:: About US
This is a private, non-profit, non-partisan and totally independent website. It's mainly targeted for researchers, scholars and investors.

The site aims at providing comprehensive information pertaining to Iran and the Middle East.

The goal of the general webguide is to give the public easy access to the best sites on the web. It is a gateway to a variety of free resources available on the internet. I have tried to index the sites which posses content of interest to readers of different backgrounds.

I have a MBA degree in finance and have worked as a financial analyst and real estate & stockbroker. There is heavy emphasis on business and personal finance topics.

I am not a trained journalist but have occasionally covered local events (filming & interviewing) in order to complement and diversify our content. I have used management principles (the use of analogs, diversification, positioning strategy, etc.) to run this site. Also, I have used the humanistic management approach since the site was launched. As a policy, race, gender or religion never play a role in our decision making. The site strives to be as secular as possible and never overtly political. In terms of content and decency we are similar to mainstream websites in the US. In fact, we have no choice but to have self-censorship.

You will not find blind links and annoying pop-up windows on this site. You can browse this website without registration and disclosing any personal information.

Your feedback and suggestions are important to us. We greatly appreciate your interest in improving the site and have incorporated the suggestions of visitors. Our internal statistics indicate that the news and media pages are the most popular among our visitors. Therefore, we only need to keep these pages up-to-date to maintain our popularity. Also, the analysis of our internal search indicates that Iranian-Americans care only about their immediate needs (cuisine, sexuality, FX rate). Rarely anyone searches for politics or religion. Therefore, we try to keep unpopular content to a minimum. You have the option of visiting websites dedicated to these topics directly. Our online videos are watched everywhere except in Iran.

When contacting us, please state the nature of your inquiry. I read and take note of every email that I receive. However, I cannot reply to every email individually due to the large volume of mail received. But I appreciate your interest and support of Pars Times.

All the maps and flags images were produced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (World Factbook), unless otherwise indicated. The Factbook is in the public domain. The maps and charts scanned from "Atlas of the Middle East", published in January 1993 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency are Courtesy of The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Images of the globe and satellite images are all courtesy of NASA. All of these images are also in the public domain.

This site is not responsible for the contents or reliability of external sites. The inclusion of a hyperlink does not constitute an endorsement.

The site is maintained and links validated quarterly. A link checking software is used to identify broken links and redirects. However, the program cannot check all the links because of robots exclusion. Furthermore, it cannot identify if the web page's content has changed. We regularly remove abandoned domains that are taken over by spammers. Hence, the program has its limits and we need your help. Please let us know which website in Pars Times was not accessible. Every attempt will be made to fix broken links as quick as possible. However, keep in mind that the best we can do is to keep broken links to a minimum. We have learned a lot from maintaining the website and developed the best system to deal with the link issues. A Persian proverb states:

We simply cut and paste the title of the articles in our news page. It would be unethical to change the titles. The terms "Gulf" and "Farsi" are widely used by news agencies and mainstream press. We have no choice but to be tolerant of those words because we aggregate the news from all over the world. In addition, news sites have a different style guide for capitalization of titles. There are spelling differences between British English and American English (i.e organisation/organization, humour/humor, offence/offense, marvellous/marvelous etc.). You may also see different spelling for some Persian words (Nowruz, Norooz, Norouz etc.). Again, transliteration of Persian words is a very complex issue and shouldn't be a major concern for us because the site isn't an encyclopedia. It's best not to be a nitpicker and instead focus on major issues. This site mirrors real life which is not consistent.

Finally, life is dynamic and we have no choice but to move with time. The social media revolution has changed the internet forever. Censorship and tracking are rampant on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Nevertheless, people spend more time at social media websites than other websites because they're addictive. Furthermore, the extraordinary growth of Wikipedia is making independent websites like us obsolete. We had to respond with new content (i.e a new lifestyle index and nostalgia pages) to remain competitive and maintain our statistics. We have done everything to improve the Site. It needs an injection of cash for a revamp. Starting in January, Pars Times will be based in the United Kingdom with offices in the EU and the Near East.