Ignorance floats around many web-design projects in Kenya. Unfortunately! In most cases, the original Photoshop documents signed off by the client are not identical with what finally goes online. I agree to some extent that at some points some things change and sacrifices have to be made, but in most cases, there are readily available solutions out there that we choose to ignore.

Below are  4 ignored “small things” while moving from Photoshop to HTML to code.

1) Border  underline

The use of font style underline to achieve a border underline not only separates boys from men, it also affects the whole symmetry of the website. Space is the most important element in my opinion when it comes to web design. Move the line-height by a pixel up or down and your website is either a hot girl or an ugly one. If so much is decided by a pixel in line height, imagine an entire border line?

2) Rounded Corners

Rounded corners create a different feeling from Sharp corners. A while back it used to be quite some work setting rounded corners on divs, but, with CSS3′s border-radius, laziness has lost excuse

3) Fontface

Incase you didn’t know this, FONTS ARE A BIG DEAL! In terms of user experience, fonts play a major role on how the user will interact with your website and together with shapes help set the entire MOOD of the website. Infact, choosing to ignore custom fonts is just like ignoring shapes. Same damage.

4) UL styling

So you are finished writing your markup, everything looks fine and functional. Your designer however trying to impress the client added grenades, tiny rockets beside the list instead of just sticking to the usual bullets!! CSS doesn’t offer internal imagery that comes close to that, so you have to crop the image and define it’s styles specially and this affects the margins!! ARGH!!! So you decide to ingore the bloody UL images. After all, they don’t mean so much now do they?! YES! They do. Small errors like those become habit and that’s not good.

Street boys also called chokoras are good people, but, after sniffing glue they are insane. Infact, I think that chokora’s can be classified into two; Glue sniffing chokoras and legit homeless chokoras.

Legit homeless chokoras carry big sacks and walk around collecting plastic cans to sell for a few shillings, they also run petty errands like taking out trash for some rich folks. Every once in a while, life confuses them and they do something stupid like steal some shoes from some door step and they get lynched for that.

Glue sniffing chokoras are the bad breed! We should be ashamed of ourselves for lynching the hardworking kind. Because of our actions, the number of the glue sniffing chokoras has increased and the decent ones has gone down. Glue must also be the worst drug out there! I say, glue is more dangerous than cocaine, more dangerous than heroine and marijuana and all the others. Infact, the only drug at par with glue or maybe close to glue is a cigarette. But that’s discussion for another day… Back to the glue sniffing chokoras…

Glue sniffing chokoras are the kind that would sneak up on you from behind with a pile of shit on one hand and a bottle of glue on the other. They then try extorting money from you threatening to throw the pile of poop on you should you attempt anything stupid. A typical chokora hold up would go down like this..

Chokora: Niajeeeeee budaaaaaaa  retaaaa doh yooooote ama ukureeeeee ii maviiiii reoooo  HAIYAEEEEEEE! (No commas or fullstop)

the Buda: What is this madness?

Chokora: HAIYAEEEEEE….. weeee unacheza na mimiiiiiiiii? hujui mi ukura mavi arafu nacelebrate!

At this point the buda pays up or else he ends up walking home since no matatu would allow him in smelling like shit! Chokora’s shit at that! But, not all chokoras are bad, not at all. While growing up, most of my friends were chokoras. They taught me things I couldn’t learn from ordinary raia. e.g kudandia lorry za mchanga. But, that’s not hard, it’s not even a cool thing. Nowadays, even rich folks kids can alight from a matatu without breaking a sweat. But, only chokoras can do a “tap-tap” hanging behind a lorry on Thika rd. And me of course . Anyone else try that. You’re dead!

Disclaimer: I won’t translate any of this words, if you didn’t understand some or most of them, it would take ages for you to get the fun out of them.

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,

1. Most of the images are now text meaning the site loads faster and get’s picked by search engines.
2. The images have alternative texts which also improves SEO.
3. 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.
4. 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