Nur Ahmad Furlong

Blog

  • 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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  • Finally a new face to nomad-one.com

    It’s a proud moment for me to have flipped the switch on my new theme for nomad-one.com. Though I’m still ironing out a few bugs and need to fix up one or 2 visual elements, my impatience has just got the better of me and I had to go live with this today.

    I’m hoping you guys will get involved and let me know what you think as well as point out any kinks there might be which I have missed out.

    I’ve done tests in a few of the latest browsers and all seems well, though I think I was pushing it to expect IE 4 to have a clue what to do with this layout. This theme has Small Potato’s Wrath theme as it’s basis though you would never be able to tell that at a glance. Small P still has some of the best free themes out there so I made use of his expertise as a springboard for this one.

    I wanted my new theme to be based on sandbox with it’s rich semantic markup and dynamically generated classes for styling freedom.

    So tell me what you think so far and if you’ve managed to find any mistakes, which I’m sure there are. A few of the links might not be working so bear with me as I patch up a few things.

  • Nomadic News e-newsletter First Edition coming soon

    It’s been a while since I started working on my e-newsletter aimed at providing value adding content to empower businesses, organisations and individuals in general. The focus of the newsletter will take what I have started on this site and move forward in a much more structured manner.

    nomadic-news

    Hot on the heals of my re-design which is dragging on a little longer than expected with all the meetings and projects I’ve been focusing on. I’m hoping the newsletter will get the nomad-one message out there and help me grow this site into a little more of a community with some more interaction and conversation.

    What would you like to see?

    I’m interested to know what you’d like to see published both on this site and in the newsletter, what what would be of real value to you the reader. I’ve been considering taking a stab at building an e-book which will be a guide to business communication. I’ve been doing some research and hunting around online to see what others are speaking about and what tools & methods are out there to help us take what we do further and improve the way we communicate what we have to say.

    I haven’t sent out this newsletter yet but would like to get an idea of what you guys think about it. The Why Design Article published just before this one is taken from the newsletter and there are a few more just to get things going. So check out Nomadic News edition 1 and let me know what you think.

    • Do you subscribe to newsletters?
    • How effective a medium to you consider email newsletters?
    • What do you think people would want to know from a designer?

  • 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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  • Open Coffee Feb 08 was gr8!

    Yesterday’s Open Coffee event held at Origin Roasting in Cape Town was a great success. I met some really interesting people and put faces to a few names I’ve come across online for a while. A little before the event I met with Callum Macdonald from Scotland who’s graced our shores with his nomadic presence for a few months. Very interesting guy indeed. Callum is amoung other things a blogger, web developer and nomadic entrepreneur with an interesting outlook on life and work. He’s the first person I’ve seen actually wearing a pair of black spot sneakers though I’ve read about them online quite a few times. We chatted a bit about business, life and even religion.

    Callum has gotten a WordPress Meetup project on the go, something we’ve all wanted for a while but have been too lazy to organize ourselves. He tells me he has plans to do a Cape to Cairo Trek in the near future.

    I met an American Philosophy Professor as well who shared his world view with us using a few very big words and some little ones in new and interesting ways, always good to know how others see things.

    I also met a Dutchman, Frans, who is an open source enthusiast and uses open source technologies to assist NGOs with their projects.

    Tim Shier was one of the organisers and it was also good to final shake hands in person and share a few words. As usually Dave Duarte was around checking out the scene and a few other online marketing and development types.

    Henk from Skyrove handed out free Skyrove credits worth 50megs which was welcome on the day as I had a few things to send off and download.

    I met a really nice guy who was preparing the coffee called Ghee, which he told me means humility. He’s from Congo and said he was pleasantly surprised that I spoke to him and ask his name even. C’mon people, where’s the Love?

    Business cards were shared and lots of networking and bouncing around of ideas of all types. All in all a great success. I think I might have had a little too much coffee though. Maybe we should start an Open Orange Juice or something :).