We sat down and asked ourselves the very question that defines the existence of the TechPost — “how can we cover the emerging digital African revolution ever better than we are already doing?”.
The answer to that simple question has not been that simple as you might think.
It has led to countless hacking hours, arguments on the latest web design trends, hundreds of hours crunching our back-end web analytics all geared towards how to better our reporting on African innovations and technological trends. We’ve also had to encounter the 6 headed monster that continues to haunt web businesses — how to make the money in order to be more sustainable.
We don’t claim to have all the answers to these questions, but we’re learning from you, from other industry players and trends and from our partners or brands some of whom have worked with us and others promised to do so.
Now lets give you a sneak peek into some of the things cooking;
Re-branding from TechPost to Dignited
This particular one hasn’t been very easy. TechPost will no longer be called TechPost with the domain www.techpost.ug but Dignited with the domain www.dignited.com. As you can notice the “.com” domain name in new name, to have a cross-Continental and global appeal, we’ve decided to acquire an international top level domain. It also helps our content to be more searchable or visible outside of Uganda than it is right now from a technical point of view.
We hope you like the name.
Redesigning to TechPost 3.0 or Dignited 1.0
So far we’ve had two major redesigns, and with every iteration, we build, measure and learn following the lean-startup model. We think a website is like a living organism — it has to change, adopt and adapt, evolve to users’ needs and changing web trends.
Hence we’ve incorporated the following aspects in the new design;
Designed with mobile in Mind: Back in the day, you only designed a website for desktop display! These days, if you don’t start with mobile, you’re doing it wrong. As such, we’re taking a mobile-first design approach. Even though the the current TechPost looks and feels gorgeous on mobile, we think we can do better.
Speed: Your time is valuable, and we’d rather you spend it reading, not waiting for page elements to load. We are not happy with out current load speeds which is why we’re making the new design load 2-3 times faster.
Better sharing: Social media completely changed web publishing (and even killed some of it). We’ve discovered that few people visit the leading page (www.dignited.com)! Instead they visit the TechPost from their social media channels and blog feeds. Hence to increase the visibility of our awesome content, we’re taking our sharing buttons very seriously.
Built for the Community
While we’ve a devoted community of readers, we still think there’s not enough interaction and engagement among community members. We understand that today’s content consumer is completely different from that of the past decades. Today’s content consumers don’t just want to consume whatever publishing houses throw at them, but they want to react to the story, contribute their thoughts on a story, development or an insight.
We’ve been giving you the opportunity to participate in the comments and silently in the guest posts through our contact us page, but we think that’s just not good enough. We’re rolling out a feature called “ignite us” which enables community members across the continent we like to call “ignitors” to contribute, tip us, write their thoughts on insights and trends or report on what’s happening around the continent on all things technology.
Connected to innovation hotpots
There’s a growing wave of digital innovation sweeping across the African continent and this is predominantly fueled by Innovation hubs or hacker spaces. These spaces are providing affordable working space for Tech entrepreneurs and networking joint between investors and developers.
We’re rolling out a feature we like to call “Ignitions” that is not just a static database of all innovation hubs across Africa, but a dynamic source of information on what’s happening in these hubs. We’ll be working closely with hubs to be better our reporting on Tech events, Startups and their products among other things.
There’s a lot more I’ve intentionally left out that we shall let you know when the new design is out. For now though to join a community of beta testers (those who will test-drive the new design before and after it’s out), please add your name and email address here.
We’re rolling out in just 3 weeks!
Updated: If you’ve been looking for some feature or content we don’t have, let us know in the comments. Your feedback is extremely valuable.
Image: blog.designsquish.com
Well I am anxiously waiting for this great change, about the “Connected to innovation hotpots”, that is extremely brilliant and if possible I suggest you also put in consideration building a database for all the tech companies in Africa or even in the whole world if that scope is also within your set goals as it will help in venture capitalists to easily access information about tech startups and decide whether to work with them or otherwise.
With that said am just waiting for the great changes that have been well elaborated in this article
Hey Julius, thanks for your response. Building a comprehensive database of Tech companies across Africa was the initial idea. As you can tell it’s a daunting task which is why we want to roll it out in phases by first working closely with those that are close or have the ground knowledge of these budding companies — innovation hubs.
As we collaborate together with the hubs and other stakeholders, and as demand for this kind of information grows, we shall then organically built this database more easily, quickly and efficiently.
Great strategy (Y) Good luck on executing it
great stuff… cant wait
Have the great move you people have moved into.