Cybersurf

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window where web matters. I am your cyberhost, Steven Lang, with some of the latest news about the internet

Let’s start with a web site about a very courageous group of women who are going to climb mount Kilamanjaro in an effort to raise money for a very deserving charity.

The Highway Hospice Association is a non-profit organisation aiming to raise one million rand to help the terminally ill. A group of perfectly ordinary – but highly energetic South African women got together and decided to climb Mount Kilamanjaro to raise the money.

The web site – you will find at www.justgiving.com/pfp/CelebrateLife - that address - which is a little trickier than usual because it is in fact a sub-site of a larger charity web portal called justgiving.com – but if you are particularly interested in the climb mount kilmanjaro fund raiser you will need the full address which is: www.justgiving.com/pfp/CelebrateLife

And if you still missed it, don’t worry, I will post this entire script on the cybersurf blog.

The actual page for donations was created by Alison Bailey, one of the climbers, and it is quite interesting in that you can see a list of donors – who donated, and how much! The list does not say where the donors reside, but judging from the list, and from the fact that the donations are in US dollars, my gues is that a fair amount of the money comes form the USA.

The climb will take place in August and we will post photographs on SABCnews.com.

And now for a rapid change of tack – this time into education….

I needed to do some research into the school curriculum – so I went directly to the Gauteng department of education site. It is pretty good – the front page is fast and has conventional navigation – a horizontal bar just below the main banner and a dynamic nav bar down the left hand side.

Better still – all the navigation links worked just fine. The site can, however, be improved by putting some consistency into the pages – what I mean is that some buttons will take you to very nicely designed html pages, while others such as the page on school terms – gives you very useful information – but you lose all the navigation and beautiful design elements of the front page – and still other buttons take you to incredibly long, arcane pdf documents – it’s a bit of a mix and match.

I was very impressed with the school finder function which was very fast. You can search by region; by suburb; by school name or by type of school. It took me less than a minute to find all the contact details of my daughter’s primary school.

Overall – to the GDE - congratualtions for a useful site – by the way, I did find what I was looking for in the first place.

It then ocurred to me that I should look at the national education department’s web site. Time constraints don’t allow me to go into detail – but I found the national site to be pretty decent, and it had links to all the provincial sites. Some of them are good – too many think that a picture of the local MEC is the most important thing on a web site – guess what – they’re wrong!

And for some reason - the link to the Mpumulanga department of education did not work.

And as we rush to the end of this program, let me remind you that I will be putting up all the relevant links to sites mentioned in the last three minutes on to the cybersurf blog – which is strategically located at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com and I’ll repeat that for tactical purposes – Cybersurf.blogspot.com

Thanks for listening and remember to keeeeeep on surfin….

Relevant Links:

• The Highway Hospice Association
• National Department of Education
• Gauteng Department of Education
• Gauteng Online