The UAE's top 10 Arabic and English websites have been chosen in a competition designed to kick-start web development. Five Arabic and five English sites were selected by a panel of judges representing the IT industry.
The winning Arabic sites are: www.swalif.net for an information only/personal web site developed by a UAE based company or individual; www.arabia.com/ for a portal developed by a UAE based company or individual and www.emi.co.ae for a web site developed by a government department.
The names of the winners in the business to consumer and business to business categories have not been released. No reason has been given by the organisers for the decision to keep the names secret.
The winners for the English sites are: www.jumeirah-beach.com/wild_wadi/index.html for the information only/personal web site developed by a UAE based company or individual; www.emirates.com for the business to consumer web site; www.businessdubai.com for the business to business web site; www.arabia.com in the portal category and www.dwtc.com in the government department web site category.
Dr Adnan Julfar, Community Development Manager at Dubai Internet City and one of the ten judges said, "This competition is our first. We were looking for creativity, originality and functionality in website designing techniques in the UAE.
"For the benefit of those sites that didn't win, I would like to mention again that we faced difficulties in choosing the winners due to the high standard of the competition."