Few weeks ago while reading Oo Nwoye’s blog, I read a post, I was very disappointed to find out about Thisday’s, one of Nigeria’s foremost newspaper organisations’, potential website redesign. Nothing personally against the plans for a redesign. In fact,  it is a redesign that is long overdue. My dismay comes from the fact that the “new” website (if actually the suspected plan is genuine) is a blatant copy of the BBC news website. Being one of Nigeria’s popular news destinations, one would expect that the people/person responsible for their online presence would be wary of copying the exact look of BBC News, another very popularly known news website. This is apparently not the case as can be seen from the screenshots below.

Now, it must be noted that there is no statement officially linking the suspected new website- Thisdayonline.net to Thisday Newspapers. It is possible that the design used on thisdayonline.net isn’t about to be their new homepage design or does not belong to Thisday at all. But the fact that Thisdayonline.com (the current main site) was  for a short time redirecting to Thisdayonline.net (as reported in Oo’s blog) is strong evidence that there are indeed plans to overhaul the homepage and this is a likely design round. That aside, there are two things that I have discovered to be very clear about Thisdayonline.net:

• it is powered by blogging CMS WordPress
• it uses a free theme called ‘the beeb’

There seems to be part of the problem already. I have nothing against using downloaded themes but if  an organisation the size of Thisday can’t develop their own unique design, it shows a huge lack of creativity on their part. I’m sincerely hoping that Thisday doesn’t go ahead and commission this “new” design just to save them the enormous embrassment, and possibly complaints, they will receive for stealing. The current Thisday website, to me, is an absolute mess. Incidentally, it was another design copy of what the CNN website looked like at the time Thisdayonline.com was launched. Perhaps they should learn from previous mistakes and decide against to ripping-off the design of another global news organisation.

Tags: bbc, creativity, Design, design theft, news, newspaper, nigeria, thisday, wordpress