Features of the Website Al Jazeera English - Coursework Example

Website Review: Al Jazeera English Introduction Al Jazeera is an Arabic term which means “island”. It is also the of the only independent Middle Eastern news station. Al Jazeera started in 1996 as a television network headquartered in Doha, Qatar, an Arabic news and current affairs satellite TV channel. Today, Al Jazeera has expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty TV channels in multiple languages, and in several regions of the world (Allied, 2007). This includes Al Jazeera, the original international Arabic-language 24-hour news channel launched in 1996; Al Jazeera Sports, a popular Arabic-language sports channel launched in 2003; Al Jazeera Mobasher, also known as Al Jazeera Live, a live politics and public interest channel which broadcasts conferences in real time without editing or commentary, launched in 2005; Al Jazeera Childrens Channel, also known as JCC, a childrens interest channel launched in 2005; Al Jazeera English, a global English-language 24-hour news channel launched in 2006; and Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, an Arabic language documentary channel launched in 2007 (Wiki-Al Jazeera, 2008). Al Jazeera English is the 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel of the Al Jazeera media group. It is the first global English language news channel that is headquartered in the Middle East, which the group believes is a unique position that will shape its destiny of becoming the English-language channel of reference for Middle Eastern events. With reference to Al Jazeera Arabic, its mother company and the historically significant broadcast of Osama bin Laden’s statements after September 11, 2001, Al Jazeera English aims to give voice to untold stories, promote debate, and challenge established perceptions. (Corp Profile, 2008). The internet website of Al Jazeera English is located at http://english.aljazeera.net/. This paper critically reviews the Al Jazeera English website in terms of content, design, functionality and navigation, as well as proposes technical and journalistic improvements to the site and its contents. Content Like most news websites, Al Jazeera English presents its headline news on its front page. But being an Islam-oriented site, the headline news consists of Islamic country/people-related news items. Also on the front page are quick links to world news; sports; programmes; focus features, analysis and comments; Al Jazeera English TV schedule; and featured videos. The front page also contains quick links to jobs with Al Jazeera, emails related to published articles, a search link and a link to the Arabic version. An interesting feature is the “Mecca time” displayed along with the “last update date”. And it is pleasing to note that the only advertisement on the front page is a banner ad at the top of the page. Compared with other news websites of Middle Eastern origin, Al Jazeera seems to be faring well. Al Arabiya, is a Saudi Arabian organisation which was established in response to Al Jazeera in 2003. Currently its website content primarily focuses also on Islam-oriented news stories but there is more content variety on Al Jazeera. Al Arabiya includes most sections present at Al Jazeera but the latter has more interesting selections, options and links (Al Arabiya, 2008) Another competitor is Al-Alam, established in 2006 by the Islamic Republic of Iran. It seeks to disseminate news in a sincere and impartial manner by keeping a moderate line and avoiding stirring religious and ethnic strife (Al Alam, 2008). The Al Alam website currently features regular global news items without seeming focus on Arabic or Islam-oriented stories. There are other competitors for Al Jazeera in terms of websites displaying Middle Eastern focus. Al Hurra is an Arabic-language satellite TV station for the Middle East devoted primarily to news and information (Al Hurra, 2005). According to a Wiki entry (Wiki-Al Jazeera, 2008), Al Hurra is forbidden to broadcast to the US under the provisions of the Smith-Mundt Act. But a Zogby poll found that 1% of Arab viewers watch Al Hurra as their first choice. Currently, the Al Hurra website is a potpourri of sections which doesn’t depict it as a TV news channel site, rather as a general portal for all around goodies. Other competitors worthy of consideration would be the big name TV news networks such as BBC World, CNN International, France 24, Russia Today and Press TV. These channels’ websites present news in Arabic with a slight focus on Middle Eastern/ Islamic interests but they would not be valid entities to compare with Al Jazeera because of differing objectives. Navigation The Al Jazeera English website is not a very busy website. Therefore, navigation can be accomplished with relative ease. The site has strategically used headlines, boxes, main headings and positioning. It is quite easy to find your way around the site and choose what to look at. Each page is labeled appropriately and news articles are presented with a first paragraph synopsis which helps the reader decide whether to read the entire page or not. News item pages also include feedback sections which allow readers to post reactions and comments on the posted news. Section links provide more links to other content which supports ease of navigation. The Search link provides access to archived information within the site. However, the search argument only works with the search button, not the keyboard “enter” key. To the extent of website review conducted, no broken links were present in all the navigation buttons of the website, which speaks about the quality maintenance of the site. In terms of navigation, Al Arabiya compares well with Al Jazeera and seems to load pages faster. An interesting feature of navigation in the Al Arabiya site is that it presents its collection of videos in a page with options on what to click aside from the one featured on the front page, unlike that of Al Jazeera which presents its videos one-at-a time. The Al Alam website, in its current state does not seem comparable as it deals with regular news, not focused on the Middle East. Style and Design The style and design of the Al Jazeera English website is clean, conservative and quite straightforward. The Al Jazeera Arabic portal website is visually a lot busier and contains more creative and artistic elements. That having been said, the English site looks like a neophyte in terms of web savvy, like a young country cousin of the more experienced Al Jazeera Arabic organisation. The colour scheme employed at the English site uses earth tones unlike the blues of the Arabic site. The navigation buttons on the left hand side are set in a dark shade of grey on a white background which does not provide highlight, since the front page new stories are in similar colour and background. Assuming that the audience of the English site would be English speakers, who will most probably be viewers of more popular English TV news websites, the Al Jazeera English website style and design does not seem attention-grabbing nor appealing to these type of viewers, unless of course the viewer intent is merely to get hold of Middle Eastern/Islamic – oriented news. It is interesting to note that the most popular TV news websites like CNN and BBC use prominent reds in their site designs to highlight major elements in their pages to draw viewer attention. The Al Arabiya website, with its reds and blues seem to have more attractive pages for viewing and present better design and layout. In terms of design, the Al Jazeera English website does not offer much attraction to arrest the viewer to it pages. Unless the design is deliberate, the style used by the website is not a key factor for increasing viewership. This leads one to think that the objective of the website is merely to provide web presence to the TV channel, and as an alternative source of information for about the news items it broadcasts on television, rather than to develop an internet following of its news coverage. Functionality Since Al Jazeera English is a relatively uncomplicated site, functionality is good. The website pages load up in reasonable time even with slow connections. All links work and branch-outs to new pages work properly. Existing functionalities for visitor interaction include weather by major city in the world; the search function; TV schedule by time zone or country; English live streams; a blog-type “Your Views” section; podcasts for subscription; article tools for emailing, printing, or sending feedback; and job applications through email. With all these functionalities, the Al Jazeera English website actually works faster and more efficiently than other TV news channel websites which are loaded with features, options and links. Critique and Recommendations Web content is the textual, visual or aural content that is experienced by visitors of a website. According to Rosenfeld & Morville (1998), website content includes documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. The specific contents that a website will contain is always decided on by the organisation or business that owns the site, with decisions based on the objectives that the website aims to accomplish as well as the target audience it aims to serve. From its published statements, Al Jazeera English, the TV news channel, rather than the website, wants to be the English-language channel of reference for Middle Eastern events. For the Al Jazeera English website to similarly be the English-language website of reference for Middle Eastern events, it must include content that will make the site readily searchable by the popular engines using key words related to its purpose. Otherwise, the Al Jazeera English website may have to rely on other means to promote visits to the site such as advertising through its TV channel and other forms of advertising and promotions to reach its target audience which are assume to be English speaking visitors interested in Middle East, Arab, Muslim, Islam news. Moreover, to create a loyal following, the Al Jazeera English website will need to include content that will be uniquely available in its site, not merely another copy or another version of news already available in the more popular, bigger and international TV news websites which also feature Middle Eastern news. Since Al Jazeera is headquartered in Qatar within the Middle East, there may be benefit in developing the organization to feature grass roots local news and events, from a local perspective, which may not be easily covered by the news giants. This may be a good niche to fill as there seems to be no aggressive local player yet for news and events reporting through the internet for the Middle Eastern region. Good web design is the same as good design. One needs to explore the space and layout, handle fonts and colours, and put it all together in a format that puts the message across. Fonts and typography define the way text will look on a web page. Colour dresses up a website and draws attention to elements on a page. There is a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Graphics and images on a web page accomplish just that. Layout is how elements or sections are organised on the web page. The degree of importance of these elements influences how they are laid out (Kymin, 2008). For a cursory onlooker, there is nothing wrong with the design and layout of the Al Jazeera English website. However, there is also nothing spectacular or attention-grabbing about it. From the look and feel, design point of view, there is no strong come-on for a visitor to revisit the site. This may be because, there is no distinctive element in how the pages look, nothing that will make a visitor visually remember it by, as distinctly different from other pages on the internet. The Al Jazeera English website pages actually follow most of the rules of good layout and design but they lack a differentiating style. Considering that the site proclaims itself as a Middle Eastern news site, it may be advisable that graphic images and colours which can be distinctly related to Middle Eastern culture be added to the site. The Al Jazeera Arabic site definitely looks Arabic because all text are in Arabic script, but since the English site is not, there is no Arabic flair presented, except for the small gold logo on the upper left-hand corner of the banner. The Middle East has a rich and colourful culture with distinct icons, images and colours that can be used for the site. Navigation schemes in web site design should be consistent throughout the entire web site and should allow visitors to find what they are searching for quickly and easily. Basic website navigation schemes include text links, graphic navigation buttons, graphic image maps, drop-down menus and dynamically generated URLs (Grantastic, 2006). Currently, navigation at the Al Jazeera English website is quite good and straightforward. That is because the content elements are not very many and the website is not very busy. The design of navigation schemes will be an issue if and when Al Jazeera English decides to put in more features into its website that it currently has, which all depends on what the site owners actually want to site to achieve. The functionality of a website is the interactive part of the site which allows the visitor to respond in some way to something which the site presents. Since the Internet allows more than one channel of communication, it is pointless to have a website that does not provide some form of visitor interactivity (Just Imagine, 2007). Currently, the functionalities provided by the Al Jazeera English website all work very well. However, the types of functionalities are common ones found in most other sites, such as search, weather, email and the like. Again, the decision on which functionalities should be included in a website depend on the objectives of the site – whether it is to gather visitor information, allow the visitor to provide feedback, provide the visitor with extra services aside from main ones, and many others. Conclusion Considering the already prominent stature of Al Jazeera as a news organisation, Al Jazeera English is a very welcome addition to the group for serving news requirements of an English-speaking audience interested in Middle Easter news and events. Moreover, the launch of the Al Jazeera English website is also a very welcome development especially for English-speaking individuals who have no access to Al Jazeera English TV. It is therefore somewhat disappointing in many aspects to find that the website had very little points of interest to invite frequent visitors. The objectives for the website may need to be re-established in order to direct how the site will be organised in terms of content, design, navigation and functionalities in order to attract a wider audience as well as differentiate it from other TV news websites. References Al Alam. (2008) Home page. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.alalam.ir/English/ Al Arabiya. (2008). Home page. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.alarabiya.net/english/ Al Hurra. (2005). About us. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.alhurra.com/Sub.aspx?ID=266 Allied Media Corp. (2007). History of Al Jazeera Television. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.allied-media.com/aljazeera/JAZhistory.html Al Jazeera English. (2008). Corporate profile. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://english.aljazeera.net/aboutus/2006/11/2008525185555444449.html Al Jazeera. (2008). Wikipedia. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera English.aljazeera.net. (2008). Home page. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://english.aljazeera.net Grantastic Designs. (2006). Navigation schemes in website design. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/navigation.html Just Imagine. (2007). Website functionality. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://www.justimagine.net/website_functionality.html Kymin, J. (2008). Web design basics. Retrieved 22 October 2008, from http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignbasics/u/webdesignbasics.htm Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P. (1998). Information architecture for the world wide web. Designing large-scale web sites. O’Reilly Media, Inc. Read More