Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

I absolutely think you should provide english translation functionality for the website. As either a marketer or a customer, I cannot read Arabic.

Hi Nour Elzeny

Nice website!! If you targeting Arab Region only, then your website is very pleasant; Going internationally with Arabic language will be difficult for international audience.

So you should design option for Non – Arabic audience. You also refer www.bbc.com, they have designed website in 43 languages around the world, that’s way they are very trustful and international.

I hope this will help!

Regards,

M Bhor

This is where having an old school friend, Mark,who is a Cambridge University educated Arabist and Persian scholar comes in handy! Actually Google made a reasonable job of the basic translation even though Mark said that Google Arab to English translation results were crass, unsubtle, bland, grammatically poor etc, etc in comparison to the original! But what do you expect from a guy who’s helped write two Arabic dictionaries, works in academia in the Middle East and thinks that the web is a bore!

Your website content is very good – I couldn’t help but compare it to several similar UK sites which are rather trivial in comparison. One problem is that unless the visitor is going to subscribe or take part in your site interactively, there are only a lot of Listings and reviews in the accessible areas. If you want people to sign up, I think that you probably need to give the casual visitor a bit more food for thought.

Overall the balance of colours and text are pleasing and the layout is very easy to navigate – until that is you come to those dreaded links which inform me that “I am not authorised to access this page” There’s nothing wrong with restricted pages, they simply shouldn’t be so easy to surf to from the main landing page.

Obviously if you are going to market this to American and European non-Arabic speakers, having tandem pages in English would be useful – and French and Spanish too, I would have thought.

All in all, pretty good. Good luck.


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions