Top 7 Nepali websites out of standards
Tuesday, October 14, 2008I have nothing against the websites listed below but just want to remind about the situation of web design and web development of the Nepali sites that have most traffic from Nepal. Recently I've visiting Alexa.com for many things, due to curiosity I looked into top 100 sites in Nepal (added recently). I was not surprised to see Nepalnews.com at no. 11 in Nepal equating to the no. 1 among Nepali sites. It is no.1 Nepali site in where as the no. 1 in Nepal is Yahoo which is no.1 in the world itself. Similarly it goes for the other sites listed below.
The websites include News sites, entertainment sites, NTC's site may be due to the not working new web-sms and Worldlink's site. The websites in order as per Alexa's Rankings in Nepal:
- Nepalnews.com
- Cybersansar.com
- Ntc.net.np
- Explorehimalaya.com
- Thehimalayantimes.com
- Worldlink.com.np
- Kantipuronline.com
*No screen-shots, place your mouse pointer over links to get the screen-shots via Snap.
The rankings are given below and Alexa informs most of the traffic are from Nepal for most of the sites below.
* Source Alexa.com as of 14th October 2008, link here.
Leaving all these behind lets look at the front-end (code) aspects of theses sites. Without doubts XHTML/CSS design has taken over the old table design, here are some reasons to use XHTML/CSS designs. But I regret telling that none of the top 7 sites use XHTML/CSS design they still follow the almost obsolete table design. I don't believe all things should be XHTML/CSS there are elements like forms etc that needs table but for the layout of the website XHTML/CSS is the new standard now.
Not only that they do not use any standard HTML tags, like the headlines or titles of the post are not even headlines like H1, H2 etc. Let's take a simple test, put a news or post anything from the sites below and post it to Facebook. The Facebook parser does not parse the title of the post/article/news, why because the web design standard is not up to the mark. Then try it from a blog or any popular site and look at the results the exact title and body will come in place while sharing the link or the post.
Most sites have a fixed design not changed for a long time and targeted at 800x600 resolution ex Nepalnews.com. I assume almost none of the above sites use a Content Management System (CMS) or any other Framework. I don't know if the so called top sites have any thing to do with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but they have OK page rank.It all boils down to a fact what does this portray about the design capability of Nepali web designers and web developers. If the top 7 sites have non standard and loads of errors to offer what do we expect from other sites. I hope all developers of the above sites come to know there are many tools, Content Management Systems (CMSs), Frameworks forJavascirpt, CSS etc etc which they can use to improve their design and even code at the back-end.
Hope we will get to visit better standard compliant Nepali websites in near future.
11 comments:
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Very good post, hope they learn that web development has take a great leap in some years.
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Great post. change is the name of the game but when will they change??
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you are being harsh to Nepali website developers but yes they should also face reality and comply with widely accepted standards.
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It's a wonderful post, and also very helpful for many people. I loved readin it. Good job buddy.
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very wonderful post...your blog also seems very nice now
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Nepal ma tableless ma design garne haru kamai cha tesaile hola...
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Thank you all for the comments.
@Diptesh Thanks a lot.
@Techwhiz yes standards do matter.
@Anil Thanks for the compliments
@Sudin Standards are hard to maintain, and cross browser compatibility is another headache. But this does not mean still use table design that is used for tabular data not layout. New and better things should be adopted I guess. -
I agree that most Nepali websites (or most sites anywhere as a matter of fact), don't follow the standards or look good.
It is nice to have a good design for a website, but more importantly is is important to have good and useful content in a website. And that's exactly what the above 7 websites have in common.
Cheers and happy Tihar! -
very interesting post... finally something to look forward to. I have been practising W3C compliant XHTML pages for a while now, but just having no XHTML errors makes no sense. For example i created a site for a company that validates XHTML and CSS 2.1 but with the JS turned off, the content does not degrade gracefully.
It will be very hard to convince clients in Nepal to purse CSS based layouts (DIV based) let alone, XHTML/CSS ... and especially with audience nuts for animated images and useless bandwidth hungry scripts... it is indeed difficult to market yourselves...
Talking about CMS... not all websites need CMS... if there is a dedicated web person responsible for updating, he'll take care of it...
but that said.. i really like the initiative of this blog... Your blog seems to be built on blogger... and it is easy for CMS frameworks like blogger, wordpress, movable type to brag about XHTML compliance because everything is built into them... but again.. great initiative... -
Thank you for more comments.
@Nepali Blogger: I beg to differ they look good say ok but only look good from the outside from the inside they seem hollow. Ok about the content if you see Cybersansar there is nothing to read as such except of photos. If you call that good content then no problem. NTC has nothing cool than the websms which goes defunct time and again. Well I can go on hehe :-).
@Subi: Well getting 0 errors in XHTML and CSS is very had for the demanding designs. There are very few percent sites in the world in that category but switching to tableless layout is the key (Tabluar data should be presented in tables no problem but layout should be as per standard i.e, XHTML/CSS).
Yes Nepali web audience just see "glamorous" pictures and other things, reading seems a thing of the past.
If a CMS is employed the web admin's life will be simplified a lot. So why not CMS and frameworks?
We are not bragging about XHTML, I'm behind some sites using Drupal CMS so when we plan the layout its the same problem table may be a easier and multi-browser compliant solution but it eats bandwidth like anything and other problems are attached too. If the world class CMS follow XHTML then they do it for good I guess. Why not XHTML???
Hope we see new sites in XHTML and old legacy sites transforming into it if its feasible for the creators. -
great post!its very informative n interesting
