Annahar’s New Website

- Fresh, new look -

The new design is a big improvement on its predecessor. It has a clean look and has lost the bells and whistles that made it slow to launch and annoying to browse. Over all, the website is now more logical, easier to read and generally much fresher to look at.

I have a few (minor) usability notes though:

The horizontal navigation menu sometimes feels like a treasure-hunt. For example, to go from the section ( مقالات ) to the sub-section (كتابنا) , you have to drag your mouse pointer precisely in that narrow blue strip or you’ll have to do it all over again. Clearly no thought was given to older people who don’t necessarily have the hand stability of surgeons.

The site is surprisingly “flat” in the sense that sub-sections (like محليات ) have dedicated pages but main sections (like سياسة) don’t. I say surprisingly because these middle pages can have ads in them and generate revenue.

There is no page dedicated to today’s columns and Op-Eds. We do find them in a home page sidebar, but this could be confusing to users who come from search engines straight to deep pages. We do have a page with smiling photos of writers. Very sweet, but not useful to those who want to know who wrote what today.

A few final nitpicks: The links to Facebook, PDF and Audio edition are dead, the RSS icon points to the YouTube Channel and the grey search box lacks prominence and could easily be missed (but kudos for keeping Yamli). Obviously, this is still a work in progress.

All in all, I’m happy with the new redesign and I’m hopeful that the rough edges will be fixed with time.

Related: Review of the new Daily Star ‘s website redesign.