Eyeofdubai.com has won the award for the “Website of the Year” from the UAE Web Awards Committee in association with Dubai Internet City, Microsoft and BSA. The website was also recognized by the Committee with a Golden Award for the “Best Travel & Tourism Website” and another Golden Award in the category of “Directories & Info Services.”
The winning website has its foundation in the popular “Eye of Dubai” guidebook which is distributed bi-annually. The comprehensive guidebook, which is endorsed and supported by the Dubai government, provides the latest information about the emirate and includes maps of popular destinations and detailed reviews about all aspects of life in the city. The bilingual EyeofDubai.com puts many elements of the guidebook online and adds interactive services and information relating to business, social, lifestyle and financial news. The website also provides access to e-government and general services.
Unfortunately EyeofDubai has some very annoying advertising that can’t easily be turned off. Disabling “active scripting” shuts down the advertising, but also shuts down some of the site’s functionality. The best method to cope with the manic ads running down the side of the site is to reduce the size of the browser window so they aren’t visible. This is not what the developers intended, but it actually works well since EyeofDubai.com was created with a “fixed width” design.
It should be noted that the UAE Web Awards is a competition for web & business developers in UAE. This means that not all the websites that won awards are targeting the UAE. For example, Saudi headquartered Zamil Group won the Golden Award in the Corporate Category. However, because the developers for these websites are in the UAE one painful issue for Net users in Saudi Arabia is that many of the winning websites load extremely slowly. This shows how even regionally, web developers are creating sites for bandwidth that the Kingdom doesn’t yet have available.
One other less than amusing situation to point out is that while attempting to browse a winning Bahraini site, my anti-virus indicated that the site’s files were infected with a virus. This made me decide not to continue visiting that site. Perhaps next year security should be considered part of the judging criteria -- along with creativity and structure. To see the complete list of winners click to www.uaewebawards.org/winner07.shtml.
