How difficult is it to maintain a website. Look at the picture and obviously what is wrong should be noticed easily

http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art20070612271165


Am sorry to say but are is the or are the webmaster(s) blind

look at the frontpage http://www.punchng.com/Default.aspx


the menu is WAY OUTTA place. freaking change the background color common

LOL,

I will attempt to address the first issue. From what I see with web dev in naija (and believe me, I have asked a lot of questions and dealt with a lot of pple to come to this conclusion), most pple there just want a website and that's it. In other words, they put no thought into what happens after the site is complete. Either that or they don't want to spend the extra money to put the developer on maintenance. Also, how many corporations there have a shop dedicated to maintaining their websites? Assuming this is costly, how many pple have been encouraged to set up companies whose sole purpose is maintaining various websites? I bet you when such pple approach companies like Punch, they are laughed out of the office.

Hopefully, the tide will turn sha.

I have gotten intouch with punch but no replies, and a couple other nigerian sites and one that claimed to be a nigerian search engine using google search.

Obviously the first thing that comes to their mind is how much is this going to cost them to build and maintain. Not taking into consideration the humongous potential revenue.

Nigerian newspapers. obviously they don't update by the second. bbc, cnn, fox etc put african news up on their sites and guardian, punch etc may catch up 10 hours later or for guardian 1 or two days.

Nigerian newspapers online have a very profitable footprint if they know how to monetize. With the innumerable number of nigerians that visit these nigerian newspaper sites daily (knowing the sites are still crappy looking and lacking functions) I can't just wonder why they can't keep up.

I dont think the word ARCHIVING is in their dictionary or RSS FEEDS at least they can use that if they cannot update themselves

I shall make a mashup, oh collection of nigerian sites just to get a kick and laugh since am jobless now.

Cactus:

How difficult is it to maintain a website. Look at the picture and obviously what is wrong should be noticed easily

http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art20070612271165


Am sorry to say but are is the or are the webmaster(s) blind

look at the frontpage http://www.punchng.com/Default.aspx


the menu is WAY OUTTA place. freaking change the background color common

I actually wanted to do something like that. Some Nigerian sites just make me burst into laughter. Its a sorry case!

You guys are not kidding!

You are expecting too much from Nigeria. The internet is too new in Nigeria and people are yet to understand the value.

Most people are putting up websites just because their friend or competitor has one without clearly articulating the purpose or function of the website.

Nigeria, a country where some businesses spend over 1 million Naira to decorate their offices and expect to pay 25,000.00 for a website, if they actually need one! Talk about lack of understanding!

It will take a paradigm shift before we come up to the class of CNN, BBC and others. What about the hidden agenda of the person in charge of the website?


Devine R.

I want to setup an online news site where ordinary Nigerians will be the reporters, with all the functionalities of a serious news site inculding but not limited to comments on news stories, photo or short clips on stories etc.

Any thoughts on this? I believe we need to get more informed on what is happening in Nigeria, not just politics as that seems to be the main focus for quite a long time now.

Could be ideal for freelance journalists with a high probability of paying the top news posters with ad revenues that may come in if the site becomes hot.

At least, news will be added by the second or by the minute using a very clear user interface without any technical knowledge whatsoever.

if u want to come up with something original, look for a group of proven developers to discuss the prospects and means of going about tackling the problem.

Developing web application nowadays is very easy. The main focus should be on marketing and promotion. once u have a solid plan in regards to marketing, You should be fine in the long run.

Thanks for the advice. I am a programmer and setting up the site isn't a problem at all.

It's what people think or how people will like to use such a platform that I need comments on.

afam, that's a good idea, was thinking about same thing over the weekend while i was watching the news.
I can help you with hosting space.
I already have one you can use. Hit me up via email via email on
title it (news site).

And don't bother what people will think about it. I know how it will work. hit me up via email lets talk.

Good initiative although I do have one concern/question: you will need to build in a mechanism to root out the rumor-mongers. Such pple could seriously ruin the site's reputation.

Good luck!

viperman:

And don't bother what people will think about it. I know how it will work. hit me up via email lets talk.

Well that will be probably your first mistake of usability. You can build something to your taste, people may use it or may not use it. If you are planning on building applications for the general public. You will have to take into consideration what people THINK, how people, BEHAVE, and what someone may do DIFFERENTLY.

I hereby recommend a combo of google news and link clouds

Rather than have users turn in news (again, I am sceptical about certain users), you can, ala google, spider websites and gather news from Nigerian news sites. Then using the power of link clouds, more popular news items could have a bigger font size, thus drawing users to it.

In particular, I used to visit www.nigeriaworld.com . However, as the years went by, it seems they decided to concentrate on number of links, rather than a usable interface. Then they decided to go even further by putting up the hideous interface that is there now. I stopped visiting there on a regular basis since last november. Now, cos of their bad architecture, I visit www.saharareporters.com . I am definitely itching for a good naija news site though.

Just a thought

Thanks for all the comments.

After receiving quite a number of interests on this I decided to do some coding last night and came up with www.justwebservices.com/jnews

I had to make use of data from another application to speed up the process but the news application site is self contained right now and is a project on its own.

No doubt a lot needs to be done but once the framework is completed any other thing can be added because as far as I am concerned any business process can be web enabled without wahala and on time too.

Maybe its because I am not working under any pressure but in reality even reproducing from scratch what you have at youtube shouldn't take more than 2 weeks maximum.

The site can be used by everyone, registered users can post comments on news items, reporters (registered users with a higher priviledge to offer control) can post news items and photos, a super reporters can post videos and they will be displayed like what you have on the home page.

I may or may not crawl other websites for news depending on what the users want. I believe Nigerians will appreciate news created by them and for them.

As regards criticisms, please send them but do remember that this is a job of less than 12hrs so make una take am easy.

Here is something that might take a big chunk out of the "inventing the wheel" part

I just found out about http://pipes.yahoo.com/ . What is it you ask? Just click to find out. In a nutshell, it is pretty powerful and cool. Hint: Think aggregators and feeds

Good luck!

What you have on the website has nothing to do with reinventing the wheel and it is not in all cases that feeds or aggregators make sense.

Thanks for the link but it does not make sense in this regard.

The focus is on Nigerians across the world creating the news not just consuming them.

Can we get something like this!

http://nowpublic.com

nowpublic.com is exactly what I have in mind, a user generated news site but with focus on Nigeria.

There is no feature that I can not implement as I write codes from scratch so if it can be web enabled then I can do it.

I also believe the design could be better but I guess my focus now is the functionality and model for the site.

that is impressive for a start pretty cool.

Well I do feel those who can contribute in some part should provide ideas and time to do something, be it code snippets, widgets, user-interface design, or debugging or something.

if the hyperlink to the sample u provided is the final staging ground for testing and development. just let everyone know to we can all be looking at the test link for suggestions

I do support this plan to be carried out and I will try my best to contribute in some way I can if we all are really seirous about getting this off the ground

Thanks. I am open to ideas. Anything that makes sense can be implemented as it is all about data manipulation and as a programmer there is basically no limit to what one can achieve based on what people want.

The link may be taken as a framework for the project and anything can be built upon it. Remember, this is a 12hrs work more or less.