You will all be very pleased to know that each Durban suburb has finally been allocated it's own hideous 'community' website! It took an age, but finally... it's done. Now take a look for yourself, at what our inbred crop of web designers have produced:

Chatsworth Online (www.chatsonline.co.za), is a deplorably ugly website who's copyright dates back to the year 2000. It's front page is an empty shell of unfinished business, decorated casually with the brightest shade of each of the primary colors.

Promising to keep the community informed, it starts by mis-informing me that the year is in fact 107, rather than the globally accepted '2007'. Proof that yes, the Y2K date bug did indeed hit Chatsworth hard.

Moving along the page, we encounter the "Local Heroes" section, which contains nothing but the line:

"Local boy discovers cure for flatulence"

Marvelous! How wonderful for Chatsworth that they have produced this prodigy, who's contribution to medical science will no doubt be recorded in the anals of history! (Haha, anals... geddit?)

A link on the left of the page directs us to "Charos Corner", which is a page with the lyrics of the American rap song "It wasn't me!" - with all references to sex replaced by the act of making spicy rotis. The chorus, reproduced here for your amusement:

"aunty came in caught me red handed cooking wid the mum next door
picture this we were both caught making rotia on the hot tavaa
how can i forget that i had given her a extra chabiiii?
all the time she was standing there she never put on her
chuniiii!!! "

Of course, the reason most visitors log on must surely be the "Free Stuff" section, which contains two free wallpapers (one a picture of the Hare Krishna Temple, the other a yellow Dodge Viper), a non-working link to an unnamed search engine, and "Free Themes" (I'm as intrigued as you are...).

I wish I could end this tale with Chatsworth, but alas, it continues. And it gets no better.

The "Westville Online" (www.westvilleonline.co.za) site re-creates the look and feel of the Windows "blue screen of death" so accurately, that I actually rebooted my computer three times thinking the site's poor coding had crashed my PC.

The content, although relatively up to date, is copied and pasted from news sources and is not at all targeted towards Westville. In fact, a little bit of clicking around revealed the creators of the Westville Online abortion have their fingers in a number of these community website pies:

Dundee, Hibberdene, Margate, Pennington, Port Edward, Port Shepstone, Scottburgh, Shelly Beach, The Bluff, Toti, Umkomaas and Westville "online community sites", to be precise.

Each one maintains the same "blue screen of death" theme, and contains almost the exact same information as the others. The same news reports, same 3 cooking recipes (chicken liver salad, hamburgers, ostrich and avocado salad), same pleas for advertising money and the exact same menu of options on the left.

The only unique information seems to be the paragraph describing the history of each area. A quick internet search reveals that it's all plagerised from KZN tourism sites.

A certain web designer, or designers, have gotten a bit carried away with this whole misguided scheme to make money. They've jumped so hard to get onto this "interweb" bandwagon that they've missed it completely.

"The Designer Boys", as they call themselves.

I mean, WHAT do they think they are doing? WHY are they embarrassing us with these disfigured, carbon-copied 'community' websites?

And now, should someone actually want to make a genuine effort at targeting a suburb with a real website, they have to pick one of the less intuitive domain names because our fabulous Designer Boys have stolen all the names for their shrines to the color blue.

It pains me, Papi. It really does.