The Web

There is a story that Zambians like to tell.

There are three main roles that facilitate the delivery of a website: the designer, the content provider and the developer. The three roles are tightly interwoven in to the website production process and it is often the case that each is performed by a single individual. As such there is confusion about what each role encompasses. The tasks in each, however, are quite distinct.

I am a big fan of great design, and I wanted to do something to promote the efforts some Ugandans are making to bring great looking sites to the web. So every month, if I see something great, I will applaud it here. And if I see something horrible, I will call that out too. I wont see everything though, so you are welcome to recommend a site you know and love, or hate.

Best Site: Node Six

The Web Standards debate is a heated one. There are experts around the world who advocate global standards adoption, but for Africa it is not that simple. The "standards" being evangelised are not supported by all browsers. Should we all throw Internet Explorer out and move unanimously to Opera? Can't we all just get along?

Web Standards are a good thing and Africa needs them. If the world were a classroom and the continents its students, Africa would be lucky to get a passing grade on a Web Standards test.

The web is full of great little apps that demonstrate innovative information architectures and designs. I was having a conversation with Silumesii from Pencilcase Studios about web designs and he showed me this neat little web app by the folks at marumushi.com in Tokyo. They developed a flash newsmap that presents the changing contents of the Google News news aggregator in something that looks like a tag cloud.