Blue Chi’s

I almost visit the website of the Times of Oman on daily basis, as a Omani person currently living outside the country, I depend on websites such as this one to know what is happening in Oman. While globally all newspapers know that the present is on the web and most people read everything online, newspapers in Oman live in the stone age as they make their profits from mass government and business subscriptions to stay alive. They can print out white paper and they will still sell because of stupid government and business subscriptions. I am not sure whether these people who run these newspapers are oblivious to what is happening around the world or maybe they just do not care.

Anyway, the Times of Oman website is the ONLY English newspaper website that I visit it – because they have an RSS feed, and it is broke and annoying, but I don’t have a choice about it. I have no idea when the website of the Times of Oman was launched or designed, but I can bet that it did not change one bit since it was launched. The website is cluttered like hell, hard to navigate, uncomfortable to read, and is unbelievable wasting advertising slots from which they can be making money. Here are my suggestions on how to make the Times of Oman a bearable website:

Remove The Clutter

If you look at the homepage of Times of Oman you instantly notice that it is a total mess. There are three horizontal rows on top and five coloumns in the body of the page. Those who designed this website have obviously not read “Don’t Make Me Thing“. People do not read the text of every link and heading on a webpage, they simply click on the first thing they see with a visual cue on what they are looking for. A cluttered page such as this one simply frustrates users and makes them decide to leave your website quickly.

The page has so many unnecessary things, why does the header of every single page on top have stuff like  ”advertise”, “e-paper”, and “make us your homepage”? The majority of people visit a website are those who came through a search engine and will NOT land on your homepage, but on a content page and their priority would obviously not be to make your their homepage or advertise with you. In fact, a regular visitor is most probably not an advertiser.

Why does the side menu have all these stupid links to e-greetings, HOROSCOPE, and flight schedule?! Do people REALLY REALLY check the website of Times of Oman to see what their horoscope says? I bet that NOBODY EVER CHECKS THESE. I mean, who the hell will use the Times of Oman e-greeting service?! 

The first thing that Times of Oman needs to do is install Google Analytics and track which sections are actually visited and which sections are never used. If nobody is checking this section just remove it. Using an analytics software will also tell you how people visit your website, what they click on once they land, when do they exit your website, etc. It is crazy that Times of Oman does not use any special analytics script (I checked their source code).

Times of Oman must remove all unnecessary things from its header and front page section. We do need to do what the editors’ picks are or what the latest technology thing at the bottom of the page, you do not need 5 coloumns, you do not need all these thumbnails.

Create Logical Navigation Structure

There is a fundamental problem with this website, they seem to not misunderstand the point of a headline. This is a visual cue that is supposed to tell you that a new section starts here. It is supposed to be bigger than the body text or the text below it. All heading texts on this website are SMALLER than the text below them?! They are barely clickable, and on the million coloumns on the front page there is no consistent style or colour to guide you. Some upper headings (Local Flavour and Features) are not even aligned horizontally on the same level.

Other lacking visual cues are weird red arrow indicators below story summaries on the front page. The text of these lists is in the same size and colour as the text above them. You might be lucky to know that these are links if you hover your mouse over them. There are also silly small thumbnails on the side that are not clickable, they look like they are thumbs about the story, so they should link to it, but you cannot click them?! Even the main image on the image is just a one line story, you cannot click on it or on any text below it. I do not know if there is anywhere else on the website to learn more about that. Is it just a random one-line story from India with no more details?!

There is something crazy about the structure of the navigation menu. There are links on top, but these are not navigation links, they just link to weird unnecessary things. There is an LONG list on the side that mixes up real content with silly services that nobody uses. Your main navigation should be distinct from your unimportant content, people will not click it just because it stuck next to important stuff, people are more likely to exit your website if they are frustrated. Main navigation should always be up, and it should ONLY have links to real sections with important info. Not horoscope of e-greetings. 

You don’t need to be creative at all, you do not need to reinvent a wheel to design a simple to use newspaper website. I sketched the layout map below in less than 60 seconds:

Structure is not the only problem as I said, it is visual cues, you need to use distinct colours for links and use conventional colours for icons such as RSS. You do not need a drop down menu for your search field. If people wanted to search the Internet they know where to find Google. They just want to search your website. Make sure that the search field is BIG and make it at the top of every single page on your website.

Remove all stuff which are not important to a regular user, but might be of interest to a more advanced user to the footer. For example, a privacy policy (which they do not have) and the advertisers info page.

Make Your Website More Readable

 Can’t you up the font size a bit? It’s not like you’re wasting ink on it. Content would be more readable by using visual cues and applying different colours for heading and links. I don’t think that I can list all the problems with the actual article pages.  Clutter issues and layout modifications must be made to the actual content pages as well.

Stop Wasting Advertising Space

For how long had Times of Oman had that stupid “advertise on our website” banner? Why can’t they just use Google AdSense and start making money NOW?! Remove all the stupid blank advertisements for the movies and horoscope sections. You are making the website more cluttered and you are not generating money or even making you users stay longer on your website. 

It is possible to make money from regular blocks, text links, feed advertisements, and Google search advertisements, and these people are not using ANY of these. I don’t know, do they just not know that you can put ads on your website and on your feed, or what? Having contextual advertising doesn’t mean you can’t get direct advertising deals because you can stop them at any time.

Of course we can talk forever about how they can enhance their SEO or how they can optimize their website using CSS, but I think that there are way more basic problems with the website to start caring about other things.

I dont’ think that making a new website is expensive, you don’t need to develop a super custom made website from scratch, you can use a free open source system that is better than anything any developer in Oman can ever make you. There are loads of things from Joomla, Drupal, or even WordPress is customized properly.

I don’t know if this is going to be helpful to anyone, but I had to share my frustration with the rest of the world. Can you believe that the Times of Oman won an award at the Oman Web Awards?

I was reading the Times of Oman buggy horrible news feed on Google Reader in Firefox 3, and when I tried clicking on one of their items to view the whole article I was faced with the message above. (Click the image to enlarge)

When I clicked on the button for more info it took me to this automatically generated Google page.

The written stuff are too technical for me to understand, but what I do understand is Times of Oman has some serious issues to take care of.

I got irritated today by a local website that has been making press releases and claims about how popular their website is when in fact nobody EVER heard or visited their website. I am not going to write down the name of their website because this will probably be the best advertisement they might ever have to date, and I don’t think that they deserve it because:

1. They are liars.
2. They scam companies into buying advertising that nobody sees.
3. Their website has no content.

So instead of just complaining about fraud websites, I am going to tell you guys how to know if a website is REALLY popular and not just believe claims they make in the newspaper:

1. Distinguish between server hits, page views, and visits.
1. A server hit is an request to a server, when you open a page, that page might have four images and one sound clip embedded directly in it, so when you visit that page you make 6 hits (for the page, for the four images, and the sound that plays). Hits do not mean visitors or page views, the higher the number of hits does not necessarily mean that your website is more popular as it could easily mean that you website is inefficient and makes too many server requests.
2. A page view is the number of pages accessed in your website, a single visitor might check three pages on the website, so he adds three page views to your count, three page views do not equal three visitors. Page views are usually the measure for paid advertisement on the website because most advertisement are paid per impression (view).
3. A visit is an instance where a user visits your website, browses around and leaves. The visitor may request a 100 hits and could make 10 pageviews. Visitor stats could be divided into two categories, unique visitors and regular visitors. A unique visitor is a visit made through a different machine, a regular visit could be made by the same user visiting your website through different times of the day.
2. So if you see people using the terms above interchangeably then they probably have no idea what they are talking about. In the case of the local website I saw today, I’ve seen them claim that they have 200,000 monthly pageviews previously and today they’re saying they have 200,000 visitors – both figures are most probably made up.
3. Check website stats yourself using public website ranking services, these ARE NOT VERY ACCURATE, but they give you an indication on what is happening, you can compare this to local websites to see who is doing better. I recommend http://www.compete.com/ and http://www.alexa.com/
4. One of the easy things to do is to search Google for the website name, just the name without the www. or the .com part and see how many times it shows up, if the website does not come number 1 or 2 for its own domain name then this website is obviously not known enough, if it has been online for years and is visited by 200,000 people then obviously someone must’ve ‘talked’ about it somewhere or linked to it. If you only find pages from like newspapers press releases they made themselves and partner websites they are commercially tied with, then you know you’ve found a website that nobody visits. A popular website will be linked to from forums, blogs, and all sorts of websites.
5. If you are going to PAY for advertising on a website then you have the right to ask to see their statistics report. If these people are for real they would not mind showing you their actual stats – make sure you check traffic sources, popular pages, and visitor geostats.

I am not sure if people know which website I’m talking about, but my guess is that they receive less than 5000 page views a month – and I’m being very generous!

What most people do not realise is that advertising in traditional media (press, radio, and tv) does NOT convert to web visits. There isn’t a link close enough between reading/listening/watching the ad or the ‘infomercial’ and visiting a website – people will simply not remember you when they go online. The key to success on the internet for content websites is through SEO and linkbait – both of which should be obviously utilized after having some content to promote anyway.

The Times of Oman and Al Shabeeba newspapers launched their mobile phone portals yesterday, it is the first news mobile portal that we have in Oman.

I personally do not think that such mobile portals are as important these days because of RSS. I was already checking news headlines for months and months over my mobile phone via RSS. It is easier to track and to use – in theory at least, but in practice, the RSS feed of Times of Oman is very buggy, the same news item pop up twice every day, the first time is the right one when the news comes up, but the second time they just show up with dead links that do not lead anywhere. It is very annoying, but it works.

I has always been very much irritated by the Times of Oman RSS feed because they are partial. Many people think that partial RSS feeds are pointless. Because of the variety of RSS readers, there is a great chance that I will not be able to click on the read-link, and that is what happens when I am using my mobile reader. I understand that the Times of Oman wants people to visit their page so that they can put advertisements on them, but number 1, it is not working, and number 2, they can just put the advertisement in the freaking RSS feed itself!

Back to topic, I think that the web based portal of Times of Oman is not too bad, but I think that it is way too cluttered, people visit Times of Oman to check the news, not search for restaurants or check their horoscope. It takes forever to actually find and read a news item on this mobile portal.

I do not think that any of the graphics on the Times of Oman mobile portal are necessary whatsoever. I obviously KNOW that I am checking the wap portal for the newspaper, what matters is the Times of Oman brand, not the word MOBILE or the MOBILE LOGO. I also think that the HTML code is ineffective, there is no need for font tags on mobile phones, mobile phones do not usually have the same fonts as computers anyway.

I do not think that I will be visiting the Times of Oman wap portal anytime because I just do not visit websites anymore, I read RSS. I hate their partial fade, and obviously there won’t be an integration between it and the mobile portal. I think that the Times of Oman would offer its readers a better service if they simply made their RSS full and put advertisements on these.

I am so freaked out AND pissed off because the Times of Oman said that the Minister of Commerce was there for the launch of Chemical Orange at eGames yesterday. I would like to clear things out:

1. Our press release did not say anything like that and the Times of Oman made it up, we gave the press release to their photographer who had no idea of what was happening.
2. The Minister of Commerce and Industry was there at the eGames conference, but he was not there at *the* launch of Chemical Orange, I was the very last person to speak on day one, this was at 4.30pm and he probably has no idea what Chemical Orange is.
3. the Times of Oman did not contact us before making any of the changes to our press release and I only knew about it a couple of minutes ago.

This is not nice because it makes us look like a bunch of shameless liars and I thought I had to make it clear that the press release was inaccurate.