www.Naeem.co.za

2008 has been a roller coaster of note, looking back on it, it was a time of huge gains, losses, experiences and much much more.

In the real world,

- March 15th, Married! – Naeem.co.za & Saaleha.com – a union of internet junkies
- Honeymoon to Singapore, Langkawi Island and Malaysia’s Kuala Lampur
- A few weeks later, trip to the far east – Hong Kong and China’s Shanghai, Guangzhou & Beijing
- Hijacked! Got my South African colours when 2 gunmen stormed my home and made off with my car.
- The Autostyle Durban Motorshow – even bigger then before.
- Recovered! My Audi was recovered in Soweto, in mint condition with a newly fitted windscreen.
- Bought another house. This time on the doorstep of our local Masjid, bigger with alot more ‘room for potential’.
- Autostyle voted 2008 Best Automotive Website. That’s the 3rd year in a row.
- Autostyle moved into its stunning new  Johannesburg showroom.

My online adventures never cease to amaze me, always learning new technologies, ideas & meeting all sorts of amazing people.
- WordPress is my App of the year!
- MyUmmah.co.za is fast establishing itself in the South African muslim niche. What started as an online storage for Islamic content I find – now receives over 11 000 page impressions a month with just over 6000 visitors.
- Kasa.org.za A quick wordpress powered website for Khitmatul Awaam: South Africa’s first non profit hajj & umrah foundation.
- SoccerStuff.co.za – A little sideline service from our Autostyle team. We do loads of imports and many agencies & corporate gift companies we work with indicated the need for custom branded soccerballs. Yes we are jumping in on 2010mania
- MuslimJobs.co.za – a little job portal for our muslim community, plans are to revamp it and add some extra features to it.

2009 promises much more new projects, challenges and more importantly trying to uphold a balance between work, life and most importantly becoming a better muslim.

2008 proved that the Almighty truly does work in mysterious ways.
There is Hikma (wisdom) in all the good & bad we go through.

Seth Godins blog is part of my Google Reader,  a few days ago he posted a short post on “Remembering”

Is it worth doing?

What was my impact?

Will it matter in the long haul?

What sort of connections did I create?

Wherever you live, whatever you do, you have an obligation.

I explained this to the owner & founder of IFISA - I have been commisioned to create an online Islamic Finance magazine for the Muslim African population.

What prompted me to write this post, a reader all the way in Athens, USA posted a comment and subsequent email.  This was from reading the daily Ramadan Quran Translations I have been posting on MyUmmah.co.za (more…)

Introducing MuslimJobs.co.za

South Africa’s first job-board website aimed at empowering and supporting the Muslim community.  Job postings are free to create & apply.  Currently, the most popular muslim websites that offer a similar service are Radio Islam & MuslimsAtWork - both of which run on my Automailer mailing list.

Radio Islam & MuslimsAtWork send out daily & weekly newsletters respectively – They each have Vacancies whereby email subscribers can view various job opportunities through the countries Muslim communities.  In essence it is a good  initiative and many have found work this way – Even I found an assistant many years ago through this method.

Nontheless, times change, technologies improve & we adapt ourselves to the world around us and this is how MuslimJobs has started. Using opensource software from Romania, Jobberbase was the script of choice to get this project done.

I have kept the categories simple and to the point.

Corporate – for the big name companies looking for staff
Small Business – your typical retail store, supermarket, etc looking for sales person, manager and so on
Professionals – Aimed at the medical industry with doctors looking for locums, assistants and similar.
Services – Looking for someone to project manage a building, looking for a web designer? all these would go into the services category.
Lift-Club – This was a last minute edition, I’ve seen many adverts on newsletters and web forums for carpools, lift sharing and ride clubs.

Jobs are available as Full Time, Part Time & Freelance which is quite self explanatory.

For income or sustainability – I have decided to go with an Honor System – If users have gained something out of using MuslimJobs.co.za – they are welcomed to donate a small fee to the upkeep and development of future online projects.

For marketing and web promotion – I’m on a zero budget for this project, I have opted to use:
- banner & promotion on MyUmmah.co.za (which has seen fantastic growth and now averages about 300 to 450 daily reads)
- a short blurb on Radio Islam’s daily newsletter

Addtionally I have requested a few facebook groups to punt this website & initiative.

Visit MuslimJobs.co.za and give me your honest feedback.

A few weeks ago Google updated their pagerank algorithms.
See here to learn about Page Rank
& here for the notice by Matt Cutts

Now now, we all know we should not put alot of stock in Google Page Rank, Alexa and similar tools. Nontheless it always boosts my confidence when visiting sites which have a higher page rank. “Hey these guys are ok, they got a PR of 4″ similarly, I receive a fair share of cold calls from startup directories and magazines offering adspace (more on that another time)

So page rank update – this blog, naeem.co.za used to sport a PR3 – which surpised me as I hardly ever update or post to the site – it dropped to 1

MyUmmah.co.za on the other hand was stuck on PR1 for over 6 months has boosted to PR3.

Alas Autostyle.co.za stays still at PR4

As mentioned a few days ago, i’v relaunched MyUmmah.co.za

This time round, I’m using wordpress mostly as an online archive for various Islamic resources that i come across online. My logic says, no point saving it in MyDocuments, rather make it available online, perhaps someone could be looking for similar resources. Looks like i was right as 52% of my visitors come from Google searches!

This is the rundown of what i used on MyUmmah.co.za
(more…)