Designing a website between Amsterdam and Dhaka

In August 2002 I made a trip to Bangladesh with my partner and colleague Marieke, to visit the media professionals of Drik in Dhaka. Marieke and I both work for Zeezeilen, an Amsterdam based web design studio.

One of the web sites we produce is The Power of Culture , a web portal and online newsmagazine on culture and development. In this web site, we stress the importance of culture and the arts as driving force towards more political, economic and social freedom and the role that culture and the arts can play in the fields of human rights, education, the environment, emancipation and democratisation.

We asked Drik to collaborate with us in producing a special issue for this web site about photography in Bangladesh. We were thus introduced to Drik's web designer Shahjahan Siraj, and started our collaboration online, figuring out at first how we would deal with the broad topic of photography, later on exchanging ideas for the design of the web site, and in the process getting to know more and more of each other. This online exchange of ideas and design sketches worked out very well.

We decided to make the web site a presentation of photographs on Bangladeshi culture grouped around several themes, like language, visual arts, festivals, and so on. The photo's were to be made by the students of Pathshala, the school of photography associated with Drik, and also the captions were written by the students themselves.

Then we traveled to Bangladesh, and were greeted in Dhaka by a very friendly Siraj (who was much shorter and a bit fatter then I had imagined him to be ;-)).

Next day we started working, and I immediately felt at home in his office, that was not so very different from my own. And a strange thing this is: to continue the work I did at home on a similar computer and with similar software, making the city of Dhaka almost feel like home too.

From day one on, the cooperation with Siraj was very stimulating and creative, and we made lots of progress, exchanging ideas, trying things out, designing and building the web site Also, the students' photographs were of high quality (as can still be seen on the web site), so we felt obliged to make something special.

Web sites have a global reach, and it seems that the way to build them, and the way to think about them and design them is also very global.

Of course, there are differences in the way web sites are used, and for a web designer this is a thing to keep in mind. As an example: in the Netherlands some 75 % of the people have a computer at home, many of them with a broadband connection. In Bangladesh many people seemed to be relying on internet cafes, and using a much slower connection (we're talking about 2002). So, in that context it makes sense to design for instance an online newspaper as one long page, and not as a big conglomerate of links that keeps you waiting for new pages all the time.

Marieke and I were also invited to give a two day workshop Internet, photography and context for the students of Pathshala. We had been giving this kind of workshops for some time in the Netherlands, but here it was different. People were very enthusiastic, keen on using the internet, especially for international contacts, and all in all much more oriented on the outside world.

To sum things up, this was a very positive experience for us, so we were eager to repeat it with another project. Siraj came up with the idea of making a web site about flood. The life with water and the struggle against water is a topic that is very real for Bangladesh as well as for the Netherlands. Last year we had the possibility to invite Siraj to a Unesco conference on water in the Netherlands. He was to present his project there, but unfortunately for no apparent reason the Dutch embassy refused Siraj a visa. Although of course, we already knew about the consequences of ever more stringent anti-immigration laws and growing xenophobia, it still came as a shock to realise how closed our society has become. I don't think this is in any way appropriate. This is not the place to elaborate on this, but as our small project with Drik shows, it is very rewarding and stimulating to seek cooperation and exchange.


Alfred Marseille
27 January, 2006, The Netherlands