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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