Geeks rock
on It began in Africa (Kenya), 17/Jul/2011 09:39, 34 days ago
One key element of my work for KAIH is improving their website. Now, like most PR people I enjoy using terms like "web 2.0" and "crowd sourcing" and "targeted campaign to access opinion formers in the blogosphere" and (on a less tongue in cheek note) I believe I "get" the open principles of internet communication and understand its value.But ultimately I'm no web designer, and html-coding is not really in my skills set. In my old company, a big international communications consultancy, I was used to being able to ask someone else on the team for help and working with lots of different people with different skills. One of the biggest things I've had to get used to here is not having a large and well-resourced team at my disposal.I'm lucky, then, that KAIH had a website structure in place and my job is more about enhancing the content rather than looking at a complete re-design: more pictures, less text, people-centred stories and case studies and a news page are my main objectives.Even with this rather limited brief I have still run up against the limits of my technical know-how annoyingly quickly. And the company we have been using for hosting the website and providing technical support have turned out to be universally rubbish; in fact the first time the guy came into our office ostensibly to teach me how to use the content management system, he accidentally deleted all the pages and it took him almost two weeks to restore everything.So thank the lord I know a lot of geeks, and that the magical internet means I can access so many brilliant brains around the world. In particular, regular reader Ben Jeffrey has been a mega-league superstar in fixing our website in a matter of minutes, when the company we pay to do this work had ignored my calls and emails for the best part of a month. Thanks to his support I can share a few links with you to demonstrate some of the changes I've made...I have added amap to our 'branches' landing pageto show the location of our officesI have drafted several case studies and created anew, picture-centric, landing pagefor this sectionChickens laying success at GathangaSupport groups changing livesJacinta teaching the teachersNdumberi's pig-rearing projectI have set up a new page fornews storiesSo in the spirit of web 2.0 I would like to instigate a little crowd sourcing - what else should be changed? What are we missing and what could be improved? Given our limited resources (and my limited skills) what more can I do? Suggestions please!