It seems today that everything is being put on the web. Making a website is so easy that almost anybody can do it, it does not require you to be a great programmer or anything. It just requires you to have a bit of interest in computers and some designing ability. But what should be kept in mind, while you are off designing your own cool new shiny website....
Planning
The planning of the website needs to answer the following questions:
a) What is the goal or objective of the website. Is the website being made to sell a product, project a company, talk about oneself, provide information services or to share and collaborate between a peer group.
b) What are the target audience of the website. Every human being is different, if the target audience are teenagers and young people then aesthetics will be different than if the website is being designed for older people. A website for programmers will be totally different from a website for lawyers.
Design
There are many aspects to a good design. Some of which are:
a) User Friendliness: A website should be as user friendly as possible. A user should be able to access any information or do any transaction with the website with a minimum number of clicks. Now-a-days the number of clicks required to do an operation is a critical part of user study analysis. Minimizing the complexity of design and having the user to make less choices while still making him feel in control is the key to a more user friendly website.
b) User Myopia: Users tend to be myopic. They do not go through all the information written on a webpage, their field of vision is very limited. This is because through the internet, you are exposed to a large amount of content through the internet, and usually you are there on a website for a very specific purpose. Thus, a design should take this into account.
c) Information organization: The information should be organized in such a way that it satisfies the 80-20 rule. About only 20% of the website content will be seen by the 80% of the users. You need to optmize and find that 20% content to make the users happy. This will lead to good organization and better access for the user. The general rule of thumb for a good website is, that you want your website to serve highly relevant content and the user should be able to move on from the website as soon as he is done.
d) Less text and more graphics: It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Although this may not be applicable to all the pages, but a website designer should understand that a website is not a novel. A website is made on multimedia medium and should make full use of it. So, it should contain a healthy amount of information being given using hyperlinks, images and videos.
Implementation
There are really very few rules here since the amount of technologies available to do the same stuff is increasing exponentially. But the general rules are:
a) Keep the page load times minimal: You do not want to bloat the website. A good website should be using features like appcache and should have less content on their home pages so as to load faster.
b) Know the traffic on your website and plan accordingly: The worst thing you can have is have Google index your website and direct so much traffic to your homepage that it crashes. Plan the servers and the backends accordingly to handle all the anticipated and unanticipated load. You don't really want to be featured on a TechCrunch news article and be down on the same day. But with that said, we have seen outages even from experienced companies like Google and Microsoft in recent times.
Thats all you need... off you go to make your own new shiny website.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Life After College
It has been such a long time since I blogged that if you have been following this blog(highly unlikely), you will know that something strange has happened in this writer's life. Let me assure you, friends(/strangers/enemies), that although something(ok a LOT) has changed, but it has been good.
Ok let me give context to the stranger.. (friends/enemies already know this otherwise they won't qualify into that bucket)
Context:
I have graduated out of college(apparent from title, I know) and have stepped into the real corporate world. I have joined Google - The Best Technical company to work in(could not stop myself from doing a publicity plug) as a Software Engineer in Test.
Change:
It has been over 3 months for me working on a host of cool things and learning a lot. But apart from that learning, I have been learning some other things too and there have been a lot of changes in my life. Some of them are:
1. The stuff that I only dreamt of working on is now within hand's reach but I never get the time to work on it.
2. I am earning and it feels good to have your own money and to be independent and to be able to do your own stuff, but sometimes you feel like you can go back to your old self where somebody(read parents) always does everything for you.
3. I always used to wonder why people consider weekends sacred, for me everyday used to be a holiday. Now I have changed, weekends are sacred and Fridays seem to be more fun than Mondays to me.
4. I have found how ignorant I am in respect of coding and technology. I am doing a new assessment regarding my own skill set and knowledge of technology and coding. I am always trying to learn new things, but there are so many to learn, I never know which one to choose.
5. I thought that I will lose my friends, but I never had to lose them. I can contact them through chat or phone. Though, I really really miss the fun and carelessness of college(does not mean I am careful now).
6. Lastly and most importantly, I have started caring. Sometimes, I think and wonder how did this happen. But one reader of this blog knows exactly what has happened.
There are many miscellaneous changes like I am working on a mac(another post on it later); acted as a guide in an outing with parents(my first); not practicing guitar at all; making new friends; stepping out of my comfort zone; learning pool etc. etc. etc. But these things will come later, once I am a regular blog writer again.
Ok let me give context to the stranger.. (friends/enemies already know this otherwise they won't qualify into that bucket)
Context:
I have graduated out of college(apparent from title, I know) and have stepped into the real corporate world. I have joined Google - The Best Technical company to work in(could not stop myself from doing a publicity plug) as a Software Engineer in Test.
Change:
It has been over 3 months for me working on a host of cool things and learning a lot. But apart from that learning, I have been learning some other things too and there have been a lot of changes in my life. Some of them are:
1. The stuff that I only dreamt of working on is now within hand's reach but I never get the time to work on it.
2. I am earning and it feels good to have your own money and to be independent and to be able to do your own stuff, but sometimes you feel like you can go back to your old self where somebody(read parents) always does everything for you.
3. I always used to wonder why people consider weekends sacred, for me everyday used to be a holiday. Now I have changed, weekends are sacred and Fridays seem to be more fun than Mondays to me.
4. I have found how ignorant I am in respect of coding and technology. I am doing a new assessment regarding my own skill set and knowledge of technology and coding. I am always trying to learn new things, but there are so many to learn, I never know which one to choose.
5. I thought that I will lose my friends, but I never had to lose them. I can contact them through chat or phone. Though, I really really miss the fun and carelessness of college(does not mean I am careful now).
6. Lastly and most importantly, I have started caring. Sometimes, I think and wonder how did this happen. But one reader of this blog knows exactly what has happened.
There are many miscellaneous changes like I am working on a mac(another post on it later); acted as a guide in an outing with parents(my first); not practicing guitar at all; making new friends; stepping out of my comfort zone; learning pool etc. etc. etc. But these things will come later, once I am a regular blog writer again.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
I Am A Published Author Now
I went to the Technology For Education conference which was being hosted at Radha Regent Hotel in Electronic City in Bangalore. The preparation before the conference was "typical me". I was at my procrastinating best.
I had to present Foodforce paper at the conference. Till the night before, the ppt was about 50% complete. But that night, since I was not in a good mood and very tired(its an excuse, I know), I thought I will do it in the morning. My roommate woke me up at 5 AM, slept, and I started work. But, I again slept and woke up with him again at 7 AM.
So, now I started work at full speed now, all thoughts of creativity abandoned. But then the nature also conspired against me and at 8:00 AM or so, electricity gone. As I was working on my personal laptop (which has no battery and works only through electricity), I was in dire straits. Ppt still not completed, no hope for internet, and no hope of recovering ppt back. And I had to leave at 9 for the conference. I had not taken bath or had my breakfast yet(which was today my responsibility since I was not going to office). So, while I got down to these tasks, I asked Paras(my ever-helpful roommate) to ask the watchmen to switch on generators for me to recover my presentation. Our (ever so irritating) watchmen switched it on only for 2 minutes during which I barely recovered ppt. And then, fortunately, electricity came at 8:50, I completed rest of the slides, packed my bags, and was ready to go till 9:10. And I vowed "yet again", that I will never procrastinate my work ever again!
The hotel was wonderful, and the conference too, lots of great people present in it. The hi-fi atmosphere intimidated me and made me nervous. But, the talks were interesting and I forgot about preparing and started listening. Soon, it was my turn, they made me put on a mike, and I regained my nervousness. I skipped the title slide totally, was hesitant to start with, too fast to speak, infact I was blurting out things I guess. But people took interest, listened and I could feel the vibes of interested people. Then at the end, there were questions and questions, infact more questions than any of the previous talks. (Though you can argue, that it might be not because I was good but because people never understood what I said). People asked for the link to download the game, which obviously in my foolishness I had never put in the presentation. When I went back to my seat I was congratulated by people sitting next to me for giving a good talk. Chatted with some interested people during lunch. And it was a nice like any Hindi Film Happy Ending to a potentially disastrous start.
EDIT: Also I got hotel address from Paras after he went to office through SMS, since internet was also not working that day!
I had to present Foodforce paper at the conference. Till the night before, the ppt was about 50% complete. But that night, since I was not in a good mood and very tired(its an excuse, I know), I thought I will do it in the morning. My roommate woke me up at 5 AM, slept, and I started work. But, I again slept and woke up with him again at 7 AM.
So, now I started work at full speed now, all thoughts of creativity abandoned. But then the nature also conspired against me and at 8:00 AM or so, electricity gone. As I was working on my personal laptop (which has no battery and works only through electricity), I was in dire straits. Ppt still not completed, no hope for internet, and no hope of recovering ppt back. And I had to leave at 9 for the conference. I had not taken bath or had my breakfast yet(which was today my responsibility since I was not going to office). So, while I got down to these tasks, I asked Paras(my ever-helpful roommate) to ask the watchmen to switch on generators for me to recover my presentation. Our (ever so irritating) watchmen switched it on only for 2 minutes during which I barely recovered ppt. And then, fortunately, electricity came at 8:50, I completed rest of the slides, packed my bags, and was ready to go till 9:10. And I vowed "yet again", that I will never procrastinate my work ever again!
Foodforce2 Revolutionising Education
View more presentations from deepankgupta.
The hotel was wonderful, and the conference too, lots of great people present in it. The hi-fi atmosphere intimidated me and made me nervous. But, the talks were interesting and I forgot about preparing and started listening. Soon, it was my turn, they made me put on a mike, and I regained my nervousness. I skipped the title slide totally, was hesitant to start with, too fast to speak, infact I was blurting out things I guess. But people took interest, listened and I could feel the vibes of interested people. Then at the end, there were questions and questions, infact more questions than any of the previous talks. (Though you can argue, that it might be not because I was good but because people never understood what I said). People asked for the link to download the game, which obviously in my foolishness I had never put in the presentation. When I went back to my seat I was congratulated by people sitting next to me for giving a good talk. Chatted with some interested people during lunch. And it was a nice like any Hindi Film Happy Ending to a potentially disastrous start.
EDIT: Also I got hotel address from Paras after he went to office through SMS, since internet was also not working that day!
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