellness Centre Studio)

    Times

    6pm – 9pm

    You can tell your spouse you’re going to gym and you won’t be lying

    For Full Details & Registration Visit the Course Info Page – http://www.the-colab.com/wordpress-course-survival-skills

  • Latest Work here at nomad-one.com

    The last few months have been really hectic for me as I posted here before with a few setbacks but I’m glad to say I’ve bounced back and things have returned to normal. I’ve completed a few nice little WordPress design projects all with their own interesting twists to them. I’m always amazed at just how many really great WordPress plugins exist to fill in the extra functionality needed.

    www.strictlyhalaal.com

    strictly-halaalc2a0c2a0live-the-lifestyle_1238479170803

    The first of them, a site which hasn’t launched yet but is pretty much completed is www.strictlyhalaal.com, which serves as a listing/directory site for “halaal” certified businesses.

    Strictlyhalaal.com uses a few great free plugins:

    Next up is Learningcurve.co.za

    learning-curve_1238479659317

    Learning Curve is a dedicated education technology supplier, representing premium brands such as Adobe, Apple, Dell, Autodesk and Toonboom. This was the first time I have setup an e-commerce website using WordPress and proved to be quite a challenge to begin with but also turned out to be a really valuable learning experience, no pun intended.

    To power the e-commerce side fo things I used the wp-ecommerce plugin, which is a really powerful yet free plugin system allowing you to turn your WordPress site into an online store in a few clicks. Customizing the online store’s appearance was a bit of a mission for starters but it’s worth learning the ins & outs of this plugin, developed by the boys at www.instinct.co.nz.

    I can’t unfortunately divulge the sales figures for the first 2 months, but lets just say I was more than pleasantly surprised. It’s great to see your work directly benefiting your client’s bottom line, especially immediately after it’s implementation.

    Last but not least is Duomarketing.co.za

    duo-marketingc2a0c2a0some-things-work-better-together_1238479702156

    This is the first time I make use of a Woo Theme to develop a client site. I’m very impressed with what the guys at WooThemes are up to, and even more so when I took a little lookie under the hood of one of their themes. The theme options part is really well done, some of the code still boggles my mind a bit, but it allows the user to easily switch stylesheets for a change of colour and style.

    The widgetized areas on the homepage works out quite well also allowing you to add pages into certain block of the homepage layout. The cost of the premium theme definitely adds value to the mix as it allows the client to aquire some really great features for a fraction of the cost of cutom development.

  • Quirk goes Open with their new E-Marketing Textbook

    following in the spirit of open education and with a firm commitment to the Open Education Declaration, one of the star online Marketing outfits in South Africa, Quirk eMarketing, has released a comprehensive e-book detailing the ins & outs of online marketing from their wealth of experience in the field.

    They haven’t forgotten to follow a few simple rules though and by first collecting your email address and asking if u’d like to subscribe to their newsletters, they’re definitely taking their own advice and using this great resource to build their own database.

    I’ve got great respect for the Quirk way of doing things and for many of the guys who form part of their sterling team. they’re a truly community focused Agency always around, chipping in and showing their faces when anything online goes down.

    Download the entire eMarketing textbook for free, or per chapter and learn holistic and integrated eMarketing tactics from the team at Quirk.

    The table of Contents Include:

  • Proud of my XHTML & WordPress students’ progress

    I’m so proud of the guys who have taken my basic HTML course I have been teaching at Friends of Design college in Cape Town. Friends of Design is a hip new design & web college based in Cape Town. They have quickly made a name for themselves and I believe are set to change the way students launch themselves into the creative & web industries.

    I’ve never taught a formal class like this before and it’s been a challenge, though a really rewarding challenge. The course is one of the reasons for my slow blogging of late.

    I’ve just completed teaching a 3 week evening class covering HTML & XHTML basics as well as CSS. The cool thing is I never studied html, so this time around I had a chance to learn a few lesser known html thingies I never even knew existed.

    Learning while I  teach

    The course covered everything from the starting <html> tags through to <div> layouts. I had to cover a few areas like table layouts which I absolutely hated but helped the students get a good idea of how and how not to use tables. After completing the unit covering accessible tables & forms I started gaining a newfound respect for these 2 areas of html which I had a really bad relationship with previously.

    Other challenges which helped me with my own HTML skills, were the questions and problems the students would bring up which forced me to dig a little deeper into the subject. It’s quite a humbling experience when a newbie comes up with a problem you have no idea how to fix and you still need to teach them how to go about trouble shooting the whole thing. More often than not it’s a really small issue like a misplaced closing tag or some or other character out of it’s proper place. This is where colour coded editors like dreamweaver and text mate come in handy. I find my students are really lost without the colour coding as it clearly allows them to distinguish between html, comments and php codes.

    To help give the students a more detailed resource I had to do some scouting around and found sitepoint’s code references for both HTML & CSS which are of the best reference resources on the subject for beginners. I found the WC3 pages way too ugly and academic in their approach to teaching html.

    Student Work to be proud of

    libertadHandre v.d Merwe is one of the students who has show exceptional talent. He has progressed to the point of launching his site(www.libertad.co.za) a few days after the HTML module was completed. He’s already quit his job “not my doing”, and is well on his way to entering the world of web development.

    The challenge of teaching WordPress development

    My class has 6 students and we have currently moved into the next module which is 4 weeks of wordpress. I don’t know of any other wordpress courses running locally, and one of the main challenges was setting the curriculum and developing a process to take the students through from scratch.

    My students have never been exposed to wordpress before this class, so we started with an overview of what a cms is, then into specifics about what wordpress is.

    I’m hoping to wrote a text book which should be completed by the end of the 4th week but so far it’s been slow going with all my other commitments.

    Some of the basic principles of how wordpress works have proven to be huge challenges to explain to students who have only just recovered from a blast of HTML, XHTML & CSS. There were a few things i thought would be extremely simple to understand that I struggled to get across. This part has been a real growing experience for me in terms of teaching.

    The exciting thing is last night we started converting the students’ html templates from the first module into simple themes and loaded them up live.

    At the end of the course I hope to post the students’ portfolios and help them find some gigs to start them on their way to a new career in web development.

  • VeloCITI Session #1: Getting our Values in order

    For the 15 start-up businesses chosen to be on the VeloCITI 2008 program, today, March 18, was a truly inspirational and profoundly introspective day.

    See more about What VeloCITI is?

    We started off at 9 waking up to cups of coffee and a round of congratulating each other for making it onto the program. It was great seeing the familiar faces from the bridging course 2 weeks ago and re-connecting. I feel this year will unlock some really special relationships and it seems it already has.

    We were introduced to Judit from PeerPower, our facilitator and mentor for the day who was later joined by Mignon(PeerPower). I think I can speak for all when I say we were rearing to go and eager to find out what the topic of focus for the day would be.

    Introducing ourselves

    First off we completed a quick introductions/interview exercise in which we each interviewed one of our VeloCITI peers and had to introduce them to the team. We then focused on setting some guidelines going forward in terms of rules of engagement and how we as a group think we would need to work together to produce the best results within the team over the next 7 – 8 months.

    (more…)

  • VeloCITI 2008 – I’m officially on the programme. Yeah!!!

    velociti-hereicomeMy head is spinning completely after attending the bridging course of the VeloCITI program. Out of all the companies applying (20 odd) who were short listed to attend the bridging course, I’ve made the cut with 14 other exciting new companies who will be given the chance to build their businesses from the ground up with professional help.

    If you don’t know what VeloCITI is all about, it’s the business incubation program sponsored by local government and run by CITI (Cape Information Technology Initiative). It aims to take start-up technology based companies and grow them with the hope of increasing employment and growing the local economy.

    A well known graduate of the programme, Rafiq Phillips was recently seen on Carte Blanche discussing web 2.0. Rafiq made a name for himself with his start-up venture, i-drive and is still out there creating buzz and achieving great things. Other companies like Red Button, one of the winning companies from the 2007 program are making it big with their wireless hotspots.

    (more…)