WEB FEET Notes from the Net
At the end of 1995, Newsweek ran a front cover declaring the previous 12 months “The Year of the Internet”. If that was a true reflection of the impact made by the Net in ’95, then they will have run out of ways to describe 1996, so much more dramatic has been the impact of the online world.
Even South Africa finally embraced the Internet, with the number of people with online access approaching the half-million mark, several institutions embarking on limited experiments in Internet banking, and half-a-dozen Internet service providers producing highly professional, easy-install Internet starter kits.
On the World Wide Web, South African business finally arrived with a vengeance, spending millions on web sites with varying degrees of success. The rest of this column will be devoted to the sites that made a particular impact on me this year, and I welcome feedback from people who think I left out the obvious or included the undeserving. Bear in mind that this is an entirely subjective listing, as is every single other attempt to name 1996’s best and worst on the web:
* Best Commercial Site: Nando’s Chickenland (http://www.nando.co.za/) – fun, clever, witty and interactive
* Worst Commercial Site: South African Airways (http:// www.saa.co.za/) – nice idea, but it doesn’t work; wildly overrated
* Best Personal Home Page: Welcome to the Cape Flats
(http://mickey.iafrica.com/~vincent/index.htm) – Vincent Williams’s guided tour into a hotbed of South African society
* Best Financial Service: The Woza share broking service
(http://www.woza.co.za/broking/wobtrade.htm) – easy entry, discount charges, friendly service
* Best search engine: Ananzi (http://www.ananzi.co.za) – groaning under the weight of demand, but still a pioneer
* Best web guide: South African Web Chart (http://sa.web-chart.com/) – has evolved from a hit parade into a valuable directory service
* Best Medical Site: Strategic Health Review (http://www.aztec.co.za/biz/dgreen/strat1.html) – happens to be No 1 on South African Web Chart
* Best Music Site: Madiba Music (http://cd.co.za/) – great design, great catalogue, great service
* Best Sport Site: South Africa’s Soccer Page (http://picturenet.co.za/soccer) – great sport, great site, gre