Interesting Kenyan Sites #8

This week has more flops than any other! 😛

Sheng.co.ke – I love the look and feel of this site. It feels…authentic, somehow. I love the fact that the language on the site is sheng! Good job here, kudos to the people behind that site. (Though they should fix some of the broken links).

Flops O.o
Sikika – I have wanted to write about this big huge flop for a long, long time. Sikika is supposed to be the wordpress.com of Kenya; a place where all Kenyans can get blogs on a more local domain, you know? Instead of using Blogger.com or WordPress.com, we’d all use Sikika.com!! But the execution, by KDN no less, has been extremely poor at best. Sikika.com runs on the freely available and world-class WordPress Software (which has thousands of extremely qualified experts who know it inside out) yes KDN was unable to make it work. Just look at the site now, pathetic – full of spam. Does anyone even bother to look after it? The odd thing is that for people who know their stuff, it is extremely easy (and cheap!) to manage this site and make Kenyan bloggers proud. Give the site to WordPress experts (like us) and the sky is not even a limit for this site. KDN, this is a huge fail for you. I hope you know that. Fix it!

Classic 105 Blog – why would such a large and successful organisation have their blog still hosted at Blogger.com? Integrating this on their main website is easy as abc and would actually improve the SEO (and other) value of their main website… Oddly enough, I cannot find their “main” site as Classic 105. So perhaps they do not have a site at all?? Why, oh why? Update: classic105.blogspot.com doesn’t look to be owned by Classis 105 FM, which doesn’t seem to have its own website.

COTU – for such a large organisation and one that is always on the news, you’d think they would have a really nice attractive site, eh? Not so, sadly. I would say that the design of the site overall is not bad. I categorise this as a failure for two reasons:

  1. Their blog (the one they link to officially) is not hosted on their site but on Blogger.com. I do not understand why. Not to mention the blog has never, ever, been used.
  2. If you look closely, most – if not all – of the links on the site seem to be leading to http://gempack.net/. This means that www.cotu-kenya.org is actually redirecting to www.gempack.net. This is VERY bad for SEO for COTU’s main site. I do not understand why they did this. Probably another case of a bad web developer, or web host in this case


What do you think of today’s batch of sites, and flops?

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Comments

  1. justsaying says:

    the classic105.blogspot.com doesn’t seem to be owned by the station. it’s appears independent if you go through it

  2. Sheng.co.ke looks great except for two things:
    1. It takes quite long to load (i’m using 512 upload/download internet connection, and i’m just wondering how long it would take in say, 128k).
    2. if the designer happens to read this, then they should consider using CSS instead of images where there are menu items to be listed.

    Apart from that “me na think hiyo site ita fika far waki adress hizi stori”. wazi joh!

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