www.igihe.com - all records are being broken as we speak (write)!

.... server overloaded??????

Wow! this is a quick blog entry! since yesterday, we have been noticing an increase in traffic that is both amazing  and encouraging. The traffic on www.igihe.com went so high in the past 24 hours we had to set up a back up server so that the main server wouldn't crash! For the technical team at igihe, it is a constant struggle dealing with <defunctional> PHP process, that are probably caused by unterminated scripts on the server.

Only yesterday, we recorded an overall traffic of 60,000 Users! and today some stories on the home page have already received 80,000 and more hits!

We believe, that we are living the internet boom of Rwanda! History is currently on the making, and by reading these lines you can be reassured to be part of it! So keep visiting igihe.com to always keep you updated for free!

WWW.IGIHE.COM is now a millionaire!

The story of how this happened is quite amazing! In 2009, when www.igihe.com begun  these were the number of visitors that we received on igihe.com:

On this screenshot of June 2009 traffic, igihe.com was recorded to have 39 Unique visitors, 64 Visits, 883 viewed pages for a total of 3495 hits and a data transfer of  12.74 MB.  Which to put it in simple words means..almost nobody visited igihe.com! (Except for the team members themselves).

These traffic datas are in high contrast with a screenshot i took a few minutes ago from Google Analytics, displaying our latest numbers :

Google analytics is a free service from  US internet company GOOGLE, that helps website gather information about the amount of internet traffic they generate. The Datas provided by google covering the period from Jan 14th,2011 to Feb 10th,2011 goes as follow :

- Number of Visits : 1,037,566
- Page Views : 2,831,976
- Unique visitors : 210,292

Now you can say, wow! these are huge numbers! In just 1 and 1/2 year igihe.com has moved from being visited by itself to being visited by almost all internet users in Rwanda and a part of the diaspora. As it shows on this analysis from GOOGLE most of igihe.com's traffic comes from Rwanda :

By country igihe.com is mostly visited From:

1. Rwanda : 498,766 Visits
2. United States : 65,791 Visits
3. Belgium : 65,502 Visits
4. Canada : 46,483 Visits
5. France : 29,636 Visits
6. United Kingdom : 17,841 Visits
7. Netherlands : 17,726 Visits
8. Sudan : 13, 630 Visits
9. Norway : 12,148 Visits
10. Not set : 140,049 Visits.

There are some more countries where igihe.com is visited which are not counted in this chart. The traffic analysis goes further to show that every single visitor spends at least 7 minutes on the site! I know this is a pointless exercise but i like to multiply 7 minutes spent by every of the 1,037,566 visits , which gives a total of  7,262,962 Minutes spent on igihe.com JUST LAST MONTH!

Given its internationalization, accessibility, covered surface area and outreach;  igihe.com is by far the most visited media by Rwandan all over the world far beyond all the local radios and TV stations taken together.

Other Local Medias, have their audience and/or readership distributed only on Rwanda territory and a part of the neighboring countries!  Igihe.com on the other hand covers almost the entire planet, and links together all the people of Rwanda wherever they are in the world.

There is no local newspaper,local radio station or local TV station that has a readership or audience in the United States, or the United Kingdom, or Belgium, or France Like Igihe.com has! And all of this has been achieved in just a year and half of existence, think about what it will be in 10 years!

A big congratulations for reaching a million visitors a month, igihe.com and the team at IGIHE LTD!

We are planning to launch a lot of new products during the course of this year, that will further perfect the way people access information via their preferred media igihe.com thanks to the internet. By the end of this year, the impact IGIHE.COM will have on Rwandans all over the world is outstanding. Stay with us, and witness history in the making! Thanks for reading.

IGIHE LTD Awarded best exhibitor at NUR Students Expo 2011

Quick post! yesterday at the close of the NUR (National University of Rwanda) Students expo, IGIHE LTD, the company managing www.igihe.com was awarded a certificate for the best exhibitor. What was there to exhibit you ask? www.igihe.com internet data, and the people at the stand answering various questions that they have about www.igihe.com questions such as the number of visitors we have, the profile of our average visitors, ect

All the people attending our stand were given explanations about our success stories, and also about the profile of the company, the people who work in www.igihe.com

This post is just to say a big congratulations to all IGIHE LTD team members and those who everyday get their news from www.igihe.com making it the first online resource for information in our country.

IGIHE LTD - A quick break from work with the team!

Did you know that the staff members of IGIHE LTD, worked for over 1 year and half without knowing each other?

Since we begun in mid 2009, hiring new members, discovering new talents, partnering with distant people was almost always done over phone lines or by em

ail. We never really had time to meet, and socialize outside of work. It is only last month that we decided it was time for everyone to know everyone. Some of our members were in fact very crucial to the team but also vary unknown by the team. Especially members from the technical team.

So we decided to set up a reunion of all team members (But even then not all of them showed up). The reunion begun by everyone presenting themselves, names, occupation, home address, and then we went on to telling stories about how we begun, the difficulties we encountered in setting up the company, the difficulties we still encounter today and our vision for the future. Many among the attendees took word to express, both concerns and how proud they felt to be part of this community.

Everybody was relaxed, we had a drink or two (non and alcoholic)! and then went back to work which has always been our first priority (even before common socialization affairs). We hope we will have some more time like that to spend with each other, but one thing is sure, every time we meet will always be around our work,achievement and innovation.

Happy Holidays, and ahead into 2011

As the holidays season gets into full swing and another year draws to a close, We want to pause for a moment and thank you, our partners and members for making 2010, such a terrific year for igihe ltd.

With your participation more than 6,616,871 Visits with a total of 23,564,688 Pageviews made www.igihe.com the most consulted online resource in the history of our country – Rwanda. Never before all these Rwandans expressed interest in Reading to get informed. This is of course without mentioning the forums, and other discussion going on with this online community that www.igihe.com has become.

www.igihe.com has created a complete new culture, a new way of perceiving and accessing information, a new consciousness and this has been done in only a year of existence, revolutionizing the relationship between Rwandan people and the World Wide Web.

All this year long, we as igihe team, hasn’t stopped learning, about culture, society, business, politics, computer science,… with every problem we faced, the smart and innovative solutions we brought up only made us stronger, and opened the way for new ideas, and a more optimized products.

Igihe ltd is one of the first “silicon valley’s style” start ups, that is actually successful in the tough cultural context of Rwanda. In many ways the story of Igihe ltd, is similar to that of more famous elders, such as Apple, Microsoft, Adobe… We all started in a garage.

Igihe ltd is young (both the members and the company). We are motivated by the desire to positively change the society in which we evolve. And all of this is being made possible thanks to the collaboration you have with us.

From myself, and the entire igihe team, we wish you a happy and safe holiday season.

Liambi Willy Igihe ltd CTO.

Brand new design for igihe.com, comming soon!

Hey there,

It has been a while now that the technical team at igihe.com and our partners have been working on setting up an international standard designed website! The design is almost completed and we are planing to launching it soon enough.

The problem

The current igihe.com interface does not fit international standards. When designing the current version of the site. We just focused on creating an interface that would be accessible to the Rwandese people, who we must say back then (A year ago) did not really have specific expectations about what a good website should look like. That time is long gone now, we need to increase the quality and ergonomics of the interface to bring the most pleasant web experience to both first time visitors and unique existing visitors.

The current design had problem regarding:

1. International standards
2. Ergonomics
3. Navigability
4. accessibility
5. Cross browsers compatibility

One more problem with the current version of the site, is it's lack of automation. Basically almost any part of the site needs to be insterted from it's source code. Which makes updating the different components of the site, very hard for the technical team (Which are me and a friend of mine :) ).

The solution

The new interface should dramatically increase user experience both for the visitors and for the managers of the site. We have also been thinking about changing the software that manages the content on the site, moving from the "IGIHE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM" to the well now french CMS (SPIP) but for now we are still develloping the plugin to will make that migration possible without loss of data . This is of little consequence, to the visitors of the site cause the only change they will notice is the change to the different interfaces of the site.

So, all we need now is to finilize the latest test with the interface, especially for Cross Browser Compatibility, to make sure that the site looks exactelly the same on all the major browsers (Mozilla,Chrome,IE,Opera). In about a week from now the new design for www.igihe.com should be in place and of course we will need to know what your response will be.

Opening the Igihe ltd blog

Hello!

Welcome to the official blog of igihe ltd, the company that publishes the website www.igihe.com but also its soon to come english version. This blog, could have been created since the launch of Igihe ltd but we were let say quite busy at work. This blog will also be a way for us to communicate about what we do internally and why we do it.

Why this blog?

Our goal is to explain our overall strategy to the visitors of www.igihe.com,which will probably be the first readers of this blog, taking into account the fact that many of them are not yet fully familiar with The world of information technology business.

We found that many visitors www.igihe.com did not understand certain things related to the Igihe ltd company that seemed obvious to us. Even elementary. And we can not blame them: we either we are not born with the innate knowledge, we are not accountants,we do not know all the things that run the world in which we live. We have made mistakes, we make and we will certainly be others. It's healthy. That's how you learn. And it's even better if that experience is shared, hence the reason for this blog.

About Us

This blog will be moderated by all the members of the current team of the www.igihe.com editors and journalists, which we will occasionally from time to time present to you. In addition to wanting to communicate what we do for www.igihe.com,we also hope to arouse the curiosity of some of you and maybe inspire in you an interest in entrepreneurship.

In fact, one entrepreneur is much closer to an employee than you think. Both have their share of worries, fears and reasons to appreciate what they do.They just see these things with a different angle. Maybe the experience we have acquired running igihe.com will be of some form of help to all of you students and other people who want to start in this business.We hope through this blog, giving you a much better idea of our point of view of the information technology business that is still in its infancy in our country Rwanda.