Day after day, the world has become smaller, faster and more connected, thanks to this famous network called Internet. Every single person on the planet can access information wherever and whenever he wants. This network is becoming bigger and richer thanks to the contributions of many people from all over the world who believe that knowledge has no meaning if it's not shared.
In this article – which is my small contribution to Dzblogday initiative- I will resume the current situation of the Algerian web in Ten (10) questions, which I will try to explain and answer according to my modest experience.
1. Do we create content?
Certainly, there is no place for doubt that user interface is so important to attract visitors to your website, but the content is more important and it is not just attract them but make them also faithful. People always look for original content.
Most of Algerian web content is not original; it is either inspired from other websites or simply translated from other languages with slight modifications in the aim of adapting it to the Algerian context.
But if we translate or just adapt content from others, where would be our own contribution to enrich these shared resources (internet) . So, the first step to improve algerian websites is to create its content by ourselves. That's true, it's not as easy as it appears, but with small efforts we can create our own original content, as Algerians!
What I mean here by sustainable content, is every content, which can be consulted today, tomorrow and even after years. News and fresh information are attractive, but those articles are just consulted by visitors once they're published and never consulted again. But a sustainable content will be consulted many times, and people always refer to it when they need. Articles that talk about culture, education or even technical subjects are sustainable.
3. Do we create varied content?
A Rich content is a content that talks about various fields such as education, health, environment technical article etc..., People have different cultures and different interests, so they don’t look for the same information . That's why variety in web content is so important to cover the interests of all networkers. I don’t mean here we've to put a various content in one single web site, but create several web sources specialized each one in a specific field. I believe that websites with a specific and limited audience are more benefic than others.
Content is not just text and words ; videos, pictures, audios etc.. are forms of content, which is – in my point of view – more meaningful and more attractive. So I strongly encourage not to ignore them if we want to enrich our websites.
4. Our content, is it visible?
Visibility of a website is the half of its success! What is the importance of creating an article or a video if it’s not consulted. Big companies give great importance to this point and invest hundreds, or even, thousands of dollars to appear in the first page of search engines such as Google or Bing.
Visibility is also using a language, that is understood by the most of your audience, and here I mean Arabic. Most of Algerian websites use French and even English as main language and ignore Arabic. There are foreign people who can create a rich content in French or English, but it's our responsibility to improve the quality of Arabic content, and making it rich.
5. Do we respect web standards?
At this point, I will focus on a very important technical side. The web has its own standards that have to be respected. Ensuring that your website can be handled in all web browsers is so important. Also we have to make sure that you're using a valid CSS file (you can use CSS Validator to check this).
You may also think of people who use smartphones and tablets, and make your website correctly displayed on these devices.
6. Do we follow the technology trend?
Here again I will talk about a technical side. Most of Algerian websites use a CMS “Content management system”. For example media websites prefer using the "vivvo" CMS which is dedicated to this type of websites.
Universities prefer to use "Joomla" which is a very famous CMS used by plenty of Algerian websites. "Drupal" and "Wordpress" have also a great part of use.
I am not against using Content Management Systems, but most of them are not secure enough. A Web developer who uses them must do additional efforts in security, and especially not use components or extensions, which are not safe. Plenty of websites have been hacked for this simple reason.
I prefer using Frameworks, which are not as easy as Content Management Systems, but they are more powerful and more secure. Here I can mention "Zend", "Symfony" and "Django" which is a powerful framework based on Python.
7. Who to host our websites?
Companies based in France, USA, host most of The Algerian websites, which make us depend on them. we haven’t so many data centers in Algeria which can host websites and offer a good service, also it’s so complicated to have a domain name with the local extension (.dz) this why most of website use (.com) or (.net) as domain name for their websites.
8. Can we call our websites secure?
This is the most important chapter in creating a website story, hackers always look for vulnerability faults to steal information from our websites, this is due to the bad use of CMS or because server which host those websites are not secure enough.
Web developers and webmasters must give more importance to security when creating their websites, especially if it is a website which host sensitive information.
9. Do we have a good access to internet?
Statistics has shown that Algeria has very poor access to the Internet. In addition, there are no 3G, which not allow to Algerian to use Smartphones to access to the net.
The launch of the 3G in the upcoming months will increase the number of Algerian people who use internet especially from smartphones, which means we have to ensure since now that our websites are correctly displayed in smartphones and tablets.
10. Do we think about future?
3G, e-payment, e-commerce will come to our country eventually, this is why we have to be prepared since now, also web developers have to focus on the next generations of web developments tools, such as HTML5/ CSS3, which is the future of websites.
As conclusion, we have to double our efforts to increase the content of the Algerian web in the internet, together we can do better, so let’s go.
2 Comments:
First congrats for your interesting article Halim, I’ve really enjoyed reading it :)
Well, I might have some different point of view than yours but I think as a start the Algerian web must ignore all “how is it made facts” (including is it CMS based or not? Are this CMS secure enough? ….) and focus more on content itself by creating meaningful well targeted sustainable content and making this content more visible using tools as social networks.
Content Management Systems have already proven their ability to deliver user content in a clear beautiful way even if there are some security issues, although one must not pass over the benefits using a CMS from the ease of use (mostly no programming skills are needed), respecting web standards and delivering content to different platforms including mobile and more.
It’s true, Algeria’s internet connection and the lake of mobile connectivity make the task harder but I guess nowadays most of Algerians have access to the internet, so internet isn’t the real problem. As an example, I do have internet access all the time but since I don’t know much Algerians websites apart the one making the buzz, I’ll find myself saying that Algeria has no presence on the web, when, for sure, there are hundreds websites out there!
I don’t know if you see my point, but in brief, Algerian websites have a lot to do on “being known” more than “how is it made”, still, it’s only a point of view.
Regards
Well you said " it’s so complicated to have a domain name with the local extension (.dz) this why most of website use (.com) or (.net) as domain name for their websites." . it's not so complicated as you mention up, I've already one. I bought it from DZROOT HOST , "www.ck-construction.dz"
Post a Comment