Syria's Representation on the WWW

A few weeks back, I sent my final papers to the Syrian Embassy in Ottawa, to get a paper allowing me to enter Syria without being dragged to military service. Long story short I filled out all the papers, and I went through the checklist. To my surprise one of the items on the checklist was, get this, an empty envelope with a stamp so they can mail the visa back to me.

A stamped envelope? I remember thinking to my self… “How poor is the embassy?” But then I remembered how much effort they put into their website design, and I thought “hey, they splurged on the website, so they have to cut down somewhere” Right :-| … So, for contrast sake I decided to have a look at the website of the Canadian Embassy in Syria, and the difference was clear. The Canadian embassy website looks like every other official Canadian website, clean and easy to navigate.

But then I thought to my self, maybe I’m not being fair. So I checked other Syrian embassies… to my disappointment, there were worse, much worse. For instance check out“Maktab al 3alaqat's” website in Libya, to give you the heads up it’s on a geocities account. Most websites have the ever cheesy waving flag, and some have an excessive use of fancy scripts that don’t belong on a government website. On the contrary, Belguim and the UK had decent websites.

I’m very sure there are tens of Syrians that have the ability to create stunning websites, and who would love to put time and effort into such a project. I’m going to try to do something about the website for the embassy in Ottawa, let’s see how far I can get.

technorati tags: Syria, embassy, www, web, website, government