Anything about Everything

1. It is the most cost effective way to advertise your products especially to global
   markets that rely on the internet to search for products and services.
2. Your business will look more professional and gain more credibility. A well designed
   site makes your site look successful and it builds trust in your company and
   products.
3. Customers expect businesses to have websites, your company websites is like a
   digital business card.
4. A website enables you to provide your customers with more information faster and
   in a more cost effective manner.
5. You can receive feedback from your customers through the website.
6. A website gives you access to global markets which would otherwise not be able
   to know about your services and products.
7. You can provide better customer service.
8. It is the best way to stay competitive.
9. The website stays open 24/7 without any added overhead.
10. Your business can provide better customer service.

Some things that has been bugging me for quite some time concerning some of the websites that I surf that belong to companies in Botswana are:

• the lack of a clear message of what the website is all about
• who are the target audience for that website?
• lack of professional appeal in such websites.

Take for instance, http://www.botsnet.bw/, (no malice intended) the website for a major ISP in the country, the website just doesn’t match the stature of the company it belongs to; It looks like somebody got over-excited with jeans and flash animations; making the website very un-usable and unwelcoming to say the least.

botsnet homepage

Sometimes, it’s easy to blame the web designers/developers for the awful websites we so often come across, especially here in Botswana but something that I have realised is that, more often than not, the owners(companies) of such websites are as much to blame as the people that designed the website.

Many are times, clients (for web designers) forget that when you set up a business or company website, you should really forget about what you like but focus on “what the visitors to your website will be looking for” when they visit your website.

So if you’re a business owner and are looking to get a website for your business; put yourself into your customer’s shoes, and just ask yourself,

what information do my customers to see when they come to my website? There’s actually no harm in asking them, give them a ring, drop them an email, tell them that, you setting up a website for your company and you’d like to know what they’d like to see in that website.

Remember, your company website may belong to your company or yourself but it’s of no use to if it does not add any value to your business in terms of your interaction with your customers. It just becomes like a gigantic trophy that you can’t use for anything except to gaze at it and relive the memories when you won it.

There is a worrying trend with regard to corporate websites for companies in Botswana. It looks like it still hasn’t sunk in the modern business world, customers and potential clients shortlist their service providers on the basis on the information they get in the service provider’s website.

But so far, most websites are either gluttered with Flash Animations or moving objects of one form or another.

I have outlined some of the offenders in this regard with partially done, or Under Construction websites with signs of a man pushing a wheelbarrow and flashing red for danger sign indicating that “MEN are at WORK”

Botswana Television – http://www.btv.gov.bw/

BTV

What can we say about BTV, a government supported TV station, that has been around for more than 10 years and yet they still can’t run a website. What’s with that? It’s really a disgrace, at least if they can’t do it; why don’t they just get someone else to do it?

PEEPA - http://peepa.co.bw/

It looks like this site existed at some point; If you do site:peepa.co.bw in Google you will get a list of pages that were previously indexed when the site was ‘alive’.

Duma FM – http://www.dumafm.co.bw/

To make matters worse, the DUMA FM’s under construction website has got the contact details of the company that is designing the website for them rather than thecontact details of the DUMA FM radio station. Maybe it’s the web designers who are taking advantage in this case, but who can blame them? It’s not a good practive.  What the web designers are doing, they are basically getting “free” marketing.

CEDA Botswana - http://www.ceda.co.bw

They used to have a fully functional website; I can only guess that, they are doing a re-branding of the old website. Why they decided to take the old one offline before they have completed the new design is anybody’s guess.

CEDA offline

The Digital TV Migration (Godigital) Website - http://www.godigital.org.bw/

Despite not being under construction, the title pages for most of the pages in this websites are all set to “Untitled Document” which makes the site just a tiny bit unprofessional.

The old cliche goes that, the “Good programmers are lazy” and sometimes even dumb mostly because they always try to find the easiest solutions to the problem (dumb bit) by using as little effort as possible(lazy bit).

Being lazy as I am, I’m always looking for “easier” and quicker ways to generate software artifacts/applications from conceptual models with as little coding and hand-cranking as possible. The downside is that, one has to invest  significant amount of time and effort to learn  the different tools and frameworks that  can be used to achieve exactly that.

The one tool I have had experience with over the years is AndroMDA, but at the moment I’m looking at Tigerstripe to see what can be made out of it.

AndroMDA

AndroMDA was the very first tool that I actually used to turn my “dreams” of Model Driven Architecture and Engineering (MDA/MDE) into reality. It can generate mostly Java oriented software artifacts but it also supports .NET. The good thing is that, you can use AndroMDA to generate anything, you just have to remember to write a cartridge for it. Cartridges are like AndroMDA plugins that specify the translation from UML’s Platform Independent Model(PIM) into whatever your target platform’s artifacts are.

Tigerstripe

Another tool that I’m looking at recently is the Tigerstripe project which is an eclipse modeling tool with specific support for Telecommunication models like Managed Entities etc. The tool has recently been open-sourced from the commercial version of Tigerstripe@tigerstripedeve.net.

The BPNC is supposed to be Botswana’s centre for excellence whose primary “mandate” according to their mission and vision goals is to :

• Stimulate and generate productivity consciousness in Botswana
• Promote increased productivity in all sectors of the economy

So I guess, it’s only fair to expect very high standards in anything the BNPC does; their website included of course.

The Good

• clean and uncluttered design
• minimal use of flash (over-use of flash seems to be a pandemic in many botswana based websites)
• The Contact Us page at least seems to work

The Bad

• too slow, mayb it was my connection but heck, given that the pages use very minimal images, the load time is way too slow for most pages in the website.
• lack of imagery even in those content items that someone would expect images e.g. Conference Facilities->Accommodation, why not have image gallery of the accommodation facilities offered by the center?
• the Disclaimer pretty much absolves BNPC of any responsibility to provide accurate and reliable information in their website. I was particularly concerned when reading the following from the bnpc website
  

  Information, ideas and opinions expressed on this site should not be regarded as professional advice or the official opinion of the BNPC and Users are encouraged to seek professional advice before taking any course of action related to information, ideas or opinions expressed on this site.

  I mean, c’mon guys; why not at least take the necessary steps to ensure that the content is as accurate as possible than go itlhotlhora any form of responsibility as if the website belongs to a third party?

Verdict

Overall though, the BNPC website is a bit dull except for the flash animation at the top, there’s very little that’s engaging from the website. It could do with a makeover and a little bit of accountability from BNPC rather than distancing themselves from any misinformationfrom their website.

A website of the stature of BNPC should be an information portal and should lead by example especially an institution of BNPC’s stature.