Initially I was quiet excited to hear the launch of new English daily in Nepal called “Republica”. It is a new publication that was separated from the Mighty Kantipur Publication. The name Republica itself seems to be quiet trendy and being a web designer myself I thought they might just come up with a trendy website that will change the whole online media of Nepal.
I also heard from some insider source that Republica was going to focus heavily on online media but unfortunately my hopes were shattered seeing their website quality. Just see the screenshot of Myrepublica.com on its launch day .
First thing I would like to ask the folks at Republica. Who made this website? If it’s someone in-house then you better fire him because he or she doesn’t even know rats about the modern web design trends. Secondly, if it was outsourced then you better tell the name of that company cause this kind of web design is pathetic by any standard,
What’s really wrong? Everything is wrong.
Technical Part
Just go to W3C Markup Validator and check the website. There are freaking 258 Errors, 68 warning(s) alone for homepage. Some of the biggest errors are:
Validator was unable to determine Parse Method which means the Validator could not find in which language really the site was made. Is it HTML, XHTML or XML? It gave up searching it.
No DOCTYPE found!
Character encoding mismatch!
OK these are some technical terms that a professional web designer will easily understand but I don’t think the guy who made this website have any idea about them.
Now come to the General Opinion about the site’s look and displays:
Who really made the graphics for the site? The whole blueish color of the sites is just too lame for any viewer. It reminds me of some shanty websites made in era of Geocities.com. The logo is cool but everything apart that just is too lame for me.
Sidebars are misplaced and there are a lot of white spaces between the title and the content. In the inner body part I guess the designer forgot to add margins around the image. Content and image are so attached to each other which make me feel that the site was made in too hurry.
The top slideshow of featured stories is probably copied from some free JavaScript code site and pasted as is without any change. It does not look part of the site from anywhere.
The search box on top right hand side of homepage too seems out of place.
I can go on and on detailing everything that is wrong in this site but lets stop with this much. I hope the administration of Dhumbarahi Media Pvt Ltd and editor – in – chief reads my review of Myrepublica.com and takes some action.
Only thing that is good about the websites is that they actually made it in first place. Secondly, there is a line on top of the page which says “BETA VERSION” (This website is still being fine-tuned)”. I hope they change the site’s layout before taking it out of BETA VERSION.
Lastly, I was also wondered seeing the site that why wasn’t it made on Wordpress. There are lots of people in Republica who are pioneer bloggers of country and in my opinion they must have knowledge of what Wordpress can do. Below I have added some links of free Magazine style Wordpress theme which are free to use and can be used to make a much more good looking news site on Wordpress than the site’s condition is now.
http://www.visual-blast.com/wordpress/10-free-magazine-style-wordpress-themes-to-choose-from/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/02/09/83-beautiful-wordpress-themes-you-probably-havent-seen/
If you really want to see what a good news site might look like then see following sites:
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.sfgate.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
I know these are US based sites and companies in Nepal cannot hire US based web design firm to make sites for them, but FYI there are tons of high quality web designers in Nepal who are actually making these kinds of sites and they would be more than happy to make a website for Myrepublica.com too that will stand out in comparison to these above listed US based sites
I didn’t see dainikee.com as I was sure it too is going to be a clone of Myrepublica.com
God Bless Myrepublica.com
P.S. I am not affiliated to Kantipur Publication or any other Media House of Nepal. I am a web designer from Nepal and I feel shame of the quality of designs that are made in my country.