The development of a blogging community usually has a couple of stages. In the first stage, bloggers discover the power of the medium, particularly its ability to help them distribute their ideas. The second stage is when the community begins to attach the same importance to presentation as it does to expression.
Uganda's blogosphere is still in the first stage. The same Blogger and Wordpress templates litter the nexus, undermining the distinctiveness of each blog. This is not surprising really because most bloggers care more about what they say than how their site looks. And those who do care, often do not know how to do anything about it, which is why some web developers are able to make a living by designing templates and selling them to bloggers.
With the next stage, we should hope to see the emergence of new designs that add that extra bit of flavour to the experience of being on a blog. It probably won't happen everywhere, but a sign that it is happening somewhere will be nice.
Comments
Nodesix helping the cause
Benge and the folks at Nodesix are working to help people get out of the box.
Re: Templates
I agree with you there. The problem is (well, if you can call it that) if you are keen on getting your own template, chances are you'd have to do your own hosting. The benefits; New look and you probably get to have a more sensible domain name, the demerits; the hosting fees and such... and there's also the issue that few do in fact know how to go about hosting these things. Then again, Nod 6 is offering cheap hosting, let's see where that goes.
Templates
In the past few months, I've really realised just how many Ugandan bloggers are out there. It's like waking up one day and you wonder if you've been in hibernation too long. And some of them have very decent looking templates. Some might look similar, but somehow they stand out, mostly due to the author preferences, and content.
Blog themes tend to be very web 2.0-esque, simple clean outlines, high legibility, and almost minimalistic straight forward content/entry flow. All in all, they are a lot simpler than some of the sites we design (static or dynamic)
I've themed a couple of wordpress templates, and too many joomla templates to count. I highly doubt a wordpress / blogger template is going to be more stress than a full blown joomla portal template. The biggest issue would be the blogger's preference.
I'd also want to disagree with ivan a little. You do not have to get your own hosting to install your own wordpress template. Last time I checked all you need is ftp access, some php knowledge and you can install your own thing, either done by yourself or custom made by someone else. I don't have an account at blogger or wordpress, so I can't really tell if they give you php support. Someone can clarify on this.
Finally, a decent hosting firm should be able to handle blog hosting. All you need is a database, it's access details and php support. Any hosting firm worth it's salt should be able to handle this.
Cheers...
PS, I don't really want to call our hosting "cheap". I prefer "affordable". Semantics and all that, but seriously, there's nothing cheap about our hosting.
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