The Hespress wordmark, oversized and faint, on the publication’s brand blue

Hespress

The front end of Morocco’s top-ranked news site, still standing six years on.

Partner project with Youniwemihespress.com

A national newsroom, redesigned

Hespress is an Arabic-language Moroccan news publisher, ranked first among the country’s news sites by Similarweb. In December 2020 it launched a redesign on a custom WordPress theme. Flexminde worked on it in partnership with Youniwemi, integrating the entire front end in HTML and CSS and supporting the interface design.

  • #1news & media site in MoroccoSimilarweb category rank, August 2026
  • #20of all websites in MoroccoSimilarweb country rank, August 2026
  • Dec 2020the redesign goes liveWayback Machine captures, 8 and 16 December 2020

The rankings are Similarweb’s third-party estimates for August 2026. They describe the audience this front end serves, not a result of the work: Hespress was a national publication long before the redesign.

The Problem

By 2019 the Hespress home page was a stack of boxed widgets under a gradient banner: a paginated lead story, a weather panel, prayer times, a cartoon, a poll, each in its own frame. A national newsroom publishing through the day needed a front page that could carry that volume and still read as one publication, in Arabic, right to left, on every screen size.

The Solution

A redesign built on a custom WordPress theme, delivered in partnership with Youniwemi. Flexminde turned the interface into the site’s HTML and CSS — every template, right to left — and supported the design work along the way. The new front page is organised around a timestamped 24-hour feed, a lead-story slider, and named editorial sections, in a flat layout carried by a single brand blue.

The Outcome

The redesign went live in December 2020. In September 2026 the same layout is still the one hespress.com runs: the 24-hour feed, the slider, the opinion columns and the video rows are all where the launch put them, and the site ranks first among Morocco’s news publishers in Similarweb’s estimates.

The Hespress home page on a phone, with the brand-blue header, section menu and lead story
The home page at 390px

A front page built around the clock

A news home page is read in seconds and refreshed all day. The 2020 layout gives every kind of content a fixed place, so a reader coming back at noon finds the same page with newer stories in it, rather than a different page.

  • The 24-hour feed

    A timestamped column of the day’s headlines, newest first, runs down one side of the front page. It is the fastest way into the site, and it has stayed in the same place since launch.

  • Named sections, not widgets

    مصدر مطلع (informed source), زاوية حادة (sharp angle), صوت وصورة (sound and picture): editorial strands with their own headings and their own layouts, instead of a column of boxes competing for attention.

  • Right to left, all the way down

    Arabic is not a translated afterthought here. Navigation, sliders, grids, timestamps and share bars are built right to left from the start, not mirrored from a left-to-right layout.

  • A layout that outlasted its launch

    Nearly six years later an English edition has been added alongside the French one, but the structure integrated in 2020 is the one still serving the site’s audience.

What it looks like

Before and launch are archived copies from the Wayback Machine; the rest are the live site in September 2026, with ad slots hidden so the layout shows. Open it yourself and compare.

  • The Hespress home page in September 2019, with a gradient banner, boxed widgets and a paginated lead story
    Before — September 2019, from the Wayback Machine
  • The redesigned Hespress home page in December 2020, with the 24-hour feed, lead-story slider and opinion columns under a brand-blue header
    Launch — December 2020, from the Wayback Machine
  • A Hespress article page with its headline, lead photograph and vertical share bar
    Article — live site, September 2026, ad slots hidden
  • The Hespress economy section, a grid of stories with photographs and timestamps, beside a most-read list
    Section — live site, September 2026, ad slots hidden

Built to last

The layout that launched in December 2020 is the one hespress.com still runs, right to left, nearly six years later.

  • 2020December, per the Wayback MachineLaunched
  • 2026same layout, SeptemberStill live
  • RTLArabic, right to leftDirection

Integration at newsroom scale

The site runs on WordPress with a custom theme built for Hespress. Flexminde’s part was the front end: turning the interface into HTML and CSS for every template the newsroom publishes through — the front page, section pages, article pages and the video and opinion strands.

All of it is right to left. Menus, the lead-story slider, card grids, timestamps and share bars were built for Arabic from the first line, rather than mirrored from a left-to-right layout afterwards.

The work ran in partnership with Youniwemi, with Flexminde also supporting the interface design. The layout that shipped in December 2020 has since gained an English edition link beside the French one without its structure being rebuilt.

One front page. Every hour of the news day. Six years and counting.

How the work ran

In this order, and no stage started before the one before it had produced something the client had seen.

  1. Interface design support

    Working with Youniwemi on the redesigned interface: the front page, sections and article pages, and how the newsroom’s content maps onto them.

  2. HTML and CSS integration

    Every template turned into production HTML and CSS, right to left, for the full site.

  3. Into WordPress

    The integrated templates went into the custom WordPress theme the site runs on.

  4. Launch

    The redesign replaced the old home page in December 2020.

The services behind Hespress

The same work is available on its own. These are the parts of it this project actually used.

Hespress questions

What people ask about this project once they have seen the numbers. If yours is not here, ask it on a first call.

What did Flexminde actually do on Hespress?

The front-end integration of the whole site in HTML and CSS, and support on the interface design. The project was delivered in partnership with Youniwemi. The journalism, the photography and the Hespress brand are Hespress’s own.

Are the traffic figures Flexminde’s results?

No. They are Similarweb’s public estimates, and Hespress was a national publication long before this redesign. They are here to show the scale the front end has to serve, not to claim the audience.

Is the design on hespress.com today the one from 2020?

Its structure is. Archived copies show the new layout arriving in December 2020, and the live site in September 2026 still uses the same header, front page and sections, with an English edition added since.

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