Project Overview
A Mainstream Objective
Aliwaa – اللواء – is a well-known privately-owned daily newspaper based in Beirut, Lebanon. Established in 1963, Aliwaa was, and still is, dedicated to producing news stories and opinion editorials covering local, regional, and international events. Aliwaa’s news coverage is published in the Arabic language across both Arab countries such as Jordan, KSA, and Syria, and European countries, including France, Britain, Greece, Portugal, and Spain.
Aliwaa reached out to Teckyou for a set of digital solutions starting from marketing and operations consultancy to website development. Teckyou consultants designed a custom digital transformation for the news outlet oriented towards organized data management, while maintaining professionalism. The technical aspect of our collaboration was rather focused on optimizing Aliwaa’s website in terms of user experience, ranking, performance, and design.
The end results were a successful holistic digitalization of the data and work operations followed by a faster, advanced, and highly viewed news website. aliwaa.com.lb deservedly lands its place now at the forefront of mainstream Lebanese news websites with its unique UI/UX design, features, vitals, viewership, and growing online partnership potential.
Challenges
Online Reposition For An Offline Legend
Aliwaa’s workflow has always been challenged to keep in track with the communication technology advancements and evolving customer behavior. Their news production practices induced in return tons of unorganized data and nonlinear monitoring and intervention. While Aliwaa’s newsprints circulation was notably expanding, the main defiance remained repositioning its news content across digital platforms.
Because such digital transformation for such a news outlet would be an ongoing and encompassing process, Aliwaa required technological capabilities, data management strategies, and most importantly, a cultural change within the newsroom practices that would blur the lines between editors, publishers, and content writers.
The dual challenging forces of unstructured data and traditional news production were manifested in Aliwaa’s website that direly lacked a clear navigation menu, original visuals, distinct elements display, search engine optimization, mobile responsiveness, easy sharing, and essential features for a modern reader’s news website.
Solutions
A Workflow Around Digital
Marketing & Operations Consultancy Solutions
The solution started with rethinking Aliwaa’s workflow around digital. Our consultants worked hand-in-hand with Aliwaa’s operations managers for the first month to craft the digital transformation that would improve the news organization’s customer experience and enhance the way its staff operates behind the scenes.
Teckyou’s consultancy service was aimed to be Aliwaa’s investment into new systems, goals, and methodologies that make their internal processes efficient and their external production systematic. For that, Aliwaa’s data needed to get to the cloud becoming all digital for storage and transfer.
A higher level of sustainability was also attained thanks to the leveraged data collection and additional customer touchpoints that Aliwaa’s online presence has brought. Such behavioral data is key to further improve customer satisfaction, target advertising opportunities, and drive sustainable growth.
Website Solutions
Teckyou website solutions for Aliwaa were sharply focused on every aspect of a transformative digital presence that would resonate with their news tradition. Aliwaa had a particular delivery style covering both hard and soft news related to politics, economy, technology, sports, entertainment, health, and culture.
Therefore, organizing a simplified, horizontal main menu for easy navigation was the first solution tackled. Aliwaa’s menu is smartly rendered inclusive of different news categories and subcategories for easily selecting local, regional, and international news stories. These categories are color coded as well for faster visual distinction. Easy article search option is also added.
Breaking news and latest videos are at the forefront of the website displayed somehow similarly to social media stories for a modern, appealing design. Contrastingly, the side news stories and suggested news articles were designed following the more traditional discourse display of a print newspaper, thus, catering to divergent audiences.
This way, Teckyou frontend developers revamped the website interface and added photos and video displays. Aside from the appearance and ads placement, the website includes easy social media sharing clicks, newsletter subscription option button, and a night mode switch for convenient night reading.
From the backend side, our developers optimized the website’s speed, sealed government grade security, and developed internal ads management. We, last but not least, optimized Aliwaa’s website for mobile responsiveness and search engines core web vitals.
Results
Success, Sustainability, Surreal Outcomes
Our collaboration with Aliwaa yielded satisfying results during the shortest period of time and it still promises long term advancements.
Aliwaa’s editorial team revolutionized their news publishing operations to achieve faster operations, reduce setbacks, and amend to a completely digital journalism approach. Their skills were doubtlessly improved to deal with digital data, but most importantly, their newsroom culture became a digitalized one ready for partnerships.
The website aliwaa.com.lb is proudly the chef-d’oeuvre after months of offline and online development. Operating 4 times faster, optimized for search engines, and compatible for mobile browsing, it deservedly doubled its viewership and page clicks rates. Aliwaa’s reach opportunities extend even beyond with the newsletter and WhatsApp news service.