Ankit Jain » india

Showcase of Indian Academic Websites

Ankit — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:35:35 +0000

Web is ubiquitous. An institute’s website is the first impression an applicant has. However, Indian institutes are not gearing up for this changing scenario. Indian academics’ websites are far beyond the quality of US colleges and universities. I understand, in India institutes have other major problems to deal with and building a website comes at last. In this post, I tried to pick some of the best designs from Indian academic world. Here go some recommendations first -

Rich colour photographs: They add liveliness to your website. Some of the academic websites have photographs of saturated colours and these are highly discouraged. Photographs of real students (or at least Indian people/models), campus or building definitely helps in making applicant’s mind.

Latest Happenings: Building a website is a continuous process, and it must have up-to-date information.

Moving content: Widely said – moving content on websites is bad. However, as long as it does not hurt visitor’s attention it is acceptable. For example, the fast moving content at IIITM made me search for what I’m looking.

Two institutes which took my immediate attention are Mangalayatan University and IIT Madras. They both have some of the best designs and give the first impression of excellence! However, I personally prefer former as their whole (home page) content fitted in viewing area. For IIT Madras’s home page, I am required to scroll through to see rest of the content. At last, IIT Madras wins the game because of their ‘site search’ feature and CMS.

1. IIT Madras (IITM)

They have a well chosen color scheme, search box placement and classification of information. No doubt it is designed by students, but it shows their excellence! I am amazed to see Joomla as their CMS. I think they are the only guys using a full fledged CMS in Indian academic world. Hats off to their excellence and awareness!

2. Mangalayatan University

Well chosen theme, photographs, course locator and highlighting of admission process. Pros: fat footer!

3. Jaipuria Institute of Management (NOIDA)

Pros: Photo animation, Color selection. Focus on admission. Cons: Not any.

4. IIT Bombay

Pros: selection of high contrast colour scheme, sidebar menu arrangement. Cons: scrolling events list and flashing footer.

5. IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA)

Pros: Photo animation. Cons: somewhere it seemed to have messy content. I feel they should experiment with alternate layouts. Also, the sitemap link is problematic as popups are not visible to search engines.

6. Delhi College of Engineering (DCE)

Pros: Home page design and content placement. Cons: Placement of logo and header should be tweaked; they are overlapping with photo gallery.

7. IIIT Bangalore

Cons: Search feature is missing.

Followings are worth to mention:

Rajiv Academy for Technology & Management: Their home-page design is worth to mention. However, they do not have good search engine ranking and most of the web-pages are broken.

- Ankit

Disclaimer: This post is my personal opinion and parameters chosen for ranking may not be complete; all it is from the website’s first impression. If you think your website is missing send me a link. If it influences me, I’ll be happy to list it here. Website is not the only criteria for choosing a school. This post just chooses some of the best homepage designs from India academic world and should not be treated in any decision making.

Time to forget Mahatma

Ankit — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:39:23 +0000

Today morning, I picked a few newspaper, expecting a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi. You might know it’s 30th Jan, 62nd death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Well, none of these newspapers had a picture or an article on Mahatma Gandhi. These newspapers* are Times of India, Amar Ujala and The Economic Times.

Typically, on this day either government or some organizations publish public service ads declaring their vision. But today it seems our government is run out of funds. There were some ads by Ministry of Power, but that did not cover all leading publications. The TOI group has huge spaces and funds for promoting TimesNow and their reports’ bravery, but not for our freedom fighters.

Ack: Wikipedia

* These newspapers are referred in Kanpur. Probably a Kanpur or Lucknow edition.

India and Internet

Ankit — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:59:29 +0000

You may have heard – the reach of Internet in India is increasing rapidly. VoIP has came in, 3G & IPtv is at the doorstep, bandwidth prices are falling down, BSNL’s netPC launched, but I still do not see a great future. I do not see awareness of .in domains, for promoting Hindi, I do not see true Indian web-hosting companies, I do not see IT professionals solving India’s a few fundamental problems. We have built a good economy by serving west IT companies. The time is now to focus inside!

Lets see where do we stand in the massive Web of Internet. There are total 3,109,827,840 IPv4 addresses issued worldwide. India owns merely 0.6% (19,267,224) of them. We hold world’s 17.6% population and only 0.6% of internet is hosted/used inside India! On the other side, with 19% of world’s population China has 7.2% of IPv4 addresses becoming the third after USA (48%), UK (8%).

You may argue that I should have measured by # of Internet users, but there are not exact figures to support it. Some agencies say 40M Indians have touched Internet while other say 80M. Whatever, I feel # of IP addresses gives pretty accurate measure of a country’s Web presence (web-servers hosted) as well as usage (ISPs).

India comes at 15th in owning total 0.51% of all ccTLDs. China is at 5th with 3.36% of all ccTLDs (after US – 64%, Germany – 5%, UK – 3.7% and Canada – 3.6%). Where is the awareness for country specific domain names? Why are we still running for .com?

There is big gap between no of people who use internet vs no of people who know there is a Internet. Obviously, education is a must to get into this. But not everyone can get English education. The Internet has accepted, they cannot bring the whole world in one language, then why do we want to push English? I am sure there are 100 times more pages in Chinese than a total of Hindi/Marathi/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/etc in Google index.

Apart from cheaper equipment and tariff, the other factor behind mobile revolution in India is the support for local languages (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc;) in handsets. We need the same for Internet. Not everyone can speak and understand English. Even ICANN has accepted this after a long time. Why IRCTC is not available in Hindi? Why Indian social networks like Bharatstudent.com, Bigadda.com, Hi5.com are not available in regional languages. There Wikipedia, BBC, Facebook & Orkut are available in Indian regional languages and gaining popularity. Why not Linux community provides free OS in Hindi? Besides, there is a Hindi keyboard layout, tools available for easy typing in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. And thanks to Google for Transliteration.

I am waiting for a day when our government shall issue a law/guidelines for website owners for enabling Internet for disabled people. I am waiting for a day when an Indian web-hosting giant opens up a data center in US/UK (for cost cutting bcoz their cooler climate and cheaper bandwidth) instead of collaborating with existing foreign providers. Today preliminary knowledge is almost free over Internet. I am waiting for a day when every member of our society has access to such information free and a child does not necessarily need to buy a book. I am waiting for a day when free internet kiosks will be available roadside and we can access Wikipedia, maps/routes and information will be a hand apart for the poorest guy in my country.

- Ankit

Ref:
* Country wise IP count as of 2009-12-19
* ICANN Wiki and Country-wise Total Domains Data as of 2009-12-14
* Second source for IP stats http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2010-report.aspx . Here too India is at 19th, and China at 3rd.