The Zambian Development Team

The Zambian goes Web 2.0

2008-05-09T20:46:00Z

A couple of months late, but the core software powering The Zambian has just been updated. In celebration of the new update, we've also applied a Zambian background photograph courtesy of Mike. The new core software has a lot of social elements that we hope to build on and even improves old features such as the forum, blogs and picture gallery. We're still working on bringing back the old Zambia Sossa Chat room and hope to have a nice surprise there shortly.

Contribute and Grow

2008-02-28T19:38:00Z

In early 2000 I posted a request for help from Zambian authors and journalists. We were trying to boost the presence of Zambian content on the Internet and knew that we had to partner with our peers in order to achieve this goal. Below is the request that was sent out to various authors and journalists:

Why you should help ...

Zambia is a rich and diverse country. Yet, half the world do not know about our undiscovered country. For those that know about Zambia, the country is constantly seen as a third world, AIDS stricken, underdeveloped nation waiting to be the next nation surviving only on IMF and World Bank help. Independence gave us freedom and pride to refer to ourselves as Zambians. So, no matter where we are or who we attempt to become, there's always something in us that is truly Zambian. This privilege is also an opportunity to change the world view of Zambia. Being Zambian allows you to impact the future of Zambia so that our freedom and pride continue to live on.

How can you help ...

We need your help in building the best African website. We need your help in spreading the word of our motherland. Your talents can be used to impact Zambia. Everyday we receive hundreds of requests for more information about Zambia. There's a thirst for knowledge about Zambia. For example, people want to know about Cherise and her Big Brother experience, James Chamanyazi and his latest album. Each request is an opportunity to reach new clients or to build new relationships. People are constantly looking for Zambian perspectives to various issues. Can you write an article? a poem? a story? a review of a music album or television show? Every single item that you can share about Zambia will definitely be sought after by someone across the globe.

What do you gain ...

As a person willing to contribute toward promoting Zambia, we want to ensure that your hard work is constantly recognized. Your contribution automatically entitles you to become part of The Zambian Development Team. Membership to the group gives you exclusive access to various events and galas organized for promoting Zambia. Furthermore, the articles are published at the Voice of Zambia page and the published material is available for syndication with various international news and journalism organizations.

Next Steps ...

If you have an article, picture or idea that you would like to contribute, simply use the Contact Us page or Send Your File directly to us. We hope to hear from you soon and eagerly look forward to your contribution toward the growth and prosperity of Zambia.

Since 2000, the presence of Zambian content on the Internet has grown. A simple search will reveal dozens of websites dedicated to serving a Zambian audience. However, we still believe in the vision that we set out to achieve in 2000. More Zambian content. More Zambian authors. So, even though there are more websites serving up Zambian content we think there's a lot more that can be done. It's a simple desire but one that we support through every facet of the site.

We Love ASP

2007-09-04T18:14:00Z

When The Zambian first launched in 2000 it consisted of dozens and dozens of static HTML files. This was the easiest way to get content out. Give a contributor a copy of FrontPage or Dreamweaver and they could create all the content they wanted. The only problem with this approach was everything about it. From the size of the page, to the layout to the very core fundamentals of good design, everything was wrong. For example, the home page of the site came in at around 80KB which on a 28.8 Kbps modem would take forever to download. Why on earth would you use a 28.8 Kbps connection? Well in the year 2000, most of our statistics indicated that our target audience would be using Windows computers running Internet Explorer with screen resolutions of 800 * 600 pixels and connecting to the Internet over dial-up connections. At the same time, our general Search Engine Optimization (SEO) understanding at that time was that the meta tags were the key to getting placed higher on search results. So a page on our site included typical page content and also the following header:

It soon reached a point where editing the content on the page was becoming exceedingly tedious. This became even more apparent when someone pointed out that the spelling of a word on our site was wrong and this word happened to be repeated in the header of every single page. We were soon spending more time keeping track of changes than actually publishing relevant content on Zambia.

In 2001, after spending some time experimenting with SQL 2000 and ASP, it was decided that the next version of the site would have to incorporate some form of a database backend to bring some order to our world of publishing, editing and reviewing content.

Memeza

2007-09-04T14:53:00Z

The new site is finally live. Well at least it's in the process of going live. What you see now is a site being built from the ground up with a core focus on community. All the old content will slowly be migrated over and features such as the chat room will be revamped and re-launched. We hope that you'll continue to visit as we continue to make steady incremental improvements to The Zambian.

To be totally honest, this new site upgrade is one that should have happened over 4 years ago. Whilst most visitors may see this as an evolutionary upgrade, to all of us here, this is a revolutionary upgrade. Aside from the new community features such as a forum or picture gallery, so much has been added to empower authors and writers to share their work with the rest of the world. We hope The Zambian is the place where new stories are written and old stories shared. In fact, we can't ask for others stories without sharing our own, and so dear friends here is our story.

Most of you may not know that The Zambian first started in 1999 in a small dorm room as a small incubator project. The project was a result of a home work assignment requiring the creation of an HTML form. To try and earn some extra points for the assignment I decided to launch a small fictitious company based on an incubator project called Memeza - a name selected based on the title of an album playing on the radio. A name that was popularied by the South African singer, Brenda Fassie, from a Xhosa word that means scream. I wanted the .com dream and so to transform from a fictitious company to one with employees, I sent an e-mail to former friends from high school asking if they wanted to be part of this grand idea. So in 1999 Memeza was born as a web design firm with the goal of designing the biggest and greatest websites for firms for free. My friends were located in three different continents and thus I felt we were uniquely positioned to leverage the affordable labor of Asian economies but target clientelle in high paying North America and build a reputation for free services in Africa. Perhaps we were a bit ahead of the curve, because try as we may, all the projects we received were small requests for developing Intranet sites. We didn't have a clear business plan, yet still I felt that if I did approach venture capitalists they would definitely want to invest in a web design firm with such a global presence. How naive. No one wanted to invest in our company. Furthermore, none of our clients wanted to register a domain name on their own or try and have someone create a website presence for them on the Internet. Everyone wanted a computer company to fix problems related to Y2K. So here we were, with the best skill sets available, the finest tools in the industry with no websites to design. The lack of clients put us in a situation where promoting the services of Memeza quickly became a secondary priority and class room assignments took on a new meaning since staying in school actually meant we were fed and had a bed to sleep on. Looking back, I remember desperately trying to attract new clients by posting messages on old high school message boards asking if anyone wanted a free site in exchange for client referrals. Alas, all efforts failed to materialize. From free design services, to free hosting services we tried every play in the book only to lose every single round of play. Memeza slowly started withering away and the dreams of riches and glory were beginning to fade.

Around the same time, I had decided to start cataloging a list of resources on Zambia as a subdirectory on Memeza. The site was simply referred to as Zambia Today and contained link after link of resources all nicely catalogued in various folders. To market the site for cheap, I learnt every trick in the book for optimizing a site for the top 3 search engines i.e. Yahoo, Altavista and Excite. These efforts slowly paid of because in late 2000, imagine my glee when Zambia Today was selected as a link to appear on Yahoo! In 2000, Yahoo was famous for being a human reviewed search engine. So a listing on Yahoo implied credibility. Within a few weeks, this link had spread and hundreds of Zambians living outside of Zambia were suddenly e-mailing praise for the central repository of links. It quickly became apparent that Zambians outside the country wanted a place they could call home on the Internet. With these messages and the steady growth of incoming traffic I decided to start developing a full fledged Zambian portal called The Zambian. Due to Network Solutions' monopoly as a domain name registrar, in 2000, the cost of a domain name was almost $30.00 and a year of hosting was over $200.00 However, thanks to a university job I had enough money to pay for a new domain name and a year of hosting services. This price point actually proved to be a blessing in disguise as not many competitors were willing to spend that amount to enter an African market. This also meant that it was time to redefine Memeza's offerings and services. As a web design firm Memeza was now officially dead. The site lay dormant until early 2007 when it was re-launched as a citizen powered news site on Zambia. The old remnants of a web design firm hidden behind the archives of the Internet.

Zambian Dictionary

2007-09-01T19:05:00Z

For the longest time, we've focussed on using .NET technologies and have been proud to be the first .NET website in Zambia and one of the first in Africa. Unfortunately we don't have any sources to validate this claim aside from the fact that we were first in line when .NET was released in January of 2002 and had a site up and running in Februrary of 2002.

However, when we first launched the online Zambian dictionary we experimented with PHP and an open source project called Glossword. Sadly this experience did not go well as we had a lot of trouble getting updates from the primary developer of Glossword. This led to an initiative to create a community driven open-source project by asking Zambian developers from around the world to help build an online dictionary for Zambian languages. This failed as well primarily because we failed to communicate our vision for this project.

So, earlier this year we decided to start from a scratch and resorted to creating our own PHP based dictionary - The site has now been launched as a separate domain accessible at Zanglish. Obviously there are more updates on the Zanglish site - but not many people know that the roots of Zanglish are from The Zambian and a new focussed vision that we'll do everything to put Zambia on the global map and stop at nothing to make sure that Zambia is highly regarded when it comes to availability of online resources.

Getting listed on Zambian websites

2004-01-22T18:20:00Z

Can someone help us get listed on other websites on Zambia?

Future of Zambia Blog

2004-01-07T18:51:00Z

As one reader notes on The Zambian Message Board, “perhaps multiple bloggers are needed to get the ball rolling as one blog leads to another“

Ideally I would like to find an expert(s) for the following categories:

History
Music
News
Politics
Sports
Technology
Tourism

Then open up the blog initially to the experts as a way of streamlining the content. Obviously the control requirement must be removed at some point if this is to be a true community driven blog. Refinements expected.