Oh No!!!

Disaster, sort of.  Late last night I started to feel a bit unwell, which in turn developed into stomach cramps in the small hours.  The upshot was that I didn't get much sleep, and felt decidedly dodgy this morning.  I've no idea what brought this on - I'd assume it must have been something I ate, but I didn't have anything that other people didn't eat, so it's a bit of a mystery.  Suffice to say that I thought it better to stay at home rather than risk infecting the entire office, so I sat at the computer table all morning.

By lunchtime I was feeling a bit better and so decided to risk it and take a stroll into town for some fresh air.  Thankfully there were no problems, and I returned safely to the house to get back to the computer.  By the time the two girls got back, I was well on the mend, courtesy of my travelling medicine cabinet.

One thing I did get done was to set up the tutorial I've been asked to give the team on building a basic website using an application like Blogger.  With the relatively high price of computers and internet access here, the internet is an underused resource for Malawi business.  There's an organisation here called BUGS (Business Growth Scheme) which sits within the Ministry of Industry and Finance.  It is a fund that refunds 50% of consultancy fees to approved projects, and many of our clients make use of it.  The idea is to accelerate the  take-up of capacity-building consultancy services by Malawi companies.  I met with the manager of BUGS in Blantyre a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned the prices being demanded for basic static website development.  His concern is that BUGS then is asked to pay 50% of a relatively inflated sum.  So I suggested that we could develop a template for Blogger or Wordpress that would in principle give these small companies a route to a free or low-cost web presence.  The proposal was well received, but alas we couldn't go ahead due to issues related to existing contractual relationships.  A shame, but I'm sure the opportunity will come up again.

In any event, all this web-related stuff prompted the junior consultants in the office to ask me to give them some training in how to build a basic website.  So I took advantage of my day in the house to develop a structure, which will be based on a 90 minute walk-through of Blogger, together with some key pointers that they will need to be aware of (e.g. copyright, usability, focusing on the target audience, etc.), after which they'll be asked to go away and build a Blogger site, using one of their client companies as the "customer" for the site.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how they get on.  When their mini projects are complete, I'll post links on this blog.