Kenyan Design problem SOLVED!
Posted by yamtaa | Posted in Kenya, Uncategorized, technology | Posted on 28-07-2010
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A few days ago, there was a post on whiteafrican.com titled Kenya’s design problem. The author used the African Scifi Factory in Thika as an example on how many designers, firms and individuals in Kenya disregard the ethics of markup while building they’re websites. I ranted a bit on the comments section and later pulled out my laptop, bought some house coffee, plugged in my loud headphones, pulled up dreamweaver and re-wrote The African scifi’s CSS as well as the mark up. You can see my attempt on cleaning Kenya’s name here www.yamtaa.com/scifi
Now! I am not the best designer out there, but comparing my version and the one at http://www.africanscifi.com/ there are a number of improvements. for instance,
- Most of the images are now text meaning the site loads faster and get’s picked by search engines.
- The images have alternative texts which also improves SEO.
- The site uses an external CSS style sheet that can serve hundreds of HTML pages. Meaning, if you have to edit a style, you do not amend all the 100 pages but the single CSS sheet.
- The site has meta tags which richly influence SEO.
There are many other improvements. Also, if I had the exact fonts from the author, I would replicate it to a perfect fit. But, I have used custom fonts that are similar to the author’s to show that custom fonts work.
My version has a few bugs here and there that can be fixed but it is fit to say that it works well on all browsers including the notorious IE6. However, someone out there can share on how opacity can be achieved on IE6.
I just hope there is something to learn from this 
[...] young designer by the name of Martin Kariuki decided to take the specific example of African SciFi Factory into his own hands after this blog [...]
Great job Martin, very impressed by your work on this. Here’s to hoping that we see more young guns like yourself setting the local market straight.
Good one Yamtaa. Now youre talking. Lets call out the web designers one by one!!! Now this is an example of a web designer, not just a designer, but a WEB designer. Cheers
Good stuff.
Excellent work.
I just got through explaining to a client what the difference between “designing” and “developing” a website are. Even after that, he still went for the cheaper alternative.
I tip my hat to you and to WA for bringing this issue to the light
To enable transparency in png images in i.e 6 and earlier versions use a jquery plugin called ‘png fix’, does that in a jiffy. The easiest way would be by adding the script to the of your pages. Its hosted on jquery.com and code.google.com, pretty neat
@ Ben, trying that out now now.. thanks.
Very good, Yamtaa. Since we are big on meta, your meta tag is inside the title. So stop using a browser with multiple tabs open.
And the fonts used are AvantGarde for the text below the banner and the rest are Helvetica. (OCD…). This means that if this was a client with branding issues, your head would have been on the block.
I know its not to seriously done, but you never know who is reading.
This is great work. Another way that you could fix the png problem would be using a script called IE7. It’s a great script, and it fixes not only the png issue, but other css and html issues in IE5, IE6, and IE7.
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
@ Afrowave. You probably are viewing this on a mac. right? I used different fonts just that I was too lazy to download their mac versions, looks different on windows.
Very good job..I’m sure it opened the eyes of many on the possibilities young guys like you can do in Kenya…very good.
free themes.. free themes
was hopping to find some local stuff
Nice job on the sci-fi web. thats the way to go.