Voyage Online

Travelling to the Midlands

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2008-08-24T01:25:59Z

Interesting journey to the midlands today.

Digital Age Website

Julius Bwesigye — 2006-03-29T16:12:09Z

We developed a website for Digital Age, an IT firm based in Kampala Uganda. The creative site uses encoded javascript to display formidable hover effects and easy navigation.

You can find them at: www.digitalage-ug.com

Akatale.Com

Julius Bwesigye — 2006-02-20T22:03:09Z

Akatale.Com, East Africa's online marketplace, was launched in February 2006 by VOL. The site, which is the first of its kind in the region, offers buyers and sellers the opportunity to link up and trade online.

Check out www.akatale.com for super deals today!

Following our site's life

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2005-11-03T11:59:54Z

I am learning a great deal on our fabulous content management system (CMS) and after the multilingual stuff, I come to the Site's life stuff.

You may have noticed that SPIP has a calendar. And perhaps you wonder why? Well it is used to follow the site's life and your own activities on the site.

You may want to read: http://www.spip.net/fr_article2275.html (in French :-( ) or read the internal help ("Internal Messaging" section).

The calendar uses the iCal standard, you can read it on line at: http://voyageonline.co.uk/0/ecrire/...

Or with a tool that can handle iCal, like iCal ;-) on MacOS X or Sunbird on Windows and Linux. This will let you view all the sites at once plus your own activities. Sunbird Download.

To register with the calendars, once you have installed sunbird, click on the "Synchronization" links here.

This works for all our sites, e.g. I registered with ACP Chemicals too. This allows me to see what's happening at a glance.

This also should allow us to communicate better, since we can post appointments, tasks and announces there. Let's use those tools, that's why they are there.

PS: these tools can be disabled, and we will communicate on them to the customers only for extra $$.

Using Jabber

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2005-11-03T11:55:36Z

We need to use an instant messenger (IM) system for our communications, phone is too expensive and too loud ;-) in the office.

The best thing to use is definitely Jabber, and don't tell me about that crap of MSN, I don't like to read advertising when I talk to my friends.

Interesting documentation can be found at http://www.jabber.org

As any IM system, you need a client to use it, there are a few, like Gaim or PSI

Both are good, just gaim has the capability of using other IM services at the same time (but this is not necessary, read on).

We will connect to the server called “bravegnuworld.com”, I have been using it for years and it is mostly stable and supports Jabber “gateways” to MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM. This means that you connect to the Jabber server, bravegnuworld.com, in an encrypted way, and it will allow you to connect to your MSN, Yahoo... accounts. That's the way you talk to me now.

Steps to follow (easier with PSI):

Create an account (properly fill the server name: bravegnuworld.com and select "SSL encryption")
Update your informations (put the real data here, like voyage online email and name)
add us to your contacts. Me: stephanek@bravegnuworld.com
connect to your other IM services if needed: (service discovery->MSN or Yahoo and log in, your MSN contacts will appear automatically)
join a group chat: server: conference.bravegnuworld.com room: voyageonline

When the account is set up with PSI, you can use Gaim or any other client you like and everything will work smoothly.

And be there whenever you can!

Making Internet Explorer 5+ use background-attachment: fixed;

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2005-11-02T16:20:26Z

=http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/fixedB...

Website Evaluation

Julius Bwesigye — 2005-10-27T21:17:49Z

It actually works! Boost your sales by getting your site evaluated

The immense potential associated with the Internet has led to a global increase in the demand to have an online presence. In the months of June and August 2005 alone, it is estimated that over 2.7 million new sites joined the World Wide Web bringing the total number of websites close to 70 million (Web Server Survey, 2005). With an estimated One billion users, the Internet offers every organization's marketing heaven. The question, however is, while it is relatively easy to have a website, how effective is this website? Is it meeting its objectives? Is the website harnessing the full potential of the Internet from a marketing perspective?

What Can Voyage Online do for you?

What we do is we evaluate your current online presence and submit a Web Inspection Report based on our findings. This is a critical evaluation that is carefully approached based on your organization's marketing environment and requirements. We perform various web marketing tests including a scenario-based experiment on your website to measure levels of satisfaction using a sample of users from your target clientele. We use the feedback from users and integrate the findings with our well-researched evaluation framework to provide a report that will enhance your web presence and hence boost your sales. Are you Interested enough to order your Evaluation report? Contact us now @ info@voyageonline.co.uk

Multi-linguisme

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2005-10-27T13:46:50Z

=http://www.spip-contrib.net/spikini...

Extant Expressions Website

Julius Bwesigye — 2005-10-22T14:50:02Z

Another of our projects was the Extant Expressions site. Extant Expressions LTD is an art, design and marketing firm based in Kampala, Uganda. This explains the innovative artistic imagery used in the design as per our clients' specifications. At Voyage Online, we dont simply design your site, we make sure the site design meets the expectations of the target market, hence fulfil the objectives of the web presence.

Web Design with PNG

Stephane Konstantaropoulos — 2005-10-19T11:27:37Z

Introduction

Transparency is not just like black or white, it's also about opacity. Floating pictures that do not completely hide what lies under them.

When you design pictures with Gimp [1] or Photoshop or even Inkscape and Dia, you often use layers in order to float things over one another. This is also available in CSS, through the z-index property. Let's make use of it for floating images.

You don't always want images to have harsh borders, these are smoothened using antialiasing with opacity. Only the PNG image format allows for such thing, check the side bar, smooth?

The same goes for drop-shadows, great with pictures inside a document. These can be created with the Gimp in Script-Fu -> Shadow -> Drop Shadow, very easy.

Other Formats

They suck, basically. GIF allows for very few colors (255) and only binary transparency. Nowadays even for icons it should not be used. JPEG does not support transparency, use it only for photographs.

There are no other formats that are rendered by browsers directly. Flash needs a plugin, so does SVG and so on.

PNG Transparency does not work with Internet Explorer

Well, it didn't, since I solved the problem with Google and some Javascript. If you use PNG transparency for your design, make sure you mention the script in your css.

img {
 behavier: url("./win_png.htc")
 }

This is an IE thingy. It will make sure all are rendered properly. Unfortunately, it does not work with CSS background-image, you'll need to tweak your design accordingly.

Examples

The left-side bar and the Section logos.

[1] See article