The Jang News website is one that just keeps getting worse with each passing day. When I wrote a review of Dawn.com Beta website launch, I highlighted their technical and interface shortcomings but the Jang News’ website is not worthy of even that. It’s lacklustre and shows absolutely no concern for its readers or the news that it serves.

The website is a big hoarding with no less than 20 advertisements on the front page while at the same time carries less than 100 words of actual news. And it looks really ugly.

This is what happens when you just don’t care about the readers. This is what happens when designers develop, developers design, business units dictate the roadmap and talent in general lacks. This is also what happens when you just don’t understand interaction design, information architecture, usability or have been oblivious to the paradigm shifts in online advertising and technological trends. This screen capture of the Jang News website clearly highlights all this.

The actual news content is highlighted in green boxes while the rest of the page is mostly advertisements. All ad slots highlighted in red are available for sale while unsold ad space is used for in-house products. The advertising tariffs section of the website indicates the type of ads available for sale on Jang News Online which includes video and expandable ads at a premium. The annoying expandable ads block access to the news until readers close them (shown in the screen capture) while video ads block the rest of the page because they take so long to load (Pakistan has very low broadband penetration in any case).

Jang News Online gets a considerable amount of traffic because the Jang News Group has entrenched itself as the face of news over the past 70 years that it has been around–a time during which it enjoyed little or no competition which helps explain their complacency.

Now, I am not even sure why an advertiser would want to publish one ad amongst 20 when it’s well known that users develop banner blindness and moreover the website’s ad space is extremely diluted and the screen interface is so cluttered.

The page reminds of the days popup ads ran rampant until readers expressed rage and all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, et al) reacted by featuring popup blockers to put an end to it all. Unfortunately, in Jang’s case it’s not easy to block the spam. The website’s front page is practically an online hoarding which seems to take it’s cue from the million dollar homepage (whose sole purpose is to show advertisements) rather than a news site. One may easily pass this off as spam in its current state.

Microsoft Innovation Center hosted the Microsoft Web Days session today where I gave a talk about online strategy and development (in a nutshell). Even thought it was in a nutshell, I slipped in some details which meant skimming over a lot of other things during latter part of the brief 30 minute presentation. The presentation covered frameworks, interaction design, business models, strategies, tools, trends and user experience among other things.

Tr.im is a URL shortening services useful for applications like Twitter where the length of posts is restricted to around 140 letters and short URLs are desirable. Recently tr.im announced that it was going out of business and shutting down but soon after they reversed their position and Eric Woodward offered to bear the costs of operations out of his own pocket if donations fell short. A move that is probably even worse than shutting down.

Earnings season is upon us. Today the DOW touched it’s highest annual level of 9000 while the Nasdaq jumped 2.9%, it’s twelfth daily consecutive gain. Following is a summary of interesting earnings highlights in the tech sector to show just where things stand.

I was introduced to the various serialization options in .NET while trying to build the JSON and XML filters for ASP.NET MVC. In this post I’ll take a look at the different JSON serializers available in .NET and the reasons to pick one over the other.