Nearly every week, we stumble upon a new internet cafe where prempeh.org has been made the main homepage
by their non-Amanfoo owners. Our latest discovery is the Legon Business Center -- an internet cafe with about
80 computers that have programmed prempeh.org as their main homepage. This means that users who open a browser are first
taken to our website before they opt to venture anywhere on the web. This partly accounts of the thousands of reloads
of the pages each days.
We have observed the trend all over Kumasi, where several cafe owners use our website to
attract children. And in certain parts of Accra, this trend, which is often exemplified
by female cafe owners who have no association
with our school, is also apparent.
The Best Website award
we received has sparked a discussion of our work in university classrooms and lecture halls in Ghana.
During a recent radio discussion program in Accra about the website of CAN 2008 (Ghana's hosting of 2008 African Cup of Nations),
which people thought was poorly designed, callers phoned in to urge the organizers to take a closer look at the Prempeh
website as example and take some lessons from us.
But the prempeh.org's stunning popularity is exacting huge prices for the managers of the site: people become easily agitated
when the site is not updated by the hour. Sofoline masters take time off their schedule to call us to find out
"why the site has not been updated since yesterday" (Misty Boat's favourite words) or "how come Photo of the Week has
been delayed for the week."
Our PRESEC friends even come up to us at times and ask "why there is nothing new."
Not only do the hundreds of people who email us want an instant reply, those Amanfoo who send
their particulars to be entered into our Global Amanfoo
Registry expect an instant editorial work.
This is because of the high standards we have set in the past by rapidly updating the work.
Also, our website is actually under reconstruction and we are transforming some of the pages -- particularly the content from the older website.
This is a tedious task that takes time.
Besides, news updates is only a small fraction of the workload. If you do not see any new stories, it does not mean we are not working.
We work on photography behind the scenes, travel (e.g. following the Black Starlets around for
first-hand news), work on the phone to retrieve vital news information, interact with the Sofoline people, among many other duties.
In fact, a large portion of the work is done off the computer, so if you have not seen
anything new, it does not imply that we are giving up. There is an intensive work that is done behind the scenes before the news appear here.
And do not forget that unlike other websites, this is not a cut-and-paste news website. Instead of taking news from other websites and posting them here, we write
our own news, have our own correspondents and travel on our own budget to wherever the news is (e.g. whether to Koforidua for Milo football, to
Sunyani for Inter-Regionals sports or to Accra for national Science Quiz).
All the attention and citations we have received in recent times have invigorated us, and we hope to make this academic year
better for our readers. A special announcement we will make in the next few weeks, which is destined to change our school,
will encapsulate our passion clearly as we aim to fulfill man's petulant demand for originality.
