The Experiment

After ten months without any new content you are probably wondering if my hiatus was some sort of poorly written epilogue to this short-lived but well-recieved blog. Not so.

Ok, maybe a little bit.

I can certainly confess that I have thought about shutting down this site on more than one occasion. The sheer task of performing upgrades on my content management system seemed more of a chore than the fun learning experience it used to be. Also, the writing is a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. But all that is a matter of dedication and a strong work ethic. The real problem I have been struggling with is my vision for this site; it is cloudy at best, and anyone who has ever tried to design and maintain a blog or personal site will tell you that a clear vision will trump enthusiasm every time. Every. Time.

If I had to choose one reason for starting this blog, I would say it was frustration with Uganda's mainstream press. For whatever reason they seem content to lumber along with poorly designed websites. The Monitor in particular is, well just look at it. The navigation is silly (What exactly does "Insights" mean?), editorial staff seems to be allergic to hyperlinks, the advertising strategy was probably taken from a military manual on carpet bombing and the color scheme lacks subtlety. Why should I believe that this newspaper has any credibility, particularly when its web staff thinks nothing of placing a lingere ad with a white model next to its logo. C'mon people. Think about your audience! This from a site that delivers important news on a daily basis is just maddening.

The usual defense against shoddy web design is time and money. I did not want to disregard these very real challenges, but I felt that something decent could be achieved without investing tons of money. So i got to work, and after a number of months of work, I had a decent front page to demonstrate my point. Good design is possible on a budget, and Uganda's mainstream press really should be doing a better job of organizing and presenting their content to their readers. Yes, it took me over 100 hours, but I was mostly working alone and learning CSS and some PHP from scratch (you would be surprised what they don't teach you in History class at university.) An enterprise in Uganda would probably be better off hiring a dedicated team or working with a consultancy like Node Six. Regardless of how it is done, Ugandans should have a decent online newspaper. Citizen Uganda was created to show that it could be done.

But then I got carried away. Suddenly, a simple clean design was not enough. I had to have content for my "readers". And pictures. And writers to write the content. And photographers to take the photos. And advertising to fund it all. And critical acclaim to keep me motivated. And...the list kept growing and growing and the experiment along with it. I tried to keep up, writing the content and getting a friend to contribute some tech related pieces. But it was no use. The clear vision I had when I started the site became murky with each new addition to the list of features and goals. Nothing was simple anymore. Soon the monster controlled Dr. Frankenstein. I burnt out and gave in to my little hater.

And that is when I realized what happened and where I went wrong. In the course of conducting my experiment, I got wrapped up in the idea of running an online newspaper, and began to actually build one. And it might have worked out too, except I also began to think like a regular mass-market newspaper. Those papers try to be everything to everyone. A hundred different ads for a hundred different people and content to keep them all coming back. It is all based on the idea that Uganda's web users are such a small number that you have to give them everything just to keep them interested and have any hope of winning the market. That approach may work for a newsroom with hundreds of reporters, but a small site should focus on a segment of the market and forget about the rest. Anything more than that is simply not practical.

I might still get the chance to launch that online news site (look out Independent), but that will not be happening anytime soon, nor will it happen here when it does. For now that dream is on the shelf, but Citizen Uganda is back on the desk, dusted and ready for a second look.

The experiment worked, but now I need to refine the results. Over the next few months I am going to be taking a scalpel to this site, examining what I enjoyed and what I did not enjoy. I will distill the vision, and when I am ready, I will reintroduce the new Citizen Uganda to the world as something simpler, more effective and hopefully still relevant.