Well today I am going to talk about university websites in Pakistan. Today I am going to look at websites for three top (from my view) universities in Pakistan: NED University, FAST NU and LUMS. 

Before I start here are some screenshots of all three:

OK this is where I have a problem: all of these sites look like a 12 year old designed them! Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of talented designers in Pakistan and being a university in this day and age, your site does matter. 

I spent 30 minutes on each site to find some information and at the end just gave up. The amount of grammatical errors, visual errors and layout issues just turned me off completely. 

There are so many things that I want to change on these sites that it will take me forever to list them all there. I will be doing a separate post for each of the site in coming days. BUT I also wanted to take this chance to openly challenge the talented designer in Pakistan to come forward and create a mock-frontpage for any one of these universities. Are you up for the challenge?

Simply wow. An interesting article on GreenWhite yesterday really shocked me. How can government spend all this energy in preventing “Cyber Terrorism” when there is no law and order in other parts of our lives?

Today I am going to kick start a new series on this blog. Its called “What’s Wrong With:”. In these posts I will be taking a look at a website (preferably Pakistani website) and give my 1 rupee worth of analysis on what are the good parts and the bad parts of that website.

My first target is Rozee.pk. Rozee has been a very successful job portal in Pakistan. I like to think of them as Monster.com of Pakistan. They are the place to go for job search. However, when I visited the site, I felt like a huge chunk of data was just thrown at me. I have taken a screenshot of the whole webpage. The page has a height of 2500px — that is ridiculous! 

I have marked the image with few numbers (the awesome paint skills) which I would like to touch upon:

1. What’s with the side banner? I never understood why the heck do they have a side banner. It not only looks ugly, it is completely useless. Complete waste of space. 
2. All this wasted space on the sides. Main content has a width of 776px which does not include that side banner. I would prefer that the site used flex width layout. That will not only make it look good on the new resolutions, it will also give more space for content.
3. Do I really care about all your top employers? Talk about wasting prime real estate. The list is huge! It takes the prime spot and conveys nothing to me. Yes all these top companies are hiring but really what does that tell me? Rozee should’ve listed a top 10 employers list in a carousel fashion with an option to see “more” if I needed to. 
4. Hot jobs are not so hot. So the next piece of wasted real estate is taken up by “Hot Jobs” section. Again too much information cramped up into a small area and on top of that it tells me nothing about the job itself. The title for most jobs is cutting out and its very easy to ignore.
5. Recent Jobs. Ah, finally what I came to find on Rozee — JOBS! This list should be at the top of the site since these are the most recent jobs and most people looking for jobs are always checking your site day-after-day, this is the section that they are interested in. Which are the recent jobs that they can target.
6. Localize options. It is beyond my understanding why this little feature is sandwiched between everything else. This should be at the top of the site so that the user can easily customize the location on the whole site and everything else around me should be sensitive to this. 

You read it right — 12 million customers are waiting for your business. These are 12 million internet users in Pakistan who are waiting for you to create the next big business online in Pakistan. The question really is, are you up for the challenge? 

Now you might call me the most optimistic person on the planet earth, but I really truly believe that in the middle of all the crisis that our country is going through, there is hope for future. Because, if us Pakistanis won’t hope for the best then who would? 

So lets get our positive thinking cap on and see how we can tap this market. We already have a few brave startups tackling online auction. Its a good start, lets take it a bit further. 

I came across a really interesting article on CIO Pakistan which talked about “Pakistan Consumer Internet Marketing Report for 2008“. Some very fascinated stuff in that article. What caught my eye was:

Demographics:

87% fall in the 18-30 age range thus capturing a fresh wave of consumers entering the market

94% have a graduate or post-graduate degree.

34% are “financial heads” of their household.

Simply amazing! Look at that watering 87% users in age 18-30. I think we will have some very positive years ahead of us and it will be great to see how local businesses capture this fast growing market. Don’t forget there is also a huge segment of NRP’s who are very well versed on Internet based services.

How would you like to tapp this untapped market? Go to IdeasHut to check out what other smart Pakistanis are cooking and share if you will.

Paktive - Pakistan on the map

So this mornings coffee chai got a bit interesting with an article on GreenWhite about Paktive (what’s with the name?) 

Okay, so what is Paktive all about? Well this is what I found on their website:

“Paktive.com is an experiment to compile and present map locations of Pakistani places of interest like restaurants, parks, landmarks, services and businesses in major Pakistani cities. Currently, it uses satellite imagery from Google maps.”

Interesting eh? Well GreenWhite author Saad Khan has written them off today. According to him its a dead venture. And sadly I agree with him.

The problem with Paktive is that it is not designed for the masses. Nerds like to draw polygons, normal people (and we have a lot of those in Pakistan) do NOT like to draw polygons and identify places on the map. They would rather use the old method of dumping text based data into a database and query it. 

Think about it, how many of you have gone to Google Maps custom map section for Pakistan and drawn or identified any location? (did you even know that Google Maps had that feature?) 

We need to think about the business plan around it. I know community based contributions and web2.0 is all WOW but really this WOW can never become a real WOW without proper business model behind it.

In Paktive.com’s defense they do call it an “experiment” so I will let them go without a attack plan.