When TechCabal got off the ground four months ago, I made a point of starting out with a pristine experience that would allow me focus on validating some initial assumptions about sustainable technology blogging in Nigeria. I’ve been proved right in some respects. In others, I’ve had to recalibrate long held notions that have now been shown not to apply to this context or to be just plain erroneous.
And now? I think we have gotten to that place where we need to listening to the data and start doing the things that will allow us take advantage of the lessons that we have learned in the past few months about doing tech blogging that creates value for the ecosystem.
That is what has informed TechCabal v2.0 — or the design that you are experiencing right now. The new design’s major purpose is to provide a befitting home for the long form plus opinion driven content strategy that we are currently pursuing. At the same time, we want to deliver said content with the kind of finesse that sponsors like to associate with.
What’s all this stuff about sponsors? Ads? That’s right. In english, it simply means that there’s now advertising on TechCabal.
The interesting thing is lots of people have asked me why there are no ads on TechCabal. From day one, in fact, when they first saw the initial and not very ad-friendly design. To answer that, all this time, we’ve been thinking hard about how to create effective audience engagement products (which are by no means limited to banners or even “advertising” for that matter) for sponsors. The trick was to do it in a way that wasn’t at the expense of a compelling and immersive experience for the audience, who for us are the holy grail. So we decided to seek first content, try and figure out what exactly you guys want, and then add everything else onto it later.
The third most important motivator that’s also been top of my mind for the past couple of months is making sure that TC v2.0 solves many of the performance and user experience problems that shipped with v1.0. I won’t bore you with details of how the backend has gotten soooooo much better now that we’ve implemented a template should allow us put out exponentially more awesomer content, and with significantly reduced lead time to boot.
But I can tell you that a great many of the bugs brought to my notice via your kind feedback have been squashed. The first thing you might notice is that content is 1000x more discoverable on v2.0, with search at the top of the page, featured content grids that segue into classic blog style layout on the homepage, and a context sensitive sidebar that highlights content you shouldn’t miss.
The second thing should become apparent very soon is that TC’s content both in presentation and editorial direction, is now a lot more structured now than it was in v1.0. Now we’ve got –
The Cabal – Editorial, opinion, conversations, analysis and insights into Nigerian tech that is hard to find in any place else.
Features – Long form features, narratives, story telling and original series
Startups – keep up with the cambrian explosion of disruptive (and sometimes not so disruptive) ideas from technology entrepreneurs in Nigeria and across Africa.
Gadgets – what can we say? We’re techies, we love our tools and toys.
Media – soon we’ll be able to deliver a whole range of multimedia content experiences from video to interactive data, but all the video and audio will live in the media hub.
We’re still mopping stuff up from the old design (the occasional bit of stray code), and there’s a lot more going on under the hood than you would care to know. But in keeping with the move fast and break things mantra, we will continue to iterate the experience as the times demand.
I hope that you find the new TechCabal a more pleasurable, exciting and engaging experience. Please tell us, what do you think? We’re counting on you to let us know if you find any loose bolts that need tightening. Thanks zillions.
