the AfricAlive Website
For promotional purposes we needed to give our idea a face to the outside world. So far the whole expedition was only a plan in our heads and this would be the first “tangible” product we would deliver. Especially the companies we would approach in our acquisition process would use the website for information purposes and hereby the website would give us some credit.
Within our extensive network of students from Delft, there were several people who could help us with building a website. None of us was very well known with HTML, and because we had only four months to put the whole expedition together, we neither had the knowledge nor time to build it ourselves. For that reason Erik Boeschoten from Joeri Multimedia has build the first version of our website.
Although we were very happy with the looks of our website, from a practical point of view the website was not satisfactory. The window in which it appeared was too small and of this window half of the space was occupied by a picture. Especially the “nieuws” page, where we would put our findings, did not offer enough space. Roughly two months before our departure, we adjusted the website, creating more space for text and pictures. Besides this we created a blog on the news page, using Wordpress, on which we could report our progress, especially the acquisition progress.
Because we didn’t leave for Africa yet, we didn’t have any pictures of our team in Africa. So after a month of the start of the expedition we updated the pictures used on the website with our own. The content on the blog was steadily growing and while the posts were at first only about the journey, after three weeks we visited our first project, and the posts on the blog got a more serious tone.
While I am writing this, four months have passed, is it October the 7th and a new version of our website is ready to be put online. This version has grown taller again, resulting in a somewhat larger window, updated pictures, and offering a lot more content, especially the whole “Preparations”, “Video” and “Gallery” section. Besides that we translated almost the entire website into English, because most people we encounter along our trip complain that they didn’t understand our website.
The character of the website is also transforming slowly from mostly a news page to a informative website. In a month time our expedition will be finished and there won’t be much news to report. That’s why our website will function more and more like a informative website, in which we present the lessons we have learned in Africa.
