A public broadcaster, not an online newspaper. That is the stance behind this redesign of the Togolese national television website. The channel has had no website for several years while still broadcasting its news bulletin online every day: the audience is there, the web offering is what is missing. The site is therefore built on what a broadcaster alone holds, the live stream, the replay, the schedule and the shows, and leaves written news to those already doing it.
The field sets the weight
The project is sized for its real audience: 37% internet penetration, expensive mobile data, a fleet mostly made of entry-level Android devices. First-view budget: 500 KB.
Measured after build: 29 KB of HTML, 22 KB of CSS, zero JavaScript. Astro ships nothing to the browser by default, where a page built on React would carry about a hundred kilobytes before the first useful line.
Language is content, not an option
The news runs in Ewe and Kabiyè every day. Of ten fonts tested, only two write ɖ ɛ ŋ ɔ ʋ, Ɖ Ɛ Ŋ Ɔ Ʋ and ɩ Ɩ ʊ Ʊ correctly. Inter was chosen for that reason, not for its style.
The visual system
Flat, because the logo is flat: three solid letters, no relief. So square corners throughout, no shadow, no blur, no decorative rule.
Green carries the identity, red is only for live, yellow punctuates. Never the three together in one block.
tokens.json is the single source for the system: a script generates the site CSS, a Figma export and a Dart file from it.
Twelve screens
Home, live, programme schedule, replay, shows and their detail page, news, national languages, the channel, and the error pages. Content comes from the channel’s official schedule, 198 programmes, with no invented data. Visuals are generated by a reproducible script: no photograph of a real person is used.
Tech stack
Astro with Tailwind CSS v4, content in versioned JSON, a fully static build. No external service, no API dependency.
Nature of the exercise
This is an unsolicited redesign, in the tradition of public-interest design. The usual criticism targets proposals that polish an interface without knowing its constraints, hence the opposite method here: reproducible measurements, a benchmark of five African broadcasters site by site, official data.
The project is neither commissioned, nor approved, nor affiliated with Télévision Togolaise or any public institution. Nothing in it is official.