White Wall Web

Net Prophet 2010 – The Woo Themes Story (By Adriaan Pienaar)

AdiiRockstar (born Adriaan Pienaar) is an entrepreneur, the co-founder of the very successful online start-up, WooThemes, and a general creator of Rockstar Awesomeness. Along with being a serial entrepreneur, he is also a designer and developer (CSS, PHP and WordPress), which has spawned his other company – a boutique design and development agency – Radiiate. At the young age of 25, Adii has revolutionised both his business and personal life, and in 2007 he decided to call himself a “rockstar”; so the rockstar-tag is very much a result of subjective marketing on his side.

“When we started up we never started a South African company – we were an international company from the get-go.”

May 13, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Net Prophet 2010 – Building a Global Business: Lessons learnt (By Vinny Lingham)

Vinny Lingham is a seasoned, globally acclaimed entrepreneur who has founded a number of businesses, including the award-winning search engine marketing company, Clicks2Customers. He was recently chosen as a Young Global Leader Honoree 2009 by the World Economic Forum. He has been recognized as a high-impact entrepreneur by Endeavor Global and awarded the 2006 Top Young IT Entrepreneur.

“Going global is expensive if you don’t know how.”

“Building a product team is critical for funded companies.”

May 13, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Net Prophet 2010 – A Rising Tide: Tech Entrepreneurs in Africa (By Erik Hersman)

Erik Hersman is the co-founder of Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili), a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Currently, he is working with a team of mostly-African programmers to continue development of this new free and open source platform that makes it easier to crowd-source crisis information and visualise data.

“[In Africa] there are a few good success stories, but not enough.”

“Kenya is proving more lucrative per subscriber than South Africa.” – Mobile advertising network

May 13, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Making business sense from your website

More than 83 percent of Internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they’re looking for.
(Arthur Andersen, 2001)

One of the most important aspects of any website or web application is the end-user experience. However, website usability is often neglected during the development process, and rarely considered after the development project has been completed. This could have negative consequences for your business, such as driving away visitors, or potential bad publicity. With this in mind, usability of your site becomes an important factor, not only for generating web traffic, but also ensuring user satisfaction and return visits.

In order to improve your site and maximise the user experience, it is vital that you understand how your visitors are using your site, where changes can be made to your site to increase visitor numbers, and how to retain visitors for as long as possible. There is no greater waste than visitors abandoning your site because they are unable to clearly see your value proposition or understand your products and services; therefore, implementing various metrics is a vital component to successfully track the usability of your site.

May 12, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

White Wall Web at CITI software exhibition

We are on show at the Cape IT Initiative (CITI) exhibition showcasing the Cape Software industry. The exhibition will run concurrently with the 32^nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2010), and will take place from Wednesday, 5 May to Friday, 7 May 2010 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (Ballroom West).

Entrepreneurs and their success stories, innovative companies, universities and their research projects, and venture capital landscape is the name of the game at the exhibition. A dedicated section on Agile development in the Cape and case studies of successful Agile implementations will also be on display.

May 6, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Supporting local tech entrepreneurs

White Wall Web is a proud sponsor of the 2^nd annual Net Prophet conference, which takes place on the 13^th of May, 2010 at the Old Mutual Campus Courtyard, West Campus, Mutual Park.

Net Prophet, a non-profit conference hosted by the RAMP Foundation, is all about inspiring, equipping and empowering entrepreneurs operating in the local technology space – something which is close to our heart (with our roots as a tech start-up) and forms a large part of CSI mandate.

April 29, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Business Metrics in our Product & Support department

Noel Ross-Gillespie’s first post in our Business Metrics Series, An Introduction to Business Metrics, provided a brief overview into how we implement Business Metrics into the various departments at White Wall Web. In this post, we discuss the practical implications of measuring the performance of our Product and Support department.

In the past, our support team found it difficult to accurately predict delivery, handle growth effectively and take the subjectivity out of performance. With the notion of change as our goal, we acknowledged the age old mantra – “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.

April 21, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

The 411 on CSS3

CSS3, the latest style sheet format, may still be a work in progress and in a continuous development stage, however, it is deemed as a powerful and comfortable tool for developers. CSS3 builds upon the principles of styles, selectors and the cascade which developers have become accustomed to in previous versions. Setting up a layout has become much easier with CSS3 as it offers greater design flexibility, faster completion time and easier maintenance. Additionally, any CSS3 implementation which is currently being done will involve progressive enhancement.

A major concern at the moment is that it is not compatible with certain internet browsers, namely Internet Explorer – meaning that developers cannot fully use any new CSS rules. Some of the CSS3 features have been implemented in modern browsers, such as Firefox 3+, Safari 3+ (which supports every tested CSS3 feature), Google Chrome 1+ and Opera 9.6+. With Internet Explorer 8, none of the new CSS3 features, and only 22 of the 43 available CSS3 selectors are supported. With this said, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 beta to the public in March, which supports both CSS3 and HTML5.

April 9, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post