Egypt Web Design

Egypt Web Design, Web Design in Egypt, Egypt Web Design Company, Website Design Company in Egypt…

Do you want a Nokia Mobile? Don’t go to Raya!

Do you want a Nokia Mobile? Don’t go to Raya!

Today i’m sharing with you my experience with Raya Nokia (Bad and lying ) Support this email i sent it to: feedback@rayadistribution.com.

 

Now let’s read it…

Dear Raya,

I just wanted to tell you that it was never easy for me to handle the bad service anymore for fixing my mobile which I got them from your store “City Stars Branch”

I have to say I wish your support service as good as your sales agents!

My wife’s Mobile Nokia N70 - Serial Number: 356963018238633 had a problem that it doesn’t give any network, so I took it to your maintenance center at Mosaddak St, Dokki they take the phone and they said it’s not working at all! While I just had it working then I said ok please check it and tell me!

They check it and then your customer service calls me to say our quality department found a liquid from the first class “God knows what they mean” and that the mobile is not working at all and will not be able to fix it!

So I told her ok but I have an extended guarantee any I bought my mobile in the 07-09-2007 so that means the guarantee should fix it for me till 07-09-2009 she told me I’m sorry we will not be able to fix it!

Today I get the mobile and connect it to the charger and GUESS WHAT? It opens but still the same problem I reported is there which means the mobile is working just there is no network signal!

I have thought about the situation and I only have 2 conclusions on my mind:

1. Your Support is lying and nobody even touched the mobile!
2. Your support is not good enough to fix a small problem and wasn’t smart enough to charge the battery!

In the 2 mentioned conclusion I find your service not satisfying for me! And to be honest I will never refer anyone to buy their mobile from Raya, you might find it okay for you to have one unsatisfied customer but I believe you have more and you can check what they write about you in forums and blogs:

• http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/raya-company-selling-cell-phones-c66833.html
• http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/raya-missselling-and-bad-customer-service-c177472.html
• http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/discussions/board/message?board.id=hardware&thread.id=3797

and even more…

Please if you are willing to change this nightmare experience for me just drop me a line with a solution and even if not just drop me a line saying anything.

Mohammed Alaa

 

and now let’s see what they will answer… Keep checking here and if you and me share the same story please make sure to write it in the comment box!

Full time web designer and internet marketing specialist job at ICT For health

ICT For health is one of the Leading IT Companies in Egypt. We have open vacancies with us at ICT FOR HEALTH (Moqattam). More details about company can be found on our website www.ictfh.com

1. Full time Webmaster/ web designer:
   • a. Experienced in FrontPage -multimedia designing flash, adobe Photoshop.
   • Familiar with CMS, updating news portal and other websites.
   • Familiar with html emails creation, managing websites, putting banners, designing and layout.
   • Experience 2-3 years or more, salary depending on experience and our requirement at the time of interview.
2. Internet marketing specialist:
   
   • a. familiar with internet emailing, html mailing
   • familiar with mass mailing programs, good communication skills
   • IT background, experience in sales, healthcare technology will be a plus, both for internet and local marketing and business development
   • Selling our products and services and presenting company

Please send your CV mentioning the job position you wish to apply for at: info@ictfh.com Please say you saw it in our blog.

Good luck…

What happen when you seek cheap Design Firm?

i get asked many times from clients who comes and say your prices are quite more we have another proposal from XXXX Company but we just want to work with you!

I respond immediately saying the following:

1- You can’t buy a Mercedes car with the same cost of a Fiat Car even that both are cars.

Then he tells me yes sure i understand but can’t we just make it a little lower! i say i’m sorry i charge you per my working hours not like a company that will add to you taxes, electricity expenses etc… and if i make it lower then i will loose so why i take from my time and instead of working to loose i can just enjoy my life or sepnd that time with my family!

Anyway just for these kind of clients, i have found a great post for who are seeking a cheap services, the trick is that your guy/company are stealing you and fooling you.

Read the full article here: Why Logos Should Cost More Than $300

Have a nice Day,

Mohammed Alaa
User Interface Designer

Egyptian Freelancer designers and Egyptian companies be aware of this Client

 

 

Windows Vista Infinte Reboot Loop!

did any one face this problem? while updating the windows vista and the computer restart then i show you a message saying update 3 of 3 0% and doesn’t matter how much you wait it won’t go :)?

after a small research i found an interesting link:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Get-Vista-Out-of-the-Infinite-Reboot-Loop-Configuring-Updates-Stage-3-of-3-0-with-Vista-SP1-78933.shtml

this explains everything! but even till now this problem still happening!!!!

just wanted to share the problem with you in case you face this problem :’(

Cheers,
Mohammed Alaa

How to work with a designer?

How to work with a designer?

Designing arts, Graphic or websites is more about creativity and passion. I’m writing this article because I think I’m confused about something!

Do we work to take the clients orders and draw boxes? OR we work to provide the client for what’s good for him and give him the correct image that will enable his customers to interact with his website?

I Love to be a designer and I’m happy with what I provide but sometimes you get costumer who is like I want the website dark! Then colorful then no make it solid color then no show me a new template! Till you reach the moment that you don’t want to work on this anymore!!!!

Sometimes customers like monsters and evil superheroes!

Sometimes we meet some customers who are like AAAAHHHHHHH a Real Monsters; they don’t know what they want! Because you are the expert you have to go inside their mind and figure it out.
If he is in the day of the meeting to show him your design he will ask for it pinky shiny website, and if he is in a bad mood he will want it black or bloody red!

I did a small research and I found this link I hope you enjoy reading it…
How to (and not to) work with a designer

Big thanks to Daniel Will

Why the IT Market is full of disasters in the Middle East – Part 1.

Most of us these days hear a lot about companies are closing or companies are treating badly their employees and even companies don’t want to pay their employees’ salaries or rights.

There is a secret for all this disasters BAD MANAGEMENT!

Bad management for IT companies is one of the main reasons of the IT disasters in the Middle East because they will not care about your skills or how you work rather than making you work 24/7 without any appreciation and even they can put you in probation period immediately without giving any reasons!

And when it’s the time for a raise or a bonus they almost do the same “disappear OR act depressed of work”.

How to screw your employees and company in less than a year?

1. Manage your company from another continent or country.
2. Exhaust your resources in useless projects.
3. Use your user interface designer to execute your ideas rather than listening to what he says.
4. Don’t say what you want to do in this project; your employees have to be smart enough to figure it out!
5. Close the communication between you and your teams
6. Don’t encourage them when they do nice work but act you don’t like their work, expecting that they will work harder in the next project.
7. Delay the salary in the beginning of every month and when they ask you for an explanation YOU LIE.
8. Don’t listen to your employees when they have an advice for you, or regarding a project they are working on.
9. Promise things you can’t do in the near future or in the far future.
10. Ignore that they have a personal life and expect them to work 24 hours per day

Believe it or not there are certain characteristics they all have, that you must consider when you are moving to a new job.

This was Part one more Series are coming soon! Part Two I will talk about Quality V.S Quantity. and as always your comments are highly appreciated

YUI TabView Control Not Working

YUI TabView Control Not Working

if you came across the YUI TabView Control you will find it not working!

Well i want to use it in one project so i spend like 5 minutes to check what’s the problem with it!!!!

and i discovered that it’s not working because of the Basic Markup:

<div id="demo" class="yui-navset yui-navset-top">
<ul class="yui-nav">
<li><a href="#tab1"><em>Tab One Label</em></a></li>
<li title="active" class="selected"><a href="#tab2"><em>Tab Two Label</em></a></li>
<li title="" class=""><a href="#tab3"><em>Tab Three Label</em></a></li>
</ul>
<div class="yui-content">
<div style=”display: none;” id=”tab1″><p>Tab One Content</p></div>
<div style=”display: block;” id=”tab2″><p>Tab Two Content</p></div>
<div style=”display: none;” id=”tab3″><p>Tab Three Content</p></div>
</div>
</div>

Here is the working version (if you didn’t notice you only have to remove the style inside tab contents):

<div id="demo" class="yui-navset yui-navset-top">
  <ul class="yui-nav">
    <li><a href="#tab1"><em>Tab One Label</em></a></li>
    <li title="active" class="selected"><a href="#tab2"><em>Tab Two Label</em></a></li>
    <li title="" class=""><a href="#tab3"><em>Tab Three Label</em></a></li>
  </ul>
  <div class="yui-content">
<div style=”" id=”tab1″><p>Tab One Content</p></div>
    <div style=”" id=”tab2″><p>Tab Two Content</p></div>
    <div style=”" id=”tab3″><p>Tab Three Content</p></div>
  </div>
</div>

Now it’s going to work as you expect! Make sure you check The Working Version

he didn’t know Egypt!

This is a conversation that happened today with me on MSN

PS: if you don’t know Egypt this is the Location on the MAP and this is Egypt in Wikipedia

Adobe Flash 10 Website is Down Dec 01 2008

Today we went to download the full flash from www.Adobe.com

by clicking on this image:

And Boom!!!

Hopefully anyone from Adobe will Notice

Tips and tricks to rescue overdue projects

Tips and tricks to rescue overdue projects

Original Post owner is Omar Al Zabir and the original post is located here

One of my friends, who runs his own offshore development shop, was having nightmare situation with one of his customers. He’s way overdue on a release, the customer is screaming everyday, he’s paying his team from his own pocket, customer is sending an ever increasing list of changes and so on. Here’s how we discussed some ideas to get out of such a situation and make sure it does not repeat in future:

Kabir: Hey, can you help me? My customer is making us work for free for extra two months to fix bugs from our last delivery. We did what he said. But after he saw the output, he came up with hundred changes, which he somehow presents as bugs or missing features and make them look like they are all our fault and making us work for last two months for free. He is sending new changes every week. We have no idea when we will complete the iteration.

Omar: I see. Did you get a signed list of requirements from customer before you started the development?

Kabir: Of course, I did. He sent us a word document explaining what he wants and we sent him a task breakup with hour estimates and total duration of three months. Now after three months when we showed him the product, he said, it’s no where close to what he had expected. Then he sent a gigantic list of things to change.

Omar: All of those are bugs?

Kabir: Of course not. Most of them are new features.

Omar: Then why don’t you say those are new features? You have the original word document to prove. Just ask him to show where in the word document did he said X needs to be done?

Kabir: Well…, he’s tricky. He somehow makes things look like it is obvious that X needs to be done and he’s not going to accept a requirement as done until X is done. For example, he said there must be a complete login form in the homepage. So, we did a typical login form with user name, password and OK, Cancel button. Now he says where’s the email verification thing? We said, you did not ask for it. He said, “this is obvious, every login form has a forgot password and email verification; I said *complete* login form, not half-baked login form”. So, you see, we can’t really argue to keep our image. Then, we did the login form exactly how he said. Now he says, where the client side validations of proper email address, username length, password confirmation? We said, you never asked for it! He says, “come on, every single website nowadays has AJAX enabled client side validation, do I have to tell you every single thing? Aren’t you guys smart enough to figure this out? You are already doing this for the third time, can’t you do it really well this time?”

Omar: OK, stop. I see what’s your problem. Some customer will always try to make you work more for less money. They will try to squeeze out every bit of development they can for their bucks. So, you have to be extra careful on how much you commit to them and make sure they cannot chip in more requirements while development is going on or when you deliver a version. Mockups are one good way to make sure things are crystal clear between you and customer.  Did you not show him mockups of the features that you will be building and make him sign those mockups?

Kabir: Yes, I made some mockups. But they were simple mockups. I did not show the validations or all those side jobs like sending verification emails.

Omar: Did you run those mockups through your engineers? They could have told you about those details.

Kabir: No, I did not because developers don’t work on the project until I get a signoff from client. So, I prepare all the mockups myself to save cost.

Omar: So, this is the first problem. The mockups were as ambiguous as the customer’s word document. Basically the mockups just reflected the sentences in word document. Mockups did not really show all possible navigations (ok, cancel, forgot, signup), system messages, system actions behind the scene, workflows etc. Are you getting what I am saying?

Kabir: Yes. Come on, I am not a developer. I can’t think of every single details. That’s what developers do when they start working on it.

Omar: But you provide estimates based on your mockups right? So, if mockup shows there’s only a simple login form and change password link, you charge 5 hours for it. But then when you realize you have to send email for change password, email needs to contain a tokenized URL, that URL needs to show a change password form, where you need to validate using CAPTCHA etc, it becomes 20 hours of work. Right?

Kabir: Well yes. Generally I multiply all estimates by 1.5 just to be safe. But things have gone 3X to 10X off original estimate.

Omar: Yes, I just gave you an example how a login form estimate can go 4X off when the mockup is not run through an engineer and the important issues are not addressed.

Kabir: So, you are saying I have to prepare all mockup with an engineer?

Omar: In general, yes, since you aren’t good enough to figure those out yourself; no offence. You will get good enough after you build couple of products and get your a** kicked couple of times, like mine. Mine got kicked about 17 times. After that it became so hard that when I sit on it, I produce really good mockups. After some more kicks, I hope to get 100% perfect in my mockups.

Kabir: Ok, so the process is, I get word doc from customer. I produce mockups from it. Then I run them through engineers to add more details to them. Then after review with customer, I run them through engineers again to estimate. Then I ask customer to sign-off on the mockups and the estimate, correct?

Omar: Well, first let me say, you don’t do a three month long iteration since you are far away from your customer. You do short two weeks sprints. Do you know SCRUM?

Kabir: Yes, one of our team does it.

Omar: I assume the team that got their a** kicked don’t do it?

Kabir: right, they don’t.

Omar: OK, then first you start doing SCRUM. I won’t teach you details. You can study about SCRUM online. Now, you collect ‘user stories’ from customer. If customer does not give you user stories, just vague paras of requirements, you break the requirements into small user stories. Understood?

Kabir: No, give example.

Omar: OK, say customer wants a *complete* login form. You break it into couple of stories like:

• User clicks on “login” link from homepage so that user can login to the system
  • User enters username (min 5, max 255 chars, only alphanumeric) in the username text field
  • User enters password (min 5, max 50 chars, only alphanumeric) in the password field
  • User clicks on “OK” button after entering username and password.
  • System validates username and password and shows the secure portal if credential is valid and user has permission to login and account is not locked.

Understood what user stories are?

Kabir: Yes, but you are missing all the validations that we also overlooked and now we are working two months for free. This “user stories” do not help at all.

Omar: Hold on, you just saw basic steps of a user story. Now you describe each user story with the following:

• All possible inputs of user and their valid format
• All possible system generated messages for invalid input
• All possible alternate navigation from the main user story. For example, while entering password, user can click on a help icon so that user can see what kind of passwords are allowed.

Got it?

Kabir: Now it’s starting to make sense. Then what? Show these user stories to customers?

Omar: No, show them to your lead engineer who has enough experience to identify if you missed something. Your Engr should point out all the alternative system actions at least.

Kabir: What if my Engr can’t figure them out? What if he’s just as dumb as me?

Omar: Fire him. Get a pay cut for yourself.

Kabir: Seriously, what do I do if that’s the case?

Omar: Your engineers will *always* come up with issues with your mockups. You should always use another pair of eyes to verify your mockups and add more details to it. You aren’t the only smart guy in the world you know?

Kabir: I thought I was, ok. What’s next?

Omar: File those user stories in your issue tracking system in some special category. Say “User Stories” category. What do you use for your issue tracking system?

Kabir: Flyspray

Omar: Good enough. Create a new project in Filespray named “User Stories”. File tasks for user stories. Each story, one task. Attach the mockup to the tasks. Then create one account for your customer so that customer can login and see the user stories, make comments, suggest changes etc. You will get the conversation with your customer recorded as comments in the task. This comes handy for engineers and for resolving dispute later on. Moreover, get your customer to prioritize the tasks properly. Understood?

Kabir: I don’t think customer will go through that trouble. Customer will ask for some word document that has all the user stories and she will write in the document what are the changes. I will have to reflect them in Flyspray. Is it really necessary to file user stories in Flysrpay? Can’t I just maintain one word doc with customer?

Omar: Absolutely not. Word documents suffer from versioning problem. You have one version, your customer has another version, your engineers have another version. it becomes a nightmare to move around with word docs which has many user stories in it and keep them in sync all the time. Moreover, referencing a particular use case also becomes a problem. Say at later stage of the project, there’s a bug which needs to refer to User Story #123. You will have to say User Story #123 in \\centralserver\fileshare\user stories1.doc. Now if \\centralserver dies, or you put it somewhere else, all these references are gone. Don’t go for word doc. Keep everything on the web that you can refer to it using a URL or small number. Another problem is numbering stories in Word Doc. Word won’t produce unique ID for you. You will end up with duplicate user story numbers. If you use Flyspray, it’s will generate unique ID for you.

Kabir: OK, let me see how I convince my customer to use Flyspray.

Omar: Yes, you should. If Flyspray is hard for customers, use some simple issue tracking system that’s a no-brainer for non-engineers. Some fancy AJAX based todolist site will be good enough if it has picture attachment feature and auto task number feature.

Kabir: OK, I will find such a website. So, I got the user stories done. Now I show them to customer, review, make changes. Finally I get customer to sign off on User story #X to #Y for a two weeks sprint. Then what happens?

Omar: On your first day of sprint, you do a sprint planning meeting where you present those user stories to your engineers and ask them to break each story into small tasks and estimate each task. Make sure no engineer put 1 day or 2 day for any task. Break them into even smaller tasks like 4 hours of tasks. This will force your engineers to give enough thought into the stories and identify possible problems upfront. Generally when someone says this is going to take a day or two, s/he has no idea how to do it. S/he has not thought about the steps need to be done to complete that task. Your are getting an estimate that’s either overestimated or underestimated. Forcing an engineer to allocate tasks in less than 4 hours slot makes an engineer think about the steps carefully. 

Kabir: If engineers do this level of estimate, they will think about each task for at least an hour. This is going to take days to finish estimating so many tasks. How do you do it in a day?

Omar: We do 4 hours Planning meeting where Product Owner explains the stories to engineers and then after 30 mins break, another 4 hours meeting where engineers pickup stories and breaks them into tasks and estimate on-the-fly. This 4 hours deadline is strictly maintained. If Product team cannot explain the tasks for a sprint in 4 hours, we don’t do the tasks in the sprint. If the tasks are so complex or there are so many tasks that they cannot be explained in 4 hours, engineers unlikely to do them within one/two week long sprint. Similarly if engineers cannot estimate the tasks in their 4 hours slot, the tasks are just too complex to estimate and thus have high probability of not getting done in the sprint. So, we drop them as well.

Kabir: This is impossible! No one’s going to attend 8 hours meeting on a day. Besides, telling them to estimate a task on the spot is super inefficient. They won’t produce more than 60% correct estimates. They will give some lump sum estimate and then go away.

Omar: Incorrect, if engineers cannot make estimates of a task in 10 to 20 minutes, they don’t have the capability of estimating at all. If your engineers are habituated to take a task from you for estimating and then go to their office, talk to their friends on the phone, drink soda, walk around, gossip with colleagues and end of the day if they have the mood to sit and think about the estimate then open a new mail, write some numbers and email it to you; they better learn to do this on-demand, when requested, within time constraint. It’s a discipline that they need to learn and implement in their life. Estimates are something they do from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. Besides, the planning meeting is the best place to estimate tasks - all engineers are there, product team is there, your architects should be there, QA team is there. It’s easy to ask questions, get ideas and helps from others.

Kabir: I have engineers who just can’t do well under pressure. They need some undisturbed moment, where they can sit and think about tasks without anyone staring at them.

Omar: Train them to learn how to keep their head cool and do their job in the midst of attention. Anyway, let’s stop talking about these auxiliary issues and talk about the most important issues. Where were we?

Kabir:About dropping tasks, I already negotiated with customer that we are going to do story A, B, C in this sprint. Now after the sprint planning meetings, engineers say they can’t do B. Problem is I have already committed to deliver A, B, and C to customer within 2 weeks and sent him the invoice. How do I handle this?

Omar: How do you commit when you don’t know how long A, B, and C are going to take?

Kabir: Customer tells me to do A, B, C within two weeks. And after doing some preliminary discussion with engineers, I commit to customer and then do the sprint planning meeting. I can’t wait until the sprint meeting is done and developers have given me estimates of all the tasks.

Omar: Wrong. You commit to customer after the sprint planning meeting is done. Before that, you give customer just a list of things that you believe you can try to do in following two weeks. Tell customer that you will be able to confirm after the sprint planning meeting. The time to do a sprint meeting is only 8 hours = a day. So, end of the day, you have some concrete stuff to commit to customer. From your model where you give engineers days to estimate, it won’t work. You have to finish planning within a day and end of the day, commit to customer.

Kabir: What if customer does not agree? What if he says, “I must get A, B and C in two weeks, otherwise I am going somewhere else?”

Omar: This is a hard situation. I am tempted to say that you tell your customer, “Go away!”, but in reality you can’t. You have to negotiate and come to a mutual agreement. You cannot just obey customer and say “Yes Mi Lord, we will do whatever you say” because you clearly cannot do it. The fact is, end of the sprint, you *will* get only A and C done and B not done. Then customer will Fedex you his shoes so that you can ask someone to kick you with it.

Kabir: Correct, so what do I do?

Omar: There are tricky solutions and non-tricky honest solutions to this. Tricky solution is, say you engaged 5 engineers in the project who can get A and C done in time. But you realize you need another engineer to do B, otherwise there’s no way you can finish A, B and C in two weeks. So, you invoice customer with 6 engineers and get A, B and C done. Now customer may not agree with you paying for the 6th engineer. Then you do a clever trick. You engage the 6th engineer free of cost in this sprint. Don’t tell customer that there’s an extra head working in the project. Or you can tell customer that out of good will, you want to engage another engineer free of cost to make sure customer gets a timely delivery. This boosts your image. Later on, when you get a sprint that’s more or less relaxed and 4 engineers can do the job, you secretly engage one engineer to some other project but still charge for 5 engineers to your customer. This way  you cover the cost for the 6th engineer that you secretly engaged earlier sprint. This is dirty. But when you have so hard a** customer who’s forcing you “what”, “when” and “how” all at the same time and not open to negotiation, you have no choice but to do these dirty tricks. You can also add extra one hour to every task for every engineer in a sprint or add some vague tasks like “Refactor User object to allow robust login”. This way you will get quite some amount of extra hours that will compensate for the hidden free engineer that you engage. You get the idea right?

Kabir: Ingenious! And what’s the honest and clear way to do these?

Omar: You negotiate with customer. You tell your customer that he or she can only have any two choices from Money-Scope-Time. This is called the project management triangle. Do you know about this?

Kabir: Googling…

Omar: Read this article:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA010211801033.aspx

It shows a triangle like this:

So, your customer can specify any two. If customer specifies Scope and Time (”what” and “when”), then customer must be flexible on Money or “how” you do it within those two constraints. If customer specifies Money and Scope, then you are free to decide on time. You engage lower resource and take more time to get things done. Got the idea?

Kabir: Yes, understood. Nice, I can show this to customer and educate him. Is there any book for the evil tricks that you just gave me?

Omar: No, I might write one soon. I will name it “Customers are evil, so be you”.

Raisul: Hey, I have fixed people engaged in a project. I can’t change the number of people sprint-to-sprint to compensate for change in money. So, the triangle does not work for me. What do I do here?

Omar: Right. I also made a slightly different version of it. Here’s my take:

This is for situation where you have fixed resource engaged for a particular customer. In that case, you cannot reduce people on-demand because you cannot reassign them. Such a case requires different strategy. If customer forces you Quality and Time, customer must be willing to sacrifice Quantity. Customer cannot say, produce perfect login form in 2 weeks and add cool ajax effects to it. Customer has to sacrifice cool ajax effects, or sacrifice *perfection* of login form, or sacrifice number of days.

From the above two triangles, which one’s more appropriate for you?

Kabir: Second one because customer hires 5 engineers from me. I cannot take one away and engage in a different project. Well, not openly of course.

Omar: OK, sounds fair. What else do you need from me?

Kabir: Let me think about all these. This is definitely worth thinking. I have to figure out whether to play fair or play clever. End of the day, I need to produce great product, so that, I get good recommendation and future projects from customer. So, I need to do whatever it takes. It’s hard to run an offshore dev shop where we kinda have to work like slaves and like a bunch of zombies mumble every 10 mins - “Customer is always right”. You are very lucky to have your own company.

Omar: I had two offshore dev shops before Pageflakes. I know how it feels. Wish you good luck. I have seen your product, you guys are building a great ASP.NET MVC+jQuery application. Release it. It’s worth showcasing.

Raisul: Thank you very much. See ya…

(End of chat)

This is the diagram my friend produced, which shows the steps to do before a sprint is started:

Handy for Product Managers. Enlightening for developers.

Google Chrome and Windows Live

Woww I really still don’t believe it! Google released their Browser!!! It’s really so cool faster than IE and very light but will Microsoft open All Windows Live features for Google Chrome? We will find out in a few days.

Learn more About Google Chrome

Egyptian Web designers Freelance Cost Survey

Freelance Website Designers in Egypt Charge

 

Hi All,

I would like to make a survey for all the Web Designers ONLY IN EGYPT.

Egyptian market is really expanding when we take about software or web design and I really noticed there is a HUGE need for web designers these days whether for a Full Time web designers or Freelance web designers.

From here came the idea of making our self more stable and confident in the market, this survey will help us getting full view of how much we charge this days and how much we should charge when we get contacted for a freelance website design work inside Egypt.

For Better Results This Survey Only Apply on:

• Junior Web Designers
• Senior Web Designers
• Junior GUI Designers
• Senior GUI Designers
• User Interface Designers
• Senior User Interface designers

To get the most near results, I will make the survey available for only 1 Month and can be increased if needed. The Survey Result Will be available here without any charge for download.
If you are interested, Please share This Post or send it to your friends
Best Regards,
Mohammed Alaa
Egyptian User Interface Designer

Home Page Usability for Designers

How to create successful home pages?

A lot of organizations focus on the home page BUT the home page is the least important page in your website. So it’s probably the page you should finish last not first.

You think it’s the first page everybody is going to see first. So you start working out on it first. But what the designers have to do is first to figure out what is the most important content you have in the website. So you can create a usable path in the home page to the most important things you want to do in the website.

I think designers will hate me!

Most of the designers will yell at me now and say that the home page is the most important page because it’s the entry point of users who are coming to the website so they designers need to make a positive impression for users who is just arriving.

I will compare the home page of the website like the Lobby of the Hotel. And when people go to any hotel the lobby is not the most important place in the hotel. If you just arrived from a long tired trip and you are having an early meeting in the morning or looking for some rest and you need to sleep before you go. Then common sense says you will be just looking for the bed to sleep or bathroom. So the Lobby is not going to be the place you want to be.

When people go to a website they just don’t go to the website to have a look or hang around. Like you don’t know go to a Hotel Lobby just to look at the Lobby. People go in because they have another thing they want to do there and you want to get them to that thing.

You Only Have 5 Sec.

And that thing is what’s most important if they go to the nice home page looking for something and you lead them to another thing. They are going to leave immediately actually you only have 5 Seconds to get their attention to what they are looking for. And you can check it yourself with a Google Analytic you will find the home page is the most exit page in your website

And I think what makes the people focus on the home page is because it’s the easy thing to focus on it’s that decorative page that we can really do some nice stuff and it’s easy because it’s one of them.

Case Study

Amazon.com
Nobody goes to Amazon.com home page looking for a specific book or gift for someone. Nobody buy a product because it’s featured in the home page of amazon.com or a product that you can find in the recommendations of Amazon or from the section of other customers bought this.

News Websites
News websites are different from any other website if you have news or something people are coming for. If you heard an important news such as for example now you can change 1 pound for 1 US Dollar (Hopefully!) then you will go to any news website. You will find this news in the home page. then you will give it a click to read the whole story. So study what you just did!! You went to the home page you found the news in the first page you give it a click and you leave the home page to read the article or the news you came for.

Conclusion

If want to really focus on the home page you should first study your visitors know why they come to the website and what they are looking for. After than create for them short path that can lead them to what they want with few mouse clicks. And focus on how to get the users away from the home page as fast as you can.

Finally I Hope You Enjoy it, please write me here your comments or suggestions for what do you want the next article to be

Mohammed Alaa
User Interface Designer

Usability in Egypt 101 - Closer look on usability from scratch

Usability in Egypt 101

Usability is a qualitative attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen and computer science professor Ben Shneiderman have written (separately) about a framework of system acceptability, where usability is a part of “usefulness” and is composed of:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re establish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

When evaluating user interfaces for usability, the definition can be as simple as “the perception of a target user of the effectiveness (fit for purpose) and efficiency (work or time required to use) of the Interface”. Each component may be measured subjectively against criteria e.g. Principles of User Interface Design, to provide a metric, often expressed as a percentage.

It is important to distinguish between usability testing and usability engineering. Usability testing is the measurement of ease of use of a product or piece of software. In contrast, usability engineering (UE) is the research and design process that ensures a product with good usability.

To start Planning for Usability you must Answer this questions:

• Who are the users, what do they know, and what can they learn?
• What do users want or need to do?
• What is the general background of the users?
• What is the context in which the user is working?
• What has to be left to the machine?

That’s it for now, but we are coming back later!

Mohammed Alaa
User Interface Designer

Website:  http://www.seniorwebdesigner.com
My Blog: http://www.egypt-webdesign.com

The First Usability Group in Egypt

The First Usability Group in Egypt

WAHOOO! Finally I had the time to focus on making the first usability group in Egypt, I’m so excited to start this group as a return back to my community, sharing what I have learned so far and exchange my knowledge with the famous web designers here in Egypt.

Usability in Egypt will take you beyond designing or developing typical websites that is hard to use!

We will give a full idea about:

• Usability 101
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• User-Centered Design (UCD)
• Human Factors
• Cognitive modeling methods
• Prototyping methods
• Testing methods

And much more…

If you are a beginner or an Expert I would like to invite you to become a part of the first usability Group in Egypt.

You can Join our Group Here:

Yahoo Groups:    Egypt Usability Group in Yahoo
FaceBook Group: Egypt Usability Group in FaceBook

This group will not be successful and helpful without your cooperation and I will give it a fair part of my time to make it useful for everybody.

Thanks,
Mohammed Alaa
User Interface Designer

When your client want to pay the half of your work

Real story we see hopefully not so often!

I would like to share this experience with everyone in the industry especially web designers in Egypt because we share the same culture and we face many of this problems everyday!

As always I was contacted for a freelance website with one of my satisfied clients, he asked me to go and meet him to discuss an opportunity to make a website design for him.

Everything went fine and I gave him my proposal and he accepted it without any negotiations and I got my first payment (The half of the offered price) and everything just sounds great! so I started to make him a design and he liked the first design I did with some revisions. We agreed on the design but he didn’t have the text content so I started helping him with the content till we finally make it happen.

I finished making the website and since he was out of Egypt I wrote to him an email that the website is ready for review. He didn’t come back to me! I tried to reach him for a month (meanwhile I finished another freelance project) and I was so upset from the way he ignored me even that I know he saw my email from the delivery and opening notifications of my emails.

So I decided to write him another email saying:

—————————————————————
Dear ….,

Hi I hope this email finds you very well. It’s been 1 Month since my last email and so far I haven’t received any response for PROJECT NAME website.

This project should have taken around 2 weeks and now is been more than 2
months due to delays of content and payments from your side Please check
our first emails you will see my deadline for PROJECT NAME was Monday
April 7, 2008.

During these 2 months I have finalize (from negotiations to upload
websites online) 3 projects which were larger than your website.

Also Note that the Website is finish since 29 of April and ready to go online, more time website doesn’t go online is more time losing money or not generation possible business for you.

I suggest we move forward on this and I am always ready to do so, this project is not resulting in a benefit for me anymore. I am sure you understand my situation and that besides my current formal job in office I have my own company that keeps me always busy.

Please let me know how we can resolve this at your earliest. and as always, send you my best wishes!

Mohammed Alaa
—————————————————————

I think the email did the impression I wanted, because after this fair email the client contacted me that he will be back to Egypt next week, so all what I can do is to wait for him to come.

The time has come for paying back!

When he came back he asked me to meet him, and he told me there is no need to wait for the website and he want to go online, so I uploaded the website online (he also have the hosting in my reseller and the domain) and I went to meet him in the agreed date.

And here is the Important Part:

I go to meet the client to collect the final payment after I already finished my work and waited him for 2 month to pay me, he goes saying “Oooh I’m sorry I will not be able to pay you’re the complete money now because I have to move out of Egypt and I will just pay you a part of the money now (which is10% from the last 50%) and we will be in contact and I will pay you but on long shots”

I heard that and I was so shocked from the way he treated me and for all the work I have done to make his succeed.

So I had to make a decision in these 5 minutes I was sitting with him! I had to choose between accepting this money and stop working with him OR to get angry and refuse to take the money!

What i had to do?

Actually I took the money he paid since this payment is for already finished work and I left the meeting, after 1 week I send him an email saying I will need the complete money within 2 weeks to be transferred to my bank account and since this email he didn’t reply me!

what you will do in this situations?

What do you suggest me to do! Should I suspend his website till he pays me? What you will do if you are in the same situation?

How to Make Deadlines to be your Friend

Hey it’s me again coming with an interesting article i just finished reading… Credits goes to the Author of the Article Steven Snell

The article is talking about every designer and developer nightmare which is (DEADLINES).

I’d like to take this opportunity to build on that post by looking not only at how we can increase our productivity in our day-to-day work, but also how we can change our mentality towards deadlines to create a healthier and more efficient work flow.

Abhijeet’s points and suggestions for meeting deadlines are:

1. Set expectations… with yourself.
2. Prioritize your work.
3. Keep track of dates and occasions.
4. Analyze your accomplishments every day.
5. Try to work only five days a week.

These points are great for keeping yourself on track and maintaining a proper balance in your work. From my experience I’ve found that it can also be helpful to turn the tables and put deadlines to work for you, rather than working against you. Click to Continue »

About Steven Snell

Making the Perfect Business Case for a Business Process

Another Article that i liked so Much. Patrick Gauthier you are Genius and your Article ROCKS!

Online Shopping Carts Getting Sucks

This Article is Really wonder full Credits Goes to: bradkay

Have you ever noticed that online shopping is nothing (and I mean nothing) like the real thing?

One can argue that this is a victory for consumers – that the terrestrial retail model has been broken for a long time (e.g. long lines, attitude from the service clerk, lack of expert guidance, etc.); however, I’d suggest that many online retailers are missing small, but important and often intangible cues that could make the digital shopping experience go from good to great.

Don’t get me wrong, the best online retailers today which include Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Fresh Direct, William Sonoma, etc. have mastered ease of use and simplicity. The checkout process is often seamless and use of the semantic Web, albeit very limited, has made shopping more intelligent and intuitive. But, most online retailers still haven’t captured the essence of shopping which can be fun, surprising and even inspiring.

In the terrestrial world, stores like H&M create distinct ambiances for their customers. Music vibrates from in-ceiling speakers and there’s an intangible vibe that makes you want to touch, feel and experience the clothing. Whole Foods offers passerby’s tasters from boutique brands and organic and green products that make you feel good about spending $200 on groceries. Bicycle shops have the smell of rubber tires and the glistening shimmer of shiny painted metal objects.

Yet, when we traverse to the online shopping experience, we find ourselves trapped in predominantly 2-D experiences. There is almost no sense of community to help guide you through purchase decisions in real-time (I’m not referring to message boards or user reviews), little to no curation of products and the vibe is often flat and forgettable. Again, try to divorce yourself from the best-in-class e-tailers like Amazon and iTunes and look across the spectrum of the Web.

One Web site that breaks with convention and stands out because of its niche in the marketplace, curation of products and overall sensibility is 20ltd.com. The site offers limited edition, super-expensive and lux products that can only be found on this site.

20ltd.com is incredibly focused and simple, the aesthetic is sexy (looks like a black-velvet jewel box with gems inside) and the music selection is always fab. Everything is handcrafted – handpicked for the user. While 20ltd’s user-experience is unique to that particular brand, they’ve effectively picked up on some of the hidden cues that make shopping fun, surprising and inspiring.

With this in mind, here are a few simple pointers to help you improve your overall online shopping experience immediately:

• Create community. Let shoppers know who’s in the online store and what they’re shopping for through traffic mapping. Form partnerships with Chat providers (e.g., AIM, iChat, etc.) and allow shoppers to talk with other like-minded individuals in the store while their shopping. This can also be extended to video-chat for bleeding edge retailers.
• Incorporate sound design and music. Ambience can stimulate purchase intent and invite shoppers to linger and browse. This aspect of shopping is being woefully neglected across the board.
•  Curate your ‘storefront window’ (the homepage). Make sure your merchandising strategy is in perpetual motion and never allow inventory to linger on the homepage.
• Create more three-dimensional experiences.
• Use the semantic aspects of the Web. Make the user feel like you know and under his/her needs. Create a system that gets smarter with each interaction.
• Above all else, follow basic User Interface design principals. Big, clickable “Buy This Now” buttons should be placed in the upper right hand corner of the screen (we read from left to right) and always manage user experectations (e.g., this is a three step purchasing process. You’re in step 1 of 3).

Powered by Wordpress | Egyptian UI Designer - Web Design in Egypt - Egypt Web Design
Copyright 2007. Egypt Web Design. All rights reserved

• Home
• About Me