Yola is a proud sponsor of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Business Strategy Program in Cape Town, South Africa. Initially, we approached UCT to use Yola as an education tool in their Business Science program, which requires the students to come up with a an idea for a start up business, investigate the viability of the business through market research, create a finance and business plan as well as build a website for their business.
Dale Williams, the business lecturer at UCT, loved the idea and has implemented it in his program for the last few years. The students were only allowed to make use of Yola as a site builder, but now we’ve opened up the forum to any site builder product.
This year for the first time Dale asked me to select what I thought was the best website out of the projects submitted. With the help of two of my Yola colleagues we rated and ranked a number of extremely good websites.
All the sites were rated from 1-5 (5 being the best) based on concept, content, pictures, layout, colors, styles used and effort. I then sent the 50 best sites to my two colleagues who helped me narrow the list. After this tough process of elimination, taking a variety of factors into account, we eventually narrowed it down to the winner.
We selected the group called Diamond, Business Edison, whose mission is “to provide safe, economical and quality lighting to mitigate climate change and empower rural communities in South Africa.”
The prize consisted of a variety of Yola products, including two hoodies, four champagne glasses, a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne, coasters, stickers and a coupon for Yola Silver.
Congratulations to all who submitted websites to the program. I was blown away by the excellent standard of ideas, businesses and websites submitted. It was an honor to have attended the top three project presentations as well as the awards ceremony at UCT to present the Yola prize for best website.
We are extremely excited about this entrepreneurship opportunity for students and what it means for Cape Town and South Africa after seeing this level of excellence.