The experience of building a successful Arabic portal extends well beyond developing the technical aspects of it to reach other critical aspects including meeting international standards for site content, reaching an advanced level in terms of services and interactivity, and understanding the culture and usage habits of internet surfers in the Middle East.

This experience is what we have gained by launching bab.com. The site has gained considerable financial and moral support from reputed organizations and individuals in Saudi Arabia.

The sound financial standing of the project enables its management to select dedicated and highly qualified staff in the fields of journalism, editing, programming, technical and other support areas.

The Riyadh-based Rawnaa for Specialized Communications, the main content provider and executor of the project, is the biggest of its kind in Saudi Arabia, and well-known for its wealth of experience and reputation in the field of specialized communication and content providing.

Bab.com contains a comprehensive electronic newspaper, giving hour-by-hour updated news and daily summaries on political, economic, government, social, sports, health, technology and entertainment stories. The electronic newspaper, the first of its kind in the Arab World, gives the visitors an opportunity to interact with every piece of news and information and to express their opinions. That means initiating two-way and open source types of journalism, which are new concepts in journalism for the Arab readers.

“Bab clubs” is built up of more than ten specialized clubs, each of which contains a variety of technological methods to facilitate communication between the virtual communities, which, we hope, will be founded on the basis of these specialized clubs. There is the auto club, telecommunications club, beauty club, women’s club, travel club, teen club, health club, children club, literature club …etc.

In addition, bab.com, like other major international portals, provides several free of charge technical services, such as email services, messenger, hosting of individual websites, etc. Our internet search engine is supported with the biggest Arabic directory site.

Advanced interactive systems have also been included to open communication channels between the visitors and specialists in various fields to answer questions and exchange views.

Bab.com is the first in the Middle East to introduce an advanced ‘Hot Line’ service where you can find more than 50 experts in different area (religious, health, Marriage and social consulting, and others). Work is in progress for introducing a hot line service for Arab celebrities to serve site visitors. These services are being introduced to our visitors for free using a unique programming method.

However, what really we are proud of is our superior content. Bab.com includes more than 16,000 pages of content classified to more than 200 categories. This is just the beginning. We are planning within the next few months to increase our content to more than 25,000 pages. Our content is written in so professional manner that many Arab newspapers, magazines, and web sites are using our content.

Our immediate future goal is to present an effective tool on Arabic e-Commerce that solves the problems of payment and delivery systems that other Arabic web sites suffer from.