This tutorial assumes you are using Drupal 6 and have access to your site’s database via phpMyAdmin.

Any modules that may require updating can be viewed at yoursite/admin/reports/updates, or you can follow the Available updates link in the reports section of the administration panel.

Follow the Download link, and save the zipped update on what, by rights, should be your appallingly messy desktop.

Throw your site into Maintenance mode through the yoursite/admin/settings/site-maintenance url, or use the Site maintenance link under Site Configuration. If you harbour any pretences of being a professional and good at your job, then you should style the site maintenance page (maintenance-page.tpl.php) to suit your theme. If you harbour no such pretences, you’re laughing. *chuckles*

Sticking the site in Maintenance mode will prevent file uploads and changes to your database whilst you perform the pesky but completely necessary task of backing up.

Backing up your site’s files is easy: FTP in and drag them all down. Backing up your database is slightly more complicated.

Log in to phpMyAdmin through whatever means your host allows, and select your database from the left. Now don’t go marauding in here drunk or insomniacally tired and start dropping tables, or you’ll be fending off kicks to the teeth from your client with the awesome skills you’ve learnt playing Tekken.

Click on the‘Export tab at the top of the window, then select all of the tables.

Check the Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW checkbox. This will remove the existing tables when you re-install the database before re-creating and populating them.

Select the Save as file option and and your preferred compression, and then hit Go.

With your database backed up, return to the admin section of your Drupal installation. Browse to the modules page (/admin/build/modules) and disable the module you’re upgrading.

Delete the existing module’s files and upload the new version (usually to sites/all/modules).

Enable the module and run update.php: yoursite/update.php. This script will iron out any changes made to the database by the new module. Select the updates you want to run, if any, and hit Update.

Take your site out of Maintenance mode, and like Ben Affleck in the awful mess of a film that is Boiler Room, you’ll be done.

Can you set-up a simple Wordpress Blog?

Yes, for a small fee we can assist in installing Wordpress and will provide training in how to use it. We can also upload an existing theme for you.

Do you provide Wordpress and Drupal templates/themes?

We can create templates or themes for any of the major Content Management website types  - Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and Motion Type.

What about Flash banner ads?

Yes, we can produce custom banner ads and videos where required. We can also assist with slideshow plugins and photo galleries for the major CMS distributions.

I have a website that needs tweaking. Can you help?

It depends on the website, but we are happy to look at it with you and advise you on a course of action. We will only charge for modifications we make to the site. Contact us today to discuss your specific requirements.

Back in 2005, when we were still working in Cape Town with Mamelani, we came up with the concept of a practical career guidance programme that was specifically tailored to South African school children. The education system in South Africa is failing for a number of reasons, but the lack of adequate career guidance is one that’s had little attention.

With further research, we identified a fairly hefty number of issues that needed to be addressed:

• teachers being overburdened and lacking the skills or qualifications to deal with career guidance properly.
• lack of personal awareness among learners
• inability of learners to make choices.
• lack of interest from teachers
• narrow scope of guidance to choices that were mostly available in the past, e.g. nursing and teaching
• parents making choices instead of learners.
• guidance education not addressing the practical realities of job changes, redundancy and need for entrepreneurship.
• lack of information on careers and tertiary courses.
• learners enrolling in university with little idea of their objectives or studying the wrong subjects for their field of interest.
• poor quality of CV writing
• lack of access to educational resources due to majority of schools running old computers and little or no internet.

We collaborated with a career guidance specialist to develop the content and plan activities that we could make interactive, and output data that the teacher could use to help the learner. We wanted the software to be animated, with characters that school children from different backgrounds could identify with.

The idea was to create something fairly broad and substantial that would speak to children from a wide variety of backgrounds and “tell it like it is”. This idea was supported by a number of teachers we spoke to, who urged us to target the programme to as young an audience as possible and as honestly as possible.

The education figures tell a frightening story. Currently, only 14% of black and 17% of coloured South Africans over the age of 20 have a high school or higher qualification. The national pass rate for the end of school exams is around 65%, but only around 15% of the population study further at university. Of these, only 22% obtain an undergraduate degree. Too few teachers have the time or skills necessary to teach career education properly and students are being passed through the system with little direction or support.

Our aim is to paint this picture clearly to students (and teachers) and encourage them to plan better and make decent choices with what they have.

Teachers are given a manual and have password protected access to a back-end which displays data on each of their student’s answers. They can therefore use the software to help guide each learner individually.

The software has been developed using Flash and Zinc and will run on old computers (Windows 98 with 64MB RAM). I will be posting more updates with screenshots (and possibly a screencast) in the coming days.

The following is a breakdown of the course material:

1. Introduction

Introduction of the various characters
Reasons to study and get a job.
Positive and negative factors about each character.
Factors and choices.
What happened to the characters later on.

2. Gaining appropriate self-information

The importance of knowing yourself before making a career choice.
Build a picture of yourself.
Explanation of Holland’s personality types,
matching jobs to types
Holland’s activity - Learners input a series of answers and their personality type(s) is displayed.

3. Gaining career information

Collecting information about careers.
How to find career information.
Understanding what type of information to look for when researching careers

4. The decision making process

The need to make decisions and the decision making process.
The job interview

5. Planning a career

Life after school, planning your career and career realities.
Changing your career.

6. Entrepreneurship

What is entrepreneurship;
Steps to creating your own business;
Researching the business;
Creating a business plan;
Finding funding;
Putting your business plan into action.
Why is the business failing?

7. A reality check

The reality of the working world.
The importance of back up options.

8. How to write a CV

A step-by-step process for compiling a CV, including structure, content, layout and an example.

9. Job types

A comprehensive list of jobs is provided. The learners can search through the list by category or personality type to find out detailed information about what the jobs entail, what qualifications and personal requirements they need, and the number of hours they would likely be expected to work.

10. Tertiary education

This section provides a list of the various departments at the main tertiary institutions of South Africa, as well as all the relevant contact details for applications and bursaries.

The new website has a full content management system (CMS), allowing addition, editing and arrangement of products, pages and menu.

The following is a general guide to the series of steps that Radar Maker follow in order to quickly move a website from the idea stage to finished article.

1. Initial contact

The first thing to do is to contact Radar Maker via phone or email. Our consultant will get a basic overview of the website you’re looking for, discuss the budget, and set up a meeting. At this stage, it’s a good idea to email us any information on the website so we can be properly briefed before the meeting.

2. Meeting

In the meeting, we discuss your requirements and advise on the various options available to you. Remember, you don’t need any technical knowledge - that’s our job. We need to get a good idea of what the site is for, who the audience is and what it is required to do. We’ll discuss the style and layout, what artwork you have, and what different functionality you need. Once we have an idea of all this, we can estimate a cost and time-frame for completing the project, and you can decide whether you want to move forward with us.

3. Planning

We then go off and plan the website based on the initial meeting and your ongoing input. You may need time to decide on various options, and to rework some content before a final plan is reached.

4. The spec sheet

Once a plan is agreed upon, we will create a spec sheet for you to sign off on. The ‘spec’ is a contract of work that outlines the structure and functionality of the website with a budget and development timeframe.

5. Initial design

The next step is to send us digital copies of your logo as well as photographs and branding material that will help us in creating a design. We then create a mock-up design and send it to you for comment. Changes are made at this stage and a final design is signed off, so that development can commence.

6. Development

At this point we code the website and any additional functionality outlined in the spec. We’ll keep you updated on the site’s progress, and send screenshots as required.

7. Final testing

Depending on the scale of the website, it may be necessary to upload it on a test server so that you can test it and make sure it’s working as you need it to, before it goes live.

8. Completion

The website is uploaded and everyone’s happy. Radar Maker can now advise you on additional services including online advertising and Search Engine Optimisation, so that you can start directing that all-important traffic to your website.

9. Ongoing Support

Radar Maker offer a range of service agreements to suit your needs. CMS websites require manditory security updates and therefore require ongoing support. We can also provide regular content updates and make any design updates you need at a later date.

1. Make sure your website is designed and coded properly

Badly coded sites make it difficult for search engines to read and archive your site. It must be structured correctly and your code should be free from errors so that search engines can do their job.

2. Write plenty of original content

Search engines sort and rank pages based on content. Ideally, you need at least 300 words of original text per page. Merely copying and pasting from other sites, or loading several pages with the same content won’t help your ranking.

3. Make sure you use important keywords in your content

Use keywords in your text but remember to write for humans. At the end of the day, you are creating a website for customers, not search engines. Think about all the words that people would use to find your site, write these words down, and incorporate them into the body of your text.

4. Update your site regularly

Regularly updating your content will improve your ranking with search engines. This is an immediate advantage of having a Content Management System (CMS), allowing you to update the site’s content as often as you need.

5. Get inbound links

This is very important. Search engines such as Google assess a site’s ranking based partly on the number of high-traffic sites linked to it. Request a link exchange with business partners and other websites relating to your industry. There are some free directories that allow links and others that you’ll need to pay for. Choose carefully where you list your website though, and don’t get too many too quickly, or Google may penalise you.

6. Write articles.

Market your product or service by writing original articles and submitting them to online directories. Submitting articles can increase your search engine ranking and attract potential customers. Write about topics relating to your business. Pick out news items or latest trends and provide a viewpoint on them. This takes some time but it can be worth it. Radar Maker can assist you with writing and submitting articles.

7. Don’t cheat

If you up heaps of random keywords, have repetition of content, or try to hide links, Google can penalise you badly.

SEO became popular due to the near total dominance of search engines in finding websites online. Search engines have become the new yellow pages. If you’re not listed on the first few pages of a search, you might as well not exist.

Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated over time in order to avoid abuse by webmasters wishing to spam links and fill their site with irrelevant keywords.

Nowadays, they obtain more accurate results because they reward sites that are well coded with the proper combination of XHTML and CSS, are regularly updated with original content, and linked to by other highly ranked sites.

How does it work?

It’s fairly straightforward. To get good search results, your website needs to be professionally coded using modern development techniques, have plenty of original and relevant content, and be linked to by well ranked sites.

The first part of SEO is structural, namely how well the site is coded and what formal elements are in place to make it ‘search engine friendly’. Each of our websites conforms to the latest W3C guidelines, using a sound menu structure and a correct combination of XHTML and CSS.

The second relates to the content on the site. Search engines identify keywords directly from the content and not just from the “meta tags”, as before. The regular updating of content will further improve a website’s ranking, and can be worth considering if budget allows.

The third aspect of SEO relates to inbound links, that is, the number of high-traffic sites that contain a link to your website. This side of SEO has produced a whole new industry with a multitude of directory sites charging big money for adding links. Some sites still allow for free links however, and most industry specific sites will agree to a ‘link exchange’.

SEO professionals can then improve a website’s rankings though writing and submitting articles to large article directories (linkbaiting), obtaining inbound links from a range of established link directories, and analysing your target market to develop search keyword strategies.

So, SEO represents two key elements – the structure and content of the website, and then how that website is marketed.

Does Radar Maker provide SEO?

At Radar Maker, we develop websites to SEO best practices. All our websites are designed with people in mind and then coded to suit search engines.

We can then provide additional marketing services such as copywriting, article writing and submission, and link building strategies which can greatly improve your website’s ranking.

The software was developed in collaboration with a career guidance specialist as a practical response to the severe shortage of career information and guidance in schools.

The software brings learners through a complete course in the factors and process of making the right career decisions, both in school and beyond. It follows the stories of seven characters from different backgrounds, examining the decisions they make and the consequences they face. By answering a series of questions relating to their personality and interests, the learners are given a host of potential career types to match their personality. They can then research these options in a career database to find out what the career entails, the qualifications they require and the college options available to them. There is also a detailed course pack for teachers, who are able to monitor each student’s results through an admin section.

Education is possibly the greatest challenge facing South Africa.  The combined effects of poverty and ill-health, an overburdened education system and the continued failure by the government to implement efficient policies have left the country in crisis. Currently, only 14% of black and 17% of coloured South Africans over the age of 20 have a high school or higher qualification. The national pass rate for the end of school exams is around 65%, but only around 15% of the population study further at university. Of these, only 22% obtain an undergraduate degree.

These figures expose a serious problem that will lead to major skill shortages in the coming years. While the chief causes are structural and administrative (lack of school facilities, over-sized classrooms and underpaid teachers), the lack of career guidance education in schools means that students aren’t planning properly and end up making the wrong education choices. My Future was developed to assist teachers with little or no prior experience in career guidance, and covers the full RNCS life orientation curriculum.

The new website has a content management system (CMS) both for project coordinators and participating schools, enabling each school to maintain their own blog relating to the linking process.

Each school is twinned with one other, and the students and teachers exchange information with over a period of time to gain insight into some of the practical realities facing their counterparts. The new Amawele website will enable schools to maintain their own web space, where they can record this process and share their experiences with others.

In addition to the twinning project, Amawele work with around 50 schools in the Eastern and Western Capes, identifying needs and supporting them through new facilities, materials, training, food and healthcare. The new website will also serve to document this important work.

NCP required a clean re-design of their existing site with an affordable Content Management System that would allow them to add and edit pages themselves. They also required a means of listing upcoming events, which we provided using an embedded Google Calendar.