It felt like the cirque de soleil of conferences with a healthy mix of audience engagement, ranging from an abrupt ovation for our country with a national anthem who intent was to rebase the audience back to our country’s patriotic roots, to motivational talks which engaged the audience in a 30 second breathing exercise and acknowledgement of people in adjacent seats–all designed to underline the prominence of “presence”, “awareness” and connecting. The topic on energy for a change focused on solutions and the Thar coal mines, whose 4% reserves are enough to sustain the entire country. Micro-finance seems to be another recurring theme in the financial and charitable circles and there was plenty of quantification and empirical evidence of it being implemented and working in Pakistan. All talks came from people who are out there on the field, accomplishing these things.

The talks had plenty of substance and mind fodder. It’s easy to get pigeon-holed into our respective trades so it was a good change to get a richer, broader perspective from people across the various walks of life.

It’s a shame that it will be another year before the next TEDx, but I’m hoping there are other forums in between that continue the discussion.

Building large scale systems like The Express Tribune news portal and turning it around in 6 months requires a team of determined masochists and some really quick thinking. One has to think about scalability, performance, security, architecture and pliability of the product. One also has to think about usability, information architecture and layouts. About user interactivity, community engagement and publication workflows. Integration with television and print and a coherent new media strategy.

But it’s here and it’s far from over. Going in, I was confident that we would easily come out ahead of the competition (whom I have written about here and here) but I never thought I would have so much fun doing it.

The Express Tribune website uses some existing platforms and our developer toolkit is quite powerful, but to get to where we wanted to go, we got neck deep in every aspect of the system.

Beyond being just a pretty website, it has some behind the scenes features where it really shines out. This is where the competition has a lot of catching up to do. For example, assigning headlines and stories to sections or updating the page layout happens directly from the section itself, rather than going in to some specialized administrative screen. The image management and carousels are first class features and not just an after thought. The News in Pictures and slide shows can be done in under 5 minutes. The pages load blazingly fast, because we optimized not only the caching mechanisms but also the web server, database server, application server and even the operating system.

The user interface follows some hard principles. For example, the comment preview feature is painstakingly simple and dynamic so users know exactly how their words will appear. The submit button is below the comment preview by design, so the user is forced to preview on his way to the submit button. The design follows a horizontal rhythm using grid-based layouts. The weather widget updates the weather without having to refresh the page and on the back end we do some very specific caching so we can handle thousands of users, yet provide the latest weather updates or auto updating stock charts. The alerts ticker is directly linked to the Express 24/7 television station which requires some trickery on the part of both, the television platform as well as the web platform.

The interesting bits about strategy are something I cannot talk about other than to say that if the website works well for you and you find yourself interacting more and more, it’s because we put the user first. And in the short and long term both, our strategy will allow us to surpass the competition and out-pace them so we maintain the lead.

With internet penetration growing the way it is, I have no doubt that The Express Tribune portal will provide common ground for a lot of avid readers and have interesting side effects.

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 me 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.

Simply download timezone.exe (unzip the file timezone.exe to c:\ or something) and run this command which specified the starting and ending times as hour-minute-day:

timezone.exe 00-01-06 00-01-11

The timezone.exe utility updates the relevant registry keys and you’re good to go.

1. The unwelcoming invitation for dawn.com Beta is like the annoying popup ads you get on cheap warez sites. They could have at least tucked it in a corner instead of having it overlap navigation and content. And whatever happened to using cookies and giving users a “Do not ask me again” option. It’s an extra ~20 lines of code in the absence of which this annoying popup is displayed to the many thousands on every visit, every day.
   
2. The website is optimized for 800×600. This is 2008. Only 8% of users use that resolution. 86% use 1024×768 or higher which provides 30% more screen real estate. All that space can be put to good use. This is a common problem with developers here who have very little interest in the discipline and read little or no literature pertaining to their field. If nothing else, I would suggest that the Dawn.net team take some lessons from news.bbc.co.uk or iht.com and follow their design principles, if they have any principles to begin with.
3. The URLs are completely meaningless. They could have slapped together a few regular expressions with mod_rewrite or equivalent and respected the URL as a UI. Even if they fix this now, the older links will become obsolete and result in all existing links to those stories to break, a common problem known as link rot. Why downgrade from existing dawn.com/2008/02/28 type URLs?
4. Placing advertisements in the main navigation is not only annoying it is a negative user experience. If they understood point (2) they would not be struggling to squeeze in these ads. Worse still, the advertisements cause navigation to drop below the page fold (the area which is not immediately visible and can only be reached by scrolling). That’s a usability blunder and shows that users are not even a priority. A side by side comparison of BBC’s and Dawn’s menus clearly highlights this intellectual divide:
   
5. There are other design, usability and information architecture issues but I want to keep this post short and avoid a lecture on design and usability so I’ll say a little about their code. I was hoping to find half decent code because it’s such a high profile project but the code is atrocious and even comic relief doesn’t help (skyscraper spelt skycrapper in the code comments). Just consider the following code pattern that occurs close to a dozen times:

   <script type="text/javascript"><!--
   var x = 0;
   var feaz = 0;
   // --></script>
   <script type="text/javascript"><!--
   feaz ++;
   x ++ ;
   switch (x)
   {
     case 1:
   	document.write('
   <td width="280" align="left" valign="top" class="fbg">...</td>
   ')
   	break; 
   
     case 2:
   	document.write('
   <td width="280" align="left" valign="top" class="fbg">...</td>
   ')
   	break;
   
     case 3:
   	document.write('
   <td width="280" align="left" valign="top" class="fbg">...</td>
   ')
   	break;
   
     case 4:
   	document.write('
   <td width="280" align="left" valign="top" class="fbg">...</td>
   ')
   	break;
   
   }
   // --></script>
   

   I never came across such code even when I was teaching Introduction to Programming at university. Why would anyone write a switch statement which says if value is 1, print X, if value is 2, print X, if value is 3 print X and if value is 4, print X. Why use a switch statement if all conditions print the same thing? It defies common logic. It’s code like this that causes pain down the line and simple feature requests can take days to implement and introduces bugs waiting to go off like land mines.

6. There are no semi-colons to terminate some of those JavaScript statements (line 11) which is standard practise. HTML is being output using JavaScript when just plain HTML output would do (line 11). Unless there are very good reasons, the middle-tier is supposed to handle this sort of logic, not the front-end. The table cell has a CSS class which should be used for styling but the style elements are also defined using inline HTML (line 11). So if you wanted to increase the width of the columns, you must edit both the CSS and the HTML. What then is the purpose of using CSS? It defeats the whole purpose of CSS. The code uses meaningless and arbitrary variable names (lines 2 and 3).
7. If you look at the CSS files (main.css and component.css) it’s plain to see that no one taught these developers what the Cascading in Cascading Style Sheets means. I also noticed some redundant CSS. Why write the same code twice? It takes up bandwidth, takes up more time rendering, more time to maintain and introduces bugs (developer updates one snippet but forgets to update the second identical snippet). The main.css is 34KB and the component CSS is 52KB. Then there’s some inline CSS. Wow! news.bbc.co.uk has a layout way more intricate and its ~65KB versus Dawn.net’s ~90KB of CSS. For example dawn’s h5 and h6 elements have the exact same style but instead of defining them using the same CSS block, Dawn.net repeats the 12 lines of code again. Dawn barely stylized its header/footer or menu bar. Even with 90KB of bad CSS, Dawn uses images for section headings instead of styled text. Imagine trying to manage or sift through 5000 lines of CSS code for the most minor aesthetic changes. I am considering using their CSS to exemplify what not to do in any future webdev presentations.

How can one even move to more serious guidelines for web development. I am so befuddled by this code I cringe just thinking about what kind of blunders they have committed in the back-end and middle-tier. This website does not even come up to par with most blogs out there, let alone be worthy of a news website. Even their current dawn.com website is a class-act in comparison and that has been around since at least 1997.

I am guessing this new website is going to be rife with problems going forward given its precarious state. Feature requests will probably take days to implement because of the poor architecture, and cryptic and unmanageable code. The only winners here would probably be the contractors billing Dawn for weeks/months of labour for even the most meagre feature request. And sadly, dawn.net might be in a bit of a sticky situation here with their contractors. If you want to get rich, build something that only you can maintain and takes you days to change so the client is locked in and ends up paying hefty amounts.

Update 8/31/2008: They don’t even have spell check in their CMS (Pakistan spelt Paklistan in title). It’s hard to image a publishing company using a publishing platform without spell check. Even my blog has spell check.

Update 10/31/2008: Sore eyes can seek out News Watch Pakistan as a considerably better alternative.

PTLC’s plot to maximize customer retention into this plan is elaborate and operates at multiple tiers. Their business division and top business planners will probably get a nice bonus this year for devising such an ingenious plot to defraud customers.

The plot behind the fraud

• PTCL has introduced a Nationwide calling plan which at a cost of Rs.199 per month provides 5,000 minutes of talk time to any city in Pakistan. The obvious contention is that PTCL has enabled this on all PTCL lines by default and most users are unaware they are automatically subscribed and being charged Rs.199 per month.
• The bold print of the PTCL advertisement claims Nationwide is a free plan while the smaller print immediately following states there is a Rs.199 monthly fee for this plan. Which is it? The barely legible print of the advertisement states that the plan is limited to 5000 minutes. See the first advertisement
• Another PTCL Nationwide advertisement claims there are no hidden charges and the fine print then clarifies there are no hidden charges only if the customer cancels out of this plan. It is akin to someone telling you that a car has no hidden charges if you don’t decide to buy it. See the second advertisement.
• The cancellation instructions are to call 1236 and I called the number about 8 times over the course of half an hour. If you follow the prompts the final prompt says press 1 to confirm cancellation. After you press 1 the phone line goes silent for 30 seconds. Most people will hang up before 30 seconds are up thinking they have now opted out. The elaborate plot by PTCL is engineered to misdirect it’s subscribers. As I mentioned, the business division at PTCL have put their collective minds together to come up with this elaborate plot.
• 20% of the time, in my experience the 1236 number has been busy. This results in lesser call volume and subsequently lesser cancellations. The persistent customer will keep trying but will still fail at the final prompt.
• So you got through to 1236 and you pressed 1 at the final cancellation prompt and you waited 30 seconds and hoping you are now finally opted out. Actually 8 out of 8 times that I called, I got a message saying “The system is busy, please try again later”. At that point I was ready to give up as will most customers. So finally the customer really has no way to opt out of the system.
• This is not first time PTCL has done this. PTCL pulled the same stunt a year or so back with their Voice Mail feature which was activated on all phone lines by default. That scheme also generate tremendous revenues for PTCL.

How to cancel

Luckily for me, after failing 8 times the ninth time I dialed 1236 and decided to check on my voice mail feature and through that prompt I was able to get through to an operator. To cancel you can quickly follow these instructions without waiting to listen to the instructions on the phone:

• call 1236
• Press 2 for english (1 for urdu)
• Press 3 for voice mail setup
• Press 1 for voice mail activation/deactivation
• Ask operator to cancel your nationwide and voice mail if activated

Spread the word so that people can cancel. The last date to cancel without penalty was 31 December which means you are already too late.

Following the buzz online revealed the following bloggers speaking about the meetup:

• Ali Raza Shaikh, co-founder of acquired company Mulazamat
• Osama A, of Green and White
• Jehan Ara, president of P@SHA
• Jawwad Farid, of Alchemya
• Fahad Ahmed
• Mohtashim of IT Tazee