The Standard Media Group’s Website Review

Tuesday, 30 March 2010 14:39

Written by theNairobian

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Our first article on Internet is a review of the website of one of the biggest and most dominant media houses in Kenya; The Standard Group. It won’t be that of thenairobian.com as we would obviously be too biased and if we were honest, we won’t want to tell you all the good things about us, as we may end up crashing our servers – or something. But for all the undeclared flaws of the thenairobian.com (which we deny and deny) it could have been worse.

I mean it could be the Standard Group’s website: standardmedia.co.ke. For a media house as big as the Standard Group, their choice of an online presence is to say the least, disappointing. And their handling of their online strategy? I think I that line of ‘it could be a case study on a web master/ business school and it wont be for the rights reasons’ would suffice here.

It all started with the group opting for the domain name eastandard.net which was well and good but in doing that they neglected and or failed to secure the country code top level for standard, standard.co.ke. Now there is a group of thought that believe that the .co.ke is a useless top level ( I don’t)but that would be irrelevant in this particular case as somewhere in between the eastandard.net adventures and present standardmedia.co.ke, the standard.co.ke domain name was registered by somebody else, who now has what seems to be a social network of sorts on it.

It seems that the Standard Group figured that the .co.ke top level was the way to go, like nation.co.ke before them and especially for a Kenyan company, and so they ended up with the rather long standardmedia.co.ke. One thing you get to learn real quick on the internet is that the shorter the domain name the better for the users. Whereas typing a name as long as standardmedia is an unnecessary labor onto itself, a further problem arising is that the possibility of a domain name being mistyped or misspelled is directly proportional to the number of characters that make it up. Go figure.

Then to compound on it all, we ended up with a new website whose design look like it involved just setting up the nearest joomla template and be done with it.

And then the advert issue could not let the website just be after all of the above problems. The website is so clattered with adverts that it seems to have more than the maximum of three adverts per page of adsense adverts that google mandates. Maybe there is an exception that. An exception that we are however yet to figure out.

And a good measure of any website on the internet is how google sees it. I thus rounded off my rather brief look at the website with inquiring on the page rank for its domain and did not bat an eye lid (have those, you know) when the result declared that standardmedia.co.ke has a google page rank of 2. For comparative purposes, nation.co.ke has a google page rank of 7. The ‘best designed and managed  website in Kenya’ ™ , thenairobian.com of course has one of 0.

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