Nur Ahmad Furlong

Islamic Experience Designer

branding

nurahmadfurlong.com domain registered for my online resume

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Sending out my resume is one of the things I do consistently no matter what’s happening in my career.

Whether I’m happy in my current situation, looking for a job or just casually scouting around to see what’s happening out there. It’s benefited me in a number of ways, one being making connections and becoming known to various companies and individuals within the communications industry.

There have been times where a resume sent out comes back to visit me just when I need it most, someone calls and says, “Hey are you still doing such and such” or, “Are you still interested in a position?”.

Being a web enabled worker means I need to keep a constantly updated profile online, and with tools like WordPress and freely available themes of all kinds it makes setting up a website for just about any purpose a real synch. So I acted on a thought which has been bugging me for a while and registered www.nurahmadfurlong.com to use as an easily up-datable online resume or profile. Currently I’ve slapped up a simple digital business card wordpress theme to post a few vital contact and social link details but I plan to build a more comprehensive resume website which I can keep updating and can also feed RSS and other activity streams into so I can consolidate my activities into 1 personal space. I use dreamhost for my personal hosting and they make it super easy to register new domains and install software like wordpress within a few clicks, no FTP necessary.

It also makes it easy to just pop the link into a message instead of scratching around for my most updated CV or intro letter at times when I need to introduce myself for whatever reason.

I highly recommend any professional builds themselves an online resume or personal profile of some sort which gives new prospects or potential employers a good idea of who you are and what you’re doing or have done in the past. It also shows you take your career seriously. It’s not extremely hard to set one of these up. You could either register a low cost domain & hosting package or use a free website service like wordpress.com or any other for that matter.

Then there’s also resume services zerply.com where I recently registered for a free online resume. The cool thing about Zerply is you can quickly pull your career history details from Linkedin or Facebook and have a resume up in a minute or 2. Have a look at mine – http://www.zerply.com/profile/nomadone

Of course I do keep my CV on this site as well so anyone visiting can download and get a quick idea of my experience and focus. I have 2 CVs, a 1 page PDF document and a much longer more detailed one when I need to provide more details into my career history, skillset etc.

Latest Work here at nomad-one.com

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The last few months have been really hectic for me as I posted here before with a few setbacks but I’m glad to say I’ve bounced back and things have returned to normal. I’ve completed a few nice little WordPress design projects all with their own interesting twists to them. I’m always amazed at just how many really great WordPress plugins exist to fill in the extra functionality needed.

www.strictlyhalaal.com

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The first of them, a site which hasn’t launched yet but is pretty much completed is www.strictlyhalaal.com, which serves as a listing/directory site for “halaal” certified businesses.

Strictlyhalaal.com uses a few great free plugins:

Next up is Learningcurve.co.za

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Learning Curve is a dedicated education technology supplier, representing premium brands such as Adobe, Apple, Dell, Autodesk and Toonboom. This was the first time I have setup an e-commerce website using WordPress and proved to be quite a challenge to begin with but also turned out to be a really valuable learning experience, no pun intended.

To power the e-commerce side fo things I used the wp-ecommerce plugin, which is a really powerful yet free plugin system allowing you to turn your WordPress site into an online store in a few clicks. Customizing the online store’s appearance was a bit of a mission for starters but it’s worth learning the ins & outs of this plugin, developed by the boys at www.instinct.co.nz.

I can’t unfortunately divulge the sales figures for the first 2 months, but lets just say I was more than pleasantly surprised. It’s great to see your work directly benefiting your client’s bottom line, especially immediately after it’s implementation.

Last but not least is Duomarketing.co.za

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This is the first time I make use of a Woo Theme to develop a client site. I’m very impressed with what the guys at WooThemes are up to, and even more so when I took a little lookie under the hood of one of their themes. The theme options part is really well done, some of the code still boggles my mind a bit, but it allows the user to easily switch stylesheets for a change of colour and style.

The widgetized areas on the homepage works out quite well also allowing you to add pages into certain block of the homepage layout. The cost of the premium theme definitely adds value to the mix as it allows the client to aquire some really great features for a fraction of the cost of cutom development.

A sniff at a nomad-one redesign

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Being snowed under for way too long as meant that some of the initial elements I wanted to add to the previous re-design of this site were left out. To be honest the design hadn’t lived up to my expectations form the very begining and has some serious usability problems as well. Having lived with version 4 of nomad-one.com for some time now I think a re-design is definitely way overdue. After pondering over where to start for a while I made a few notes ad a few sketches and dove straight into some look & feel mocks in Photoshop. This time I’m planning to develop something which interprets the nomad concept alot more literally, hopefully with a bit of a digital feel in part.

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I’m still at wireframe stage but would appreciate some feedback from anyone out there with regards to the little mockup above and also how you think I should improve on my site based on the current design & layout.

So I need to know about:

Colour, Graphic Elements, Layout, Usability, Readability, Functionality and last but not least, Content, the area I think probably needs to most focus.

Salam BC, an impressive new business network

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A few months ago I posted some designs on crowdspring.com for the re-brand of the social network which targets Muslim, Arabic and Middle-eastern interest groups. I won the contest and went on to complete a logo design according to the client’s very strict specifications. See Salambc.com Logo Design below:

I signed up on the network a while back in the testing phase but only really started using it in the last few days and I have to say, Linkedin needs to take note of some of the features in Salambc.com’s network. Salambc’s profile’s work alot more like a facebook and creating and joining groups is alot easier than Linkedin.

They’re described themselves in the following manner:

The Salam Business Club is the world’s first social business network especially for the Arab, Asian and Muslim business world with members from 170 countries around the world. Join the hottest Internet startup and find old friends, colleagues, valuable business contacts and new markets for your products. Extend your network and connect with decision makers, freelancers, entrepreneurs and the managers of the future.

I’d love to know if their backend is custom built or running on an open-source platform. Have a squiz at Salambc.com and sign up if ur interested in networking with Muslim/Arab Friendly business professionals.

An aquantance of mine criticised the special focus of this social network saying no social networks should be specifically for certain groups. I had to dissagree, as  person with a specific set of values and ethics, I’m interested in networking with others who share my values and on a business level I’d like to network with other business people who appreciate that there are certain types of business practices I cannot promote, joining Salambc gives me this opportunity.

Salambc is not exclusive though and even though it encourages doing business in an islamically acceptable manner, it invites all interested to join. If you do join though, know that there are rules to any game, so promoting business which does not conform with Islamic Business rules is not allowed, those being interest based financial services, gambling, alcohol, anything of an adult(XXX) nature or any unhealthy products or services.

I take my hat off to theses guys and wish them every success going forward.

Recent Project – Praxia Technologies Branding & WP website

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greyA nice little Branding & Web design project I recently completed was for Praxia Technologies.

Praxia Positions itself in the following manner.

“Our mission is to help our clients realise the full potential of their network, communications and computer hardware and software.”

Saeed of Praxia Technologies approached me, firstly to refresh his web presence and put something up there he could manage himself. This has become pretty much a standard request for web design projects as no-one wants to have to call up an html coder each time they want to update a page on their site.

As usual I recommended WordPress, due to it’s quick and simple framework and user friendliness, especially for Praxia’s simple CMS(Content Management System) needs. I found a template which suited their requirements and went about giving it a complete facelift. Praxia’s logo also needed a change and I was happy to oblige as logo design is one of my favourite areas of focus.

First Things first – Establish a new Brand

We started off with the logo design so we could base the site’s look & feel on the Brand and create a nice consistent looking online presence.

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After exploring various directions as I usually do with logo design projects the client was split between 2 logo options and we had some back & forth discussion on the pros and cons of each direction.

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We settled on the more practical option, the other being the 3 dimensional X element. The focus on the X stems from their original logo and was maintained to keep some kind of consistency going in the re-brand.

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Next comes the site in WordPress

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We decided to re-use the 3D X element with each component of the X representing a specific business unit as the client still liked the element and wanted to maintain it somehow.

Because Praxia is an IT Tech company focusing every element of a clients IT Tech needs they wanted to go with something which links well with the technology they use. A few stages of design drafts and the client was pretty happy with the look though felt something was missing, and with the inclusion of the brushed metal background we’d settled on a design which the client was very excited about.

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To see the final coded result visit www.praxia.co.za. Let me know what you think.