Taste of Drupal: New Al Jazeera Cafe Website

In April 2015 Al Jazeera, the biggest media network in the Middle East, opened a new restaurant in Doha where everyone can easily experience the news-making process and interact with Al Jazeera stars. About a month after the opening of Al Jazeera Cafe, its manager of enterprise and merchandise Mohammed Al Rumaihi said in the interview to Doha News: “We didn’t want to be the ‘typical’ channel who reaches out to its audience through social media or TV. We wanted to have a direct physical interaction with our audience in a softer (environment)”. Today Al Jazeera Cafe is a famous place in Qatar where food zone is combined with an interactive media studio, a live broadcast unit, and museum exhibit. The media network got very close to its audience, and one of the important steps forward to them was launching the Al Jazeera Cafe website developed by Vardot.

Another Drupal website of Al Jazeera

If you read our blog often, you know that Vardot has a rich background in creating educational websites and sites for media companies. Nonetheless, knowing our technological expertise Al Jazeera approached us to build a web experience for their new modern cafe and we were up for the challenge. We developed a web experience that not only represents the cafe but also combines the best of media, cuisine, and technology. The design of Al Jazeera Cafe website is similar to other Al Jazeera sites. Moreover, we used the same CMS as in all the previous projects to give our client a convenient editing experience. More and more websites of the media network are managed in the same way - it makes change-, process-, and knowledge management easier within the organization.

Drupal ideally fits our customer’s requirements - the website is built according to highest security- and technical standards, allows site admins to manage content with a few clicks, can handle a high traffic and stay extremely quick:

Why Drupal is always a win for you

UX & SEO

We also kept in mind the latest User Experience and SEO trends: the first thing you see on the website is the video captured by our colleagues from Al Jazeera. It corresponds on one hand with one of the main web design concepts of 2015, and on the other hand with SEO-predictions for 2016. This video as long as many high-quality photos are definitely the strong point of this web page.

The motto of the Cafe is “Experience a taste of Al Jazeera”, and we did our best to make you start tasting before even going to the restaurant. The media helps you to feel the atmosphere of Al Jazeera Cafe from wherever you are. Using #AlJazeeraCafeonn Instagram, Facebook or Twitter you can see visitors presenting news in front of cameras inside of Cafe and after clicking on Menu it’s impossible not to feel hungry. Although the media network became popular first of all because of the news articles, this site is less about words and more about images.

The website contains everything you might wonder about: information about the Cafe and its events, news, contacts, map, menu, lots of beautiful images and social sharing buttons. And of course as always to guarantee the visitors an exceptionable browsing experience our team made sure that the page looks perfect on devices of all types - from regular desktops with a different screen resolution to mobile phones and tablets.

Bottom line

This project showed that Drupal is maximal efficient not only for educational, eCommerce and media companies but also for restaurants and cafes. It allows to create a user-friendly interface for cafe visitors and easily manage a specific content like menu section etc. Anyways, better to see once than to hear hundred times.