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.

In today’s review I want to somewhat adopt a review style a little bit different from the previous website reviews., rather than the usual meandering style of analysing the, Layout and Design, Navigation, Markup etc, I’ll just go straight for the kill and just focus on the good, the bad and the ugly of the website under review.

So let’s get straight into it then

Overview

Unlike few of the websites that I have reviewed so far, The Voice web site has many good features about it, the web designers did take advantage of the Joomla CMS’s features and extensions like Jom Comment, SH404SEF for Search Engine Friendly URLs. The website seems to run on Joomla 1.1x which is little bit dated at  this point in time, my advice, “try Joomla 1.5” it has some rather nice features and a little bit more secure and the amount of extensions is unlimited.

Pros (The Good)

1. Regular update schedule, the updates in the website are like clock work, the online edition of the newspaper is updated weekly, very much in sync with the paper edition unlike the sporadic updates that characterizes the Mmegi website.
2. Fascinating news stories and the reporting is light-hearted, making it easy and enjoyable to read the online newspaper.
3. The comment facility is a rocker, the first online newspaper in Botswana to allow commenting on the news stories. Other newspapers, should copy that and get their readership engaged on some healthy debate.

Cons (The not so Good)

1. The Contact Us page can be better, as it is at the moment, it uses the bare functionality of the Joomla Contact component.
2. The profile page could be better, I registered thinking that by registering I would be getting “extra” facilities, like profile customization, Private Messaging etc but actually, registering is not worth it, you neither lose nor gain any extra functionality from the website by doing so. You can always try Joomla’s Community Builder to enhance the user profiles.
3. In the contact us page, The Voice guys claim to respond to queries within 24 hours but I have since written to them through their contact page, it’s been more than 72 hours now without a response.
4. Some pages are just way too long, especially those with multiple stories bundled together onto a single page. Paginating the long pages into multiple pages including the comments, would greatly enhance the browsing experience.

Verdict and Recommendations

It looks like the guys at ebotss know their stuff. However, as we all know, every good thing can always become better and anything else that is better can always be perfected. For this website

• Implement an Archived Listing of previous stories and news articles, at the moment the news portal is like a black hole, if the story disappears, it’s gone; no how to find and retrieve it.
• Break news articles in each news category into separate pages i.e. instead of having all Business News chunked into a url like http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html it wil be much better if each story under business category had its own story. This is because, every week each category will have different stories, so if I link to http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html this week, the following week that particular link will be pretty much irrelevant because the story would have been replaced with new stories.
• Have comments enabled on a per story basis rather than per category basis, where you have to scroll all the way through news stories in the, say, Business category before you can comment on one particular story you were interested in.
• Fix the Live Search at the top of the page. I tried using it but all I got were PHP errors as shown in the screenshot.
  
• Do away with the limit of the number of characters that can be typed in the Live Search Box as well, when testing this, I could only type in 20 characters.

Otherwise, the website is a breath of fresh air in many respects, it in many cases resemble the UK’s The Sun website but without the annoying advertising and embedded flash.

Till next time, but do feel free to leave a comment below.

Another day, another free website review. Today I will be reviewing  the SF-Zone.net website which is a blog dedicated towards Programming, Design and Internet Marketing at least according to the details I got. So let’s get on with it then.

Design and Layout

It’s a clean design without too much clutter [unlike mine . . . 'rolls eyes'];.

I’m not too sure about the color of sidebar navigation menu however, the menu text on the light background looks a bit blurry; something darker against the pale background will stand out a bit more I suppose.

There are some pages in which the layout breaks completely, this might be due to unclosed XHTML tags somewhere in the page. For instance, the ebooks page is totally broken, I tested this in IE6, IE7 and FF3 and I get exactly the same view as in the one shown in screenshot below.
It is worth correcting such errors as soon as possible.

Markup and Navigation

The blog roll links open in the current window; I would advise against because, this could end up being a “black hole” for visitors to your website.

Suppose, If someone lands on your site after searching for “is squidoo worth it?” and immediately they see a link about Affiliate Programs; if they click on that, chances are that they will leave your site for good without even reading what they came there for. I know I have done that on several occasions.

So I would suggest you

1. Open your blog roll links in a new window i.e. target=_blank in your links.
2. Reduce the text size of your blog  roll links relative to the website’s main navigation links, that way you draw attention to the most important parts of your website i.e. your content links rather than external links.
3. The links, Software Company Outsourcing services and Software Development services are too long; so you can either re-word the anchor text or increase the padding or margin in that part of your website.

Too many markup errors mostly coming from the many embedded Javascripts. I couldn’t get a single page that validate or at least has less than 20 XHTML validation errors. The home page, design category, windows shell alternative all fail validation.

Content and Updates

Good quality content across a wide range of categories. However, the problem with such wide range of content is that it is very possible to get untargeted traffic from search engine. I have had a similar problem, am still trying to prune some content about, business plans, credit crunch etc from this website because such topics are wayward from the target niche of this website. i.e. web design reviews and validation.

The updates are somewhat irregular, e.g from the 30th of July to the 12th August there was no update. This could be a bad omen for loss of “loyal visitors.”

Try keeping your updates schedule as regular as possible and try to stick to that schedule of updates. This ensures that your visitors would know when to check for new content from your web site because they will know you update schedule.

Verdict

Overall, the site has lots of potential bar a few minor issues

• Lack of About Us/me page, like who are you and what is your website about?
• No contact us/me form apart from the comment form, you can check out wordpress’ Contact Form 7
• The email address in the privacy policy says email to admin@xtutorials.net, not too sure whether that’s intentional or just an oversight. [I stand to be corrected]
• The Read More link in the fold (immediately below the navigation bar) the one that leads to the ebook can seriously harm the credibility of your website. The reason being that, it is not clear whether, you are the author of that ebook, or you’re reselling it, have you used it? Moreover, the testimonials in the ebook webpage have no reference, it could have been written by anyone.
• Stream-lining content towards a specific niche, for instance, Programming is a very broad concept so having a website which talks about programming amongst other categories might make it very difficult to do well in search engine or get targeted traffic.

All in all, nice job by the blogger and the best of luck to him/her in their blogging escapade.

In the previous review of the new University of Botswana website, I talked about mainly aesthetic features of the website like layout, navigation, typography etc.

This is the second and last part of that review and will be focusing on Content and Markup as promised. I wanted to contact the webmaster for the UB website, unfortunately I only found email addresses for the Public Relations officer and other Administrative junkies whom I doubt would know anything about CSS or XHTML.

I mean, what website of that magnitude does not have a simple contact details page for the webmaster or admin, an advanced one wouldn’t hurt either. Let alone, lack of a contact form anywhere on the site, I mean c’mon even my 10page website has a contact form. Anyway, enough with the ranting, let me get back to the task at hand; review of the content and markup.

Content

I am not going to bore you with all the hullabaloo about how Content is King and everything else a slave rant, I already talked about that in my first review of the ministry of trade and industry website. However,

1. There is immense content in the UB website but some of it is mis-classified, for instance, when you click on the left menu under Information for … -> Staff , you land on a page about Employment Opportunities at UB which is a bit awkward unless of course the job opportunities are open only to UB Staff members.
2. The navigation menu titled Media and Business leads to a list of tenders at UB except that there is a separate Tenders link; how misleading is that?
3. Most of the content in the website is too narrative rather than informative, for instance, when clicking on the Faculties and Departments menu, you get some a narrative about student enrollment and the names of faculties.The disappointing thing is that such narrative has no links whatsoever to the faculties’ websites or at least the different programmes offered in those faculties.
4. When you navigate to the the Department of Computer Science and guess what you get, information about the number of staff, the department’s vision and mission, annual intake and lots of other information but nothing about :
   • What programs are offered in the department
   • Research Activities
   • how to apply to academic programs in the department
   • How about Alumni including semi-alumni like myself ?
5. A very commendable feature which also is its detriment is the minimalist approach adopted in the design; no flashy images dancing on the screen. This makes the site load reasonably quicker and clean and less amateurish.

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I was going to review the Department of Customs and Exercise website as recommended by a fellow edumela poster but I decided against it because, as you can probably tell, there is not a lot anyone can say about that website except to say, “It’s really embarassing.” I probably shouldnt even be posting the url to that website given the standard of the website.

Anyways, I decided to write about the newly launched University of Botswana website. The review of this website will be a two part series with the first post focusing on website Layout, Navigation and Typography and the second and last post focusing on Content and Page Markup and concluding with the Verdict on the new website.

Overview

At first glance the website gives very little away as to what it is all about, at first impressions it looks like a minimalist website for a small charity organisation than a website for the largest academic institution in the country. The minimalist style was a good idea but it looks like it is minimalist for its own good because now it looks nothing like a website for a reputable institution.

Layout

The layout is purely CSS, well done to UB web developer/designer for that, it’s about time someone did their job right and follow the standards. However, the layout lacks any design appeal, it is just a set of colored boxed with some text written in them no artistic imagination whatsoever.

The use of Setswana traditional dancers’ image as one of the primary components of the layout is also questionable; what does it say about the university? It might have been relevant for a culture club or as part of a slideshow tucked somewhere in the menus but not in the main page of the university. It reminds me of the Southampton University website which has also undergone a re-design;

The logo seems somewhat out of place, the design may be all clean and tidy but it just looks inappropriate as a logo for the University of Botswana and so does the website.

Navigation

There is three sets of navigations - 2 on the left and a single one at the top right corner; all of which use Javascript to provide drop down and collapsible effects.

One fundamental flaw in the design is the lack of a Home link, I realised the logo is linked to the Home page except in the homepage itself but some people will not be able to pick that one up.

I guess it is worth discussing each menu group in turn.

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