mydsf.com - the website
myth or reality ?

We decided to look through mydsf.com to see how far they have advanced.
A locally based site proclaiming to get over a million hits a week needs a peek into.

On 3 March 2001 - This Alert was put up. It gave us food for thought to expand further.

www.mydsf.com (IP= 213.132.36.73) is now hosted by the Dubai Internet City after being relaunched in partnership with Dubai Ideas Oasis. The route of the link to this IP and the PING response time points towards the site being hosted locally in Dubai. Well done both DSF and DIC! Now if the DSF website's opening page could just be reduced a bit from its over 200K size :).

Let's move on. Does anyone really believe the far fetched claim that the site has received "one million hits in the first four days of operation." To give you an idea, that means it is receiving almost 3 hits per second, 24 hours a day :) **cough* *cough**
Would be interesting to see audited figures verifying those claims. 

So we dug further.

Browsers Used:
Internet Connection:
Monitor:
OS:

First impression - Takes way too long to load the opening page. 200K for an opening is HEAVY stuff.

Netscape 4.7

40 secs to display
50 secs to load completely.

Background is the standared Grey - giving one the feeling of - was this page made in the early 1990's !

The "Site Hosted" logo at the bottom overlaps with the "Site Sponsors" logos.

Quick to display and load.

Displays correctly except for the "Site Hosted" logo at the bottom which overlaps with the "Site Sponsors" logos.

Opera 5

45 sec to display
50 secs to load completely

Displays correctly. White background. Tables in place.

Everything displays neatly.

IE 5

15 secs to display
45 secs to load completely.

Displays correctly. White background. Tables in place.

Everything displays neatly.

In case you are unaware, DSF expands to the Dubai Shopping Festival.

A look at the page source shows no Meta Tags, developers info, description or keywords or anything else other than simple tables with text in them.

Where to go next on the page is not clear.
Choices are not strong enough to send someone onwards.

Events Page took 30 seconds to display, and 40 seconds to load totally. (Actually 45 seconds in all, 5 seconds spent waiting for the proxy to respond).

The Events main page again in the disconcerting Grey background in Netscape 4.7, but fine in the other 3 browsers.
The Logo here is also a bit heavy at 56K

10 main events shown. One would get the impression nothing else was on if one didn't live in Dubai. Again the formatting of the pictures and text are right next to each other in Netscape, but show correctly in Opera & IE.

Next Clicked on the Dubai Desert Classic (Golf championship). The new window went to the background, and nothing appeared to happen.

Of course, normally one would expect the webteam to ensure the popup window would be brought back to the front. Not the case here. So had to go and open it manually. Quite a strange way of setting it up.

The write up was terrible, outdated, incorrect, and useless information for a person wanting to know more about the event.

Next - Firework Display. Reasonable information. No timings.

Weekend Carnivals to light up Dubai Street - weak English in the write up

Global Village - good write up. No timings.

Here we realized that this couldn't be all there was. So we clicked the "small" "Events" button up top. We realized we were only looking at the "Special Events" before, and there was lots more. Surprise Surprise. Why make it so "un-obvious" that there is so much more!

This page opened to a "Dubai Shopping Festival Calendar Of Events 2001"

A long table with all events laid out one after the other. A bit confusing, some basic information, but really not enough for the official home pages of the festival.

So we clicked Where to Stay which took us to the same page.

This page basically gave the 5 hotels of the Jumeira Beach group, which would be out of the budget range of 99% of visitors.

A bit confusing, and we were lost for a few seconds before we noticed the left side of the page had expanded to show links to 7,5,4,3 star & Hotel Apartments.

These links opened nicely, and allowed a look at many hotel choices. Although contact details and addresses are given, the very important link onwards to the hotel web page is not included.

Big banner gifs such as this:  added to the misery.
In the electronics sections quite few items were available, in other sections, hardly a handful. Offhand the prices looked good. We did not try buying anything.

The Classified Section had nothing in it.

The news section looked like a 8 year old had set it up.

The Search function didn't work in any of the browsers.

Unfortunately, a tourist map of Dubai was no where to be seen on the site.

Neither was the phone number for the specially set up DSF hotline called Ahlan Dubai Services at 090-40099 or +971-90-40099

One World, One Family, One Festival!
We wondered where it would be said. Couldn't find a mention of it anywhere on the site. Strange since it is supposedly the central theme of the Festival

By here ( on 8th March) we got thoroughly bored and put off and called it off.

Sorry guys, but you have a lot of work to do
Very unprofessional.
One could actually say "sloppy."
And it's a travesty if you are receiving as you claim - 250,000 hits a day - and maintain such a incomplete site.

The weekend (Fri 9 March) made us feel, that we must have missed something. How could such an important site really have given such a low impression.

We revisited the site using Netscape 4.72 and an ADSL connection, hoping the faster speed would allow us a different experience.

As often happens, ADSL was slower than a 64K ISDN until proxy1.emirates.net.ae was used as a Proxy, instead of the recommended "Direct connection to the Internet."

So with a much faster connection now, more time could be spent visiting all areas of the site.

The expanded menu on the left when clicking a main menu topic, almost blends back into the previous menu. Until one gets used to it, one could easily be unaware that more choices have opened up.

The site is reasonably good when compared to a one or two man volunteer operation on a budget of a few hundred Dirhams a month.

For a professionally developed site that represents one of the most festive festivals, it really does such injustice to the size,  grandness, festivity, and gaiety that Dubai transforms into during this month of the Dubai Shopping Festival.

Well, we were so disappointed that we went in search of
any other sites highlighting the DSF.

This is where we ended up. : Khaleej Times DSF pages

In Opera the page took 50 seconds to display and 55 to load completely. In IE - 20  / 30

First impression was lively and vibrant. The frame was just slightly off  in Netscape 4.72, but was fine in N4.72, Opera and IE.

A Poll right at the top - caught our eye - was relevant - and we smiled that most others thought the way we did.

Next a cursory glance of the page showed a neat layout.
Main events were visible and beckoning.
In fact, everything looked interesting.

We were forced to reopen mydsf.com to compare the two. That was painful. A quick look at the opening page of mydsf.com and we closed it.

Khaleej Times looked like they knew what they were doing.

A whopper at over 300K - most of it in Table formatting.

A little hint to the webmaster at Khaleej Times. If you have such a huge table, break it into a series of smaller tables. That way, once one section loads, it will display first, and the whole huge table doesn't have to load before the page displays. The #Dubai Alerts page  is laid out like that.

This Events Calendar page is similar to the mydsf site, but easier to read, and looks more accurate. Sections are also bookmarked at the top for easier access.

We browsed through the Just for Women section, the Just for Kids, and then ......

...... on the bottom right of the main page -- A link to DSF's hotline phone numbers along with all other important phone numbers a visitor may require.

Verdict.

The limited team and budget of Khaleej Times has put mydsf.com to shame.

Well done KT.
Strike 3 mydsf.com