The Student body of the Ghana Pentecost Students Association – Legon on the University of Ghana Campus contacted us to have their website redesigned. And following is a post about the development processes we used at Kava Media in executing the website design project.

Website Goals and Objectives

After a meeting with the client, we help establish the clear goals for the website as well as identifying the target audience for the site.

This part is a phase of our project development process that aids us to envision what exactly the client has in mind in coming up with the project. That is not to say the client is left alone in the dark, but we initiate and cordinate conversations to establish the business and user needs of the website.

Designing the Solution

After we were done with the project specification. We went through it designing a feasible solution that works best for both business and user needs.

Then the actual design of the website itself that is the look and feel for the homepage as well as the other content pages.
The right message is communicated through the right graphic design elements on the page to attract the user in executing or achieving a particular goal. The process is usually preceded with a lot of sketches and wireframes to map mental design solutions unto the paper.
We believe designing your own website’s look and feel get you exactly what you want to achieve your specific design goals as such we are not a fan of developing websites with templates or off-the-shelf products.

The Web Development

Our development process entails Front-end development, Back-end development and Database development. At the Front-end stage we handcraft codes usually HTML and CSS for building the web pages for the various pages and sections on the website. It doesn’t end there. With the use of JavaScript, Jquery, Ajax and other front-end technologies, we enhance the User experience for maximum impact and visitor conversion.
Those with modern browsers are not left as we use HTML5/CSS3 features where applicable to improve their experience.

It is the function of a thing that determines the design. The design of these User interfaces is not complete if there’s no function/task achieved. With that in mind, the Back-end then deals with programming the task or functionality and breathing life into the User Interfaces or pages. Database interaction is also done here where appropriate to store and manipulate data.

Content is King. So the integration of a custom CMS(Content Management System) is vital for website updates and seo improvement.

Testing and Launch

Finally we test the website in our quality assurance part of our development cycle. Errors are debugged and stuff tweaked to get working as intended.

We also provided Pensa Legon with Website Hosting, so the deployment was just a matter of uploading and installing the website on the remote servers.

The website is then launched and after, user feedback and reports analyzed and errors fixed where missed or encountered due to live or production environment.

In all it was a very nice experience for us as we worked with students from the University of Ghana bringing back memories of our student days. The final websites includes Photo and Video gallery sections, Student and Alumni section, News, Events, Downloads, Social Media Integration such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.

The client was more than excited to have chosen Kava Media for the project. At Kava Media, we help you achieve your individual or business goals with a functional and nicely designed website or web application that get your business transformed.

Visit: Pensa Legon (live) to have a peep for yourself or leave a comment about how you go about your development process below.

And not so surprisingly, these same “top ranked” websites use all sort of means and unethical ways to get to the top. Of course Google does well to penalize those who abuse the SEO rules but remember it’s a machine and therefore can be tricked, as most of these websites have succeeded in doing so. I took the time and pain to find out how and why these websites ranked high and below are my findings.

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is considered as an unethical way of boosting a website’s search ranking. While it is a black hat tactic for search engine optimization, it is not considered to be a good technique for search engine ranking and visibility. But surprisingly most of the these websites (with our findings above) use this tactic.

It is quite interesting how some of these websites employ keyword stuffing to their advantage using all sort of means.

• 1. Keyword stuffing in content
  For example consider the phrase below
  “…web design for ghana is a service dedicated to providing businesses with the best and most affordable web design solutions for Ghana. Web Design for Ghana services are designed for small and medium sized businesses and enterprises in Ghana. Solutions include domain name registration, Web hosting, Ecommerce Web hosting, Web design, Custom Graphic design, online marketing and email solutions. Web design for GHANA is brought to you by…”.

  The above sentences convey a meaning which can be summarized by just one sentence but for the sake of the keyword “web design ghana” it is stuffed in an eccentric way.

• 2. Keyword stuffing using hidden elements
  Others too had clear and concise contents yet ranked higher, the reason? They had hidden elements with keywords in them. So cunningly was this directed that the site visitor is unaware of the situation. The element is given a height of 1 and the color of the text in this element is set to the color of the background. In our findings, most used white colored text against a white background. For example, consider what’s below
  “ Ghana Premier Website designers, Web Design, Developers , E-commerce, Websites, Graphics, Software, Developments, Government, Accra, Tema, Takoradi, Kumasi, West Africa and internet business models, web application, redesign, multimedia, productions, branding, online, course, digital, advertising, graphic design, consulting, flash development and video, production development... “.

• 3. Keyword stuffing in attributes;alt,titles and summary
  Though this depends on the context of how its been used, and the opinion of the person using it. It was quiet evident that some of these were merely abuse usage to increase their chances of SERP visibility. Especially for me was a notable one which used html tables for its layout and yet had the summary attributes for those tables set for the targeted keywords.
  Besides it had an increasing number of it that at a point I almost lost track of the counts. Funny enough on this particular website’s page they advice to get your website to the top if you consult them for SEO services without using outdated and unethical means.
  For example, consider the html table below;

  Header Table
  sidebar Table	content Table
  Footer Table

  With the source code for the html table below.
  
  

  Header Table
  sidebar Table	content Table
  Footer Table

In conclusion, there are finer and professional ways of getting seo visibility and it will be the topic of another blog discussion to come. Share your thoughts or drop a comment to show some of the unethical ways people are using. Thanks.

As a web development company, this topic is a major concern to us because it affects the core of our operation. In this blog post, we will look at the some of the techniques used to as a form of mitigation against website attacks and hacks. It is amazing how common some of the vulnerabilities are and yet a simple search with Google leads one to a whole lot of websites out there that are vulnerable. In our recent survey (with respect to where our company is based-Ghana), we found out that some of the most trafficked websites in Ghana were vulnerable. To our dismay, some of these sites have been around for years and never bothered to scan their website against website vulnerabilities. The result was directory listing and download of perhaps files that should not be made accessible, unauthorized login to protected or authenticated sections of the website, unauthorized access to administration panel and content management system part of the site, etc.

The bottom line of the security of website is the fact that your website accepts inputs and gives outputs to users. And it is never to be assumed that users give the right data. A rather safe assumption about security is that All input is tainted and should be filtered.
Data sources in PHP include those from $_SERVER, $_SESSION, $_POST, $_GET, $_FILES, $_COOKIES,etc.
We offer the following recommendations as per our findings and do not intend to make this blog post an exhaustive subject on mitigating attacks.

• 1. Directory and File protection

  a. File and Folder permissions
  Set your server permissions “755” for folders or “644” for files. If you are using any third party software “777″ permission to install, remember to set them back the appropriate ones after install.

  b. Using htaccess
  # Protect files and directories from prying eyes.
  <FilesMatch “\.(application|system|model|view|controller)”>
  Order allow,deny
  </FilesMatch>

• 2. User submitted inputs

  All user submitted inputs should be filtered before they can be considered safe for further processing in the application.
  a. Data – If the system accepts only alphabets it should be checked against such, if it accepts only numbers(e.g. IDs) it should be filtered as such. Several functions exist in the different server technologies to help with this daily programming tasks. In PHP, I can think of is_numeric, ctype_alpha for now.

  b. SQL Injection – A common attack we found was SQL Injection. The simple solution to start with is to escape values before been used. PHP offers mysql_real_string_escape () function for this but remember to filter your numeric data types too before been used. For example `id`=3 where id is number and therefore ’3′ should be filtered as a number before been used.

• 3. Validation

  Usability costs, there’s nothing more responsive than validating on the client side but remember one can have Javascript turned off and as such you should also validate user submitted inputs too on the server side. If there are time/budget constrain on a project, then it better or preferred to do server side validation as against both.

• 4. User friendly URLS

  Basically speaking doing a search with Google for the search term:”index.php?id=3″ to find sql injection vulnerable websites is a simple task, however if these urls have been user friendly such as ‘/3′ that would have helped mask them from showing up in the SERP. It was quiet interesting when we checked our server logs and observed the url hacks folks where trying to use to get into our system. Who said we want our CMS to be public? It was funny to see how people can guess stuff trying with all sort of string combinations e.g. adm, admin, admini, administration, administrator, etc. to get in. Refer to our other post on friendly urls for more.

Basically there’s more to website security than that listed here, this is what I came up with for now, you can drop a line or comment below to share.

Personally, long and ugly web page url has been a concern to me not only because of SEO purposes but I also can’t seem to remember the urls of interesting articles I stumbled upon and didn’t have the chance to bookmark.

It’s a fact that search engine friendly urls do have an impact of your website ranking in SERP. The result could be seen on primarily two levels: 1. the domain level and 2. the sub directory level.

• The impact could be seen on the domain level www.domain.com… where your website could get a listing in the search result if the keyword that the user searched for appears in your domain. As a result, it’s important that one carefully chooses a sensitive domain name and not just any long boring domain name when it comes to choosing a domain for your website.

• The second impact is seen on the sub directory level. That is where the searched keyword appears in your page url other than the domain. When it happens this way, the searched keyword gets highlighted in the search result. Of course this makes it more trustworthy for the site visitor since they can see the keyword in the SERP snippet.
  For example, searching for website design agency ghana gets Kava Media listed as per the result page because there are pages within our website that have some of these keywords in the url.

As a website design and development company, we want our clients to not just be in business but have value added to their business through their website. As such we do our best as a company to leverage every best possible feature and tool in the creation of websites for clients to enhance their online user experience and add value to their business.  As a result, we updated our own content management systems to take SEF urls into account in the creation and management of website contents.

We are able to do this by enabling the URL rewriting module in Apache and routing every request to the an index page. It can be fun and tricky working with  URL Rewriting as you must have Regular expressions as part of your arsenals when dealing with Mod_rewrite.

You can drop a comment below to let us know of how you handle friendly urls in your websites.

HTML5 is still evolving and will be the new standard for authoring websites and developing web applications.
It comes with a new set of features and advantages that addresses the deficiencies of HMTL4. Among them are:

• New semantic elements and attributes
• Reduce the need for external plugins
• Support for audio and video
• Support for Drag and Drop.

My approach for these series of posts on introduction to HTML5 is to go through a typical web project by developing a homepage for a web design company. This is how I would like to structure it:

• HTML5 document structure for a web design company homepage
• Developing the design layout of the homepage using Adobe Fireworks CS5
• Converting the design layout to HTML5/CSS3 web page document

The first part of the series has to do with organizing the various contents on the homepage with respect to overall site goals and objectives. At the same time, I’ll be discussing how these content models would be laid out semantically using HTML5.
Obviously familiarity with HTML/XHTML and CSS is a plus.