MEPR: 7DAYS.ae

Here we go again, since I’ve been on the move for a while, I missed dotShow and podcasting so to start another conversation starter the Middle East Portals Health Check had to start. And this is the first of the installments, reviewing 7days.ae. We’ll talk about its design, information architecture, and ads-value and placement.

First, an intro

7days is one of the finest daily papers in UAE, it prints everyday(was 6 days a week previously). With topics such as local news, gossip, sport, and roughly anything interesting 7days captures a good number of visitors online as well.

Each month more than 1.4 million pages are visited by mostly UAE visitors. 7DAYS is the first urban newspaper for the UAE and the Middle East. 7DAYS news stories are tightly written so that the reader can take in all the key facts quickly, something that is demanded by our audience of time-poor, fast-living urbanites. Whether people need to know about a breaking news story or share their thoughts about their local events, 7days.ae is their online destination.

Design: Graphics, Typography, Colors and Whitespace

It’s a piece of harmony, starting from the header to the footer.

Having 7Days’s identity in pure type, it makes it very flexible to design for, specially if design is to be for a publishing house which 7Days is, that said, Typography’s been a major shift in the new version of 7Days. Added to the great typography and the variaty of clear fonts used is the great amount of whitespace which gets the shades of blue in graphics and text blending for easier reading and skiming. It’s neat!

Another very minimalistic move is the use of expressive icons. No biggie, they’re all around but the use is really effective and bold. Usually comments, and feedbacks have been some of the prohibited forms and functionalities to show off on portals; which is a great addition in the ME. The feed icon in the footer is a little misleading and in a way not using the well-known standardized icon (even IE7 supports the standard RSS icon on the toolbar).

Information Architecture

According to the All Sections menu at the top of the navigation the paper’s site is divided into the following sections:

• News
• Business
• Sport
• Metrolife
• What’s On
• Letters to the Editor
• Columnists
• Cinema Listings
• Home
• Newspaper Distribution
• Advertisers targeting UAE audience?

The first six sections (News, Business, Sport, Metrolife, What’s on, Letters to editor) are grand sections of the portal where active content pour into. However, the rest are pages and not sections, although it is not so confusing to have them in the same menue it is misleading to have pages and sections mixedup by using the same styling(arrow, and font).

Home as one of the sections? I thought I was wrong, but actually Home is listed as one of the sections. It’s either the menu title “All Sections” is wrong or the the last items were ad-hoc additions that are to be changed later. Although Home could be taken as a section as it holds a special information design and distribution, it could not be called a “section” for the viewer, home is the homepage for reader, not a section, it is a gateway an index and a teaser.

The navigation system is heavily based on a popup menu which holds all the sections (explained above), so viewing it takes you a mouse-over and is not out there, however, this is a space saver that made the whitespace possible to have on the page. A custom user menu is available for registered users as well where they can keep their own fav sections.

Apart from the top navigation,

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Online advertising, the real deal

Every now and then there’s someone who claims that Middle East is way too slow in adopting Online/Web advertising, which is true. But who does that? Usually the online-ad agencies and it is often taken for granted to a point where marketers are put down and called old-fashioned and old-school thinkers, which I don’t agree with. I believe there should be a need for a technology to be adopted and that’s only possible with knowledge sharing and facts instead of sales brochure data.

To that end, I wrote a tiny peice that was published yesterday on CampaingMe weekly magazine. Here it is. Page impressions don’t mean ads are being read.

Transparency and knowledge sharing are the keywords for such a valuable technology to be successful. And that’s gonna’ happen only when agencies and marketers are on the same page, knowing what exactly online ads are and how the results are converted and turn into another traditional medium only tagged by online.

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Standalone IE6

Couple of months ago I wanted to run a standalone IE7 beta1,2 but the last few days I was in the search for a way to use a standalone IE6 after I upgraded to IE7. Many developers have come accross this, for sure. Brilliant solutions are out there for standalone IE installations, but there’s one that comes with less hassle than the rest. It’s Yousif Al Saif’s multipe IE installer that installs IE3 thru IE6. I never even blinked an eye for users who used versions of IE lower than IE5.5 but now all I need is IE6.

Try out multipe IE installer by Yousif Al Saif and have all the versions of IE while enjoying the use of IE7. I’d recommend IE7 and IE6, since I’m going to discontinue support for IE5.5 users on my work.

On another note, I found this Wikipedia entry on IE, very informative with a timeline and a flashback to the early days. Nice to read.

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ME portals health check

In the next few days I’ll be starting a new series of reviews and I’ll examine the news portals in the Middle East. I’m going to evaluate Design, Information Architecture, and most important than all Ads real value (not price) based on content visibility and navigation through out portals’ pages.

Starters, I’m going to digest 7days and move on to bigger portals of likes of AMEInfo, AlJazeera and AlArabeya.

Update:I was asked to clarify the criteria and the testing environment, here it goes:

• Screen resolution: 1024×768
• Browsers: IE6, IE7, FF, Safari 2 (rough test, not so strict)
• Connection speed: 1MBit

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IE7 replacing my FF

When I first started using FF was when I needed to have a better browser for standard-based design testing and implementation. It soon became my default browser and over time after installing a bunch of extensions I was not able to go back to IE, IE came short to go back to. Opera was always my second choice if not IE, even that was ditched. I shifted back to using IE, well, IE7.

FF covered a need

Back when I shifted to FF, I was searching for a method to x-browser test and do that fast. The method I chose was to find the best implementor of valid CSS and XHTML rendering which FF provided, so testing on FF meant having to adjust and provide some little hacks for IE and Safari in the polishing phase.

IE’s good now

Even though this took me a bit to decide, you know how IE could get scary and ditch you, but, well, it’s(it’d be) the most used browser. Numbers and figures matter more and now that it’s close to FF rendering and does give a little value to your clean markup it’s okay to use it for x-browsing testing as well. I’d still have FF for my testing base, but as a user I’m back to IE, and I’d be using IE7, it just makes sense, I have all that I needed on FF on IE7, all the extensions/add-ons are available on IE7–del.icio.us buttons, netvibes buttons, links and bookmarklets, dev-toolbar and tabs, nothing comes short while it’s handy. Not forget the font smoothing, i’m digin’ it!

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Literally ripped off

I was lucky to find the last copy of Communicate magazine at Spinneys, as usual some other magazine has to always catch my eyes for the first time and make me buy it; it was the Web Designer magazine. While it’s not bad at all, it ain’t that good! And most importantly, I feel ripped off, the price printed on the magazine is £5.99 which is around AED 30, well, I was ripped off! I bought it for AED 62! That’s like double the price!

The magazine’s price wasn’t an issue cuz I always value magazines with the content and what could be closer to my heart more than web-design? I’m still trying to figure out a way of thinking that I at least got something out of the magazine. And the answer is, I never knew the European New Media market was suffering from lack of talent as well. It’s the cover feature, Creative Careers.

According to web-designer magazine:

The market is crying out for candidates with creative input

Not forgetting the last issue of Communicate magazine stressing on the same with the whole dedicated issue featured as the Talent Crunch. It sounds like it is a global problem.

The magazine makes a nice little list of positions in the creative web-designing market. I’d like you to have it read as well, it’s nicely put together.

* Art Worker, Skills with Photoshop and a through knowledge of HTML are essential for this role to turn rough sketches into proper graphics

• Designer, you should have superb Photoshop skills because designers need to turn concepts into rough sketches.

• Flash Designer, Entire websites or dynamic elements all use Flash these days. You must know Macromedia’s software inside out.

• Information Architect, Essential to have an understanding of how people will use a specific website. Information architects design user interfaces and structure a web site’s information for easy access.

• Art Directors, The lead designer of website design who steers the project to completion and ensures that a client’s brief is fulfilled.

• Creative Directors, sets the tone and style of a project, but is less hands-on than the art director because they have more contact with clients.

• Project Manager, They will be responsible for the costing, planning and sourcing of any extra elements such as specialized staff in order to successfully complete a project.

Even though I was ripped off this morning, well the magazine didn’t but the reseller(Jashanmal) did, I’d still recommend it to every web-designer who’s looking for some neat tutorials and goodies in a CD as well as the magazine with hundreds of advices from Freelancer all around the world.

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Does language matter?

Having a website or an online service in your own language is a plus? Or? How much does a website language matter to you?

On a scale of 1-10 how much do you care for websites content to be in your local language instead of English? Explain why, in your own language.

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Microsite: Spalding

There are micro-sites and micro-sites. No one ever said that if it’s flash then all your Navigation are supposed to be all weired and unpredictable? That’s right. Check out Spalding’s micro-sites. With the new NBA ball on the grips, check out why Spalding has to be #1 in basketball. You play ball? Then you know how Spalding to ballers is like how Mac is to designers. A piece of quality.

There isn’t much of interactivity that would tickle your senses but more of realism that make you feel you’re visiting a gear-shop. Just as if you were touching and feeling the basketballs. That good.

Need help buying the right ball? Answer the questioner and you’re guided to the best fitting ball.

Long story short, it’s the amount of static-interactivity and the care for brand that shows in the micro-site that pushes such a great brand forward. It’s about connecting with the brand, and the baller. Such a work.

Check it out for yourself at http://spalding.com/basketball/

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Get sick and try Gmail Mobile

I’ve been under the weather for the past few days, flue and fever all the time. Been spending most of my days either in bed or just lying down. But did I get my new black MacBook on my lap to check mail? I didn’t. To be honest I didn’t touch my laptop, all I was doing was striking the keys on my mobile keypad. Isn’t that so amazing? And on top of all that I used Gmail Mobile client that I posted about last week. I found out more about it.

Shortcuts feel better on Mobile

Keypad shortcuts are amazing in Gmail Mobile client, they make your tasks as easy as making mouse clicks, even easier, you know how keypads are more handy. While the web-based version of the Gmail for mobile was cool, the client is a connected application, it’s completely there with all the context menus for every message and not forgetting how easy it is to remember the few tasks’ shortcut keys.

• 1 = Search in e-mails
• 2 = Compose Mail
• 3 = Mark as read
• * = Add Star
• 8 = Report spam
• 7 = Delete
• 4 = Reply
• 6 = Forward
• 0 = Goto Inbox

I wrote the above list in the order that I remembered them trying to test what I’ve learned so far.

Composing and replying

For a spell-check (F7 in Word) lover, a text-area without a spell checker does not count as a console for sending e-mails, but still works, you know, use the so-called internet lingo, and feel as if you’re actually sending an SMS, that makes it easier to write, and guess what, unless you’re writing to a top executive who you haven’t sent anything before, don’t worry, it always gets understood, and it’s cool. I’ve been replying back with 2 liners the whole last week. That was a cool find out.

You contact list in the palm of your hand

Once you want to send an email, you compose, and come to type in a to address, and bam! You get all your Gmail contacts in your face, without even syncing your phone with outlook or entourage, isn’t that something? I certainly think that is! Big time.

Attachments without having MS Word or Adobe PDF

Note that I’m using a small handy mobile, not a smart-phone, nor a PDA. So having opening Word files is a miracle to my mobile. Now guess what, Google Mobile client opens and reads PDF, Word, Excel and Images as of the attachments that I’ve received. I was shocked to see that it actually shows the list of files in Zip files as well, only the list of content, but even that’s amazing!

If I ever learned anything from the last week, it’d be how nice it is to be able to think of e-mails as SMS, I actually spend a total of 2 hours a day only on e-mails(writing and responding), Gmail Mobile client is a big blow to all the push e-mail devices out in the market.

You still don’t have the the Google Mobile client? Point your mobile-browser to www.gmail.com/app and download it.

Don’t tell me you still don’t have a Gmail account! This is a good reason to get you one!

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Back again, no 404

I’m not a fan of being disconnected. On top of that, I can’t take having one of my sites down. I’d understand an accident, I’d tolerate an electric outage, I try to justify with a server melt-down. But not more than once in a year. Dreamhost has done that to me more than 5 times in the last six months. DB outage has been killing lately, there’s no day that I don’t get a “host not found” error. I don’t like it. In brief I’m looking for a better host. MT on top of my list, any others you think?

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