Botswana Ministry of Trade and Industry Website Review

This is the beginning of a new series in which I will be reviewing websites for Botswana companies and the government departments including other stakeholders and service providers e.g. BTC, BPC etc in Botswana. If you have any other website for a company or organisation in Botswana that you would like to see a review of, feel free to leave a comment below.

This week I will be starting with mti.gov.bw

Overview

The website runs on a rather dated version of Mambo content management system (CMS) and seems to have been around since 2003, at least that’s the impression we get based on the copyright and privacy text at the footer of the page.

Design

• The design is a classic 3-column layout that mixes Javascript in the top level menu, static images and some minor flash animations [see figure below]. The bluish theme spotted is synonymous with many websites or anything Botswana related for that matter, government or otherwise [you can see what I mean from the botswanainfo.blogspot.com].
• Navigation menu on the left is intuitive and it is what you would expect from a a website for ministry offering the services offered by ministry of trade and industry.
• The middle column is rather too narrow for the main content to fit some of the content, for example see the company registration page. The designer could have killed off the right column since it contains somewhat irrelevant content which was last updated in 2005 or so it appears.
• a table based layout is a search engine turn off and the often table bordered content area is an eyesore, the designer/webmaster could benefit from CSS layouts and some Cascading Style Sheets fundamentals.

Content

As any serious web designer or master will tell you, content is king nowadays given how easy it is to set up a website or a webpage. What makes a website stands out and rank very well in search engines these days is the content not some flashy moving images jumping up and down on your screen.

This is one of the few websites in which you can get some useful information about the services offered by the ministry. From here you can find information about

• company registration
• business licences applications and processes
• pantents, trademarks and copyright related
• investment
• intellectual property and entrepreneur etc

Updates

Updating of the website seems to be a bit of a challenge but there is an attempt to update the website with some newsflashes now and then, like there is a couple of stories published on the 04 August 08 about Venturing into niche marketing, Small-scale entrepreneurs urged to be more creative etc

Verdict

All in all, the guys at cbsbotswana seem to have done pretty well especially considering when the current design was made. However, the website could benefit from :

1. Optimising the page URLs to make them Search Engine Friendly (SEF) which is one of the primary steps when doing Search Engine Optimisation.
2. Get rid of the right column since the content there does not really add any meaningful value to the website.
3. Update the content under some of the menu items or remove the menus altogether if updating content for those is elusive especially, under Speeches, Careers etc.
4. Add a contact form in the Contact Us page and use a generic name for the webmaster’s email address in the same page; something like webmaster@mti.gov.bw is much more maintainable as compared to the published personal email of the webmaster.
5. Lastly, correct or ask whoever is responsible to correct the DNS entries for http://mti.gov.bw so that it does not give a 404 - Page Not Found Error.