A Short Open Letter to the CEO CIO Chief Web Strategist of Access Kenya

Dear Sir/Madam,

A Thumbnail of home.co.ke

First, please accept my apologies for having to address you in such an inappropriate forum. Probably, the proper thing would have been to write you a private email, but I just could not stand the risk of my message being deleted as spam by your filters.

Not that I am sure you will get to read this post in my  virtually unknown blog anyway. But at least there’s a 0.00something probability that someone from your esteemed organization will see it and hopefully bring it to your attention. And even if not, somebody else may benefit from this short critique.

Now to my reason(s) for writing. You have a great information site in the name of Kenya’s homepage. Great content, and a very innovative product – the traffic cameras. Kudos are in order.

Naturally however, even the greatest ideas deserve criticism, because we don’t always get everything right.

I have some grievances with your product, and I highlight them below:

• Excessive Use of Banner Ads
I know, I know. You don’t build a great website for its own sake. You definitely need some returns. After all, there are costs associated with hosting the site, developing content, etc. But the banner advertisements are almost choking your content. At the time of writing this, your home page alone has nine of these banners.

Truth be told, most people don’t click these banners. Perhaps we used to in the earlier days of the web, but not any more. If you doubt me, you should see the findings on banner blindness. Unless you believe Kenyans are still in the web stone age. And again, when you have nine banners in one page, some of them will have to be pushed well “below the fold”, denying your advertisers value for their money.

We could possibly excuse a small website like mine if I placed hundreds of such ads. But for a site of your size, this is unacceptable. You should borrow a leaf from some of the sites you are trying to ape (Yahoo, AOL, et al). Fewer ads per page, but definitely more costly. Looks more professional.

• Forceful marketing
To be frank, I enjoy your newsletter, and would like to continue receiving it. So I am not complaining much here. But I don’t understand how I got subscribed in the first place. Obviously, someone “datamined” my email address and subscribed me. No, I did not voluntarily opt-in through your “Subscribe to our newsletter” section – which you have hidden near the footer of your site.

My point: I am a firm believer in permission marketing, but if you datamine me, at least give me the option of opting out. Your newsletter lacks that, so you are literally forcing me, and probably many others, to consume your product.

• Numbers Don’t Lie, But Yours Do
Take this quote from your website, obviously written for the advertisers:

“@home…offers …traffic of more than a million hits a month”

You are in the internet business. So you and I know that there are better measures of a website’s real worth. Tell us about the number of unique visitors, page views per month, etc. Not hits please.

Let me illustrate. Your home page alone has 76 different objects. That would record as 76 hits for just one visit. It would take roughly 13,160 visits to the home page alone to record one million hits. Out of these, the absolutely unique visitors may be about 60% (or 7896 unique visitors per month, disregarding visits by search engine spiders and other bots). That’s a respectable figure, by some standards. But not exactly what your statistics paint.

• Trying to Be Everything to Everyone
Well, this is a rather subjective judgment, but I think I have a valid point. Your site attempts to provide Kenyan news, sports news, health features, etc while at the same time trying to be a shopping guide, a travel guide, a site for selling cars, etc.

In my opinion, it would be better to focus on one or two niches. Or if you have to do it all, create different sub-domains or minisites for each niche. That way, you’d not be spreading yourselves too thin, and it’d be easier to monitor which niche is performing best and giving a better return on investment.

Since you are market leaders of sorts in the technology business, technology would be a more natural niche for you I guess. That depends on your overall business strategy however, and I have no idea of how well-staffed you are.

On a minor note, your home page title is pathetic (SEO-wise, and for humans too). This is what it says:

“home.co.ke | home is the top gateway to Kenya’s lifestyle information.Ranked globally as one of Kenya’s top websites, its a one stop destination for Kenya”

That’s more fitting for a description than a title. How about changing the title to simply

“@Home | Kenya’s Home Page”

So Why Do I bother?
As I have already mentioned, I think you have a great idea. I may have been motivated by the mere thrill of tearing into a giant. Or maybe I want to impress you to give me the job of maintaining your site ;-). But I believe you get my point.

Best Regards,
Tom

Update: 19 Nov 2010
I can confirm that home.co.ke have implemented some of the suggestions above. Whether it is in reaction to this post or not, I’d like to say thank you.

1. In the latest newsletter titled “Hope lives in Kibera”, there are now instructions on how to unsubscribe/opt out.
2. The home page title is now:  “home.co.ke | Kenya’s lifestyle information Portal”.