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.

1. 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.

Ever heard someone saying “this software sucks”… I love such moments. It makes me laugh, not for the user, but for the poor developer! Users are innocent, they are not concerned about technical details. A software is there to make life simpler and hide complications of a task. It’s your responsibility to make it intuitive and meet users expectation on first impression, rather showing unnecessary (modal) alert boxes or irrelevant (technical) details. You don’t need to be a Usability Engineer. Just,

• stand on users’ shoe and think what is annoying
• don’t take negative feedback as an attack on you and your beliefs.
  Rather it’s a feedback on your understanding about how much you understand your users. In short never reject/resist on feedback.

Nobody hates software more than software developers and nobody distrust software more than software developers. Scott Berkun has written a good post about why software sucks. ( I have heard software engineers saying that they don’t trust online money transactions. Heck !! Do you need President to meet you and ensure? )

Here is what I think you should target as first step:

• Any tasks that you think user should perform by reading Help/Documentation, MUST be automated.
• Even an single unnecessary alert box annoys. Features should be available with less no of clicks. Still this is very subjective matter to discuss. A simple guidelines is – only system errors or exceptions should raise alert-box, tiny information should be modal-less dialogs (or like balloon pop-up).
• users never read entire screen. Default values chosen or default selection of check-boxes makes big difference in a long run.
  E.g. while filling an online form a default selection of check-box “subscribe me for spam mails”. Who does read entire form before clicking submit? None. But it affects your reputation in long run.
• Never hesitate in picking a useful (cool, awesome, sexy, astonishing, amazing! ) feature from competitive software. Ask a simple question – Does it add value to your product? You won’t like this argument, but this is truth. The success of Web is a tiny ‘view source’ feature. Well, this is a fast moving industry where we learn from other, we improve over time. You never blame the world for borrowing tabbed browsing from Opera (originally by NetCaptor). It’s a matter of accessibility, and understanding what your users like and what they dislike is a key to success.
• Don’t recruit incompetent programmers, because a incompetent programmer creates two new jobs a year. If you have a few already, either trains them or fire them. (Sorry pals)

- ankit
( and finally, this is a 100th post on this blog. Happy Blogging! )

In addition to those common features, this phone features something new. In this post I’m going to write those specifications which you won’t be able to know unless you buy the phone. Here are a few:

1. Bright display! I can read text even in sun light. The phone comes with preloaded high contrast images, watching those you can see how much color contrast it delivers !!! – far from any other manufacturer in the same prize range.
2. 3.5mm jack support. This allows any kind of head phones to be used with the phone.
3. Text Copy/Paste feature. Handy for coping/writing SMS.
4. J2ME with support of – Internet access, File system read/write access API, camera API, Messaging APIs, automatic start, local connectivity API, running Java apps in background.
5. You can have at max 1000 Contacts, 1000 SMS memory and 380 events/tasks. (~26MB internal memory)
6. 5 alarms, and you can also set FM alarm.
7. Two kind of keypad lights. White for normal purpose and Orange when Walkman is running. The orange light blinks on the beats of the song.
8. USB charging: When you connect this phone to PC it start charging from the USB cable.
9. Flash Menu: The main menu in this phone is built using Flash Lite. You can switch the orientation and look of the menu. Menu items can be tiled, horizontally or vertical aligned, and can have cool animations.
10. Synchronization is one of the most important service that we should use. In short taking backup of the phone data. I sync my phone regularly with PC. The phone supports synchronization via USB data cable, Blue-tooth, or internet server.
11. Stereo Bluetooth, Picture Blogging, Voice Dial + Playing Caller’s name, Big Fonts, Video Ringtone, etc;

Go and get the phone… it’s a worth buy cellphone.

Note: The camera is not good as compared to ‘K’ series (remember it’s Walkman phone, and this is acceptable). Still it supports EXIF, Night Mode, Effects, Self Timer, No shutter sound (in silent mode), etc;

Ankit

A: Almost 2-5 items a day, as I’m an avid Internet user. Let me list down where Acrobat Reader sucks:

1. The Adobe Reader 8 installer a massive 20.8MB setup to download and time consuming setup.
2. Version 5 was roughly fast whereas new versions are becoming more memory hungry and CPU intensive and version 7 is damn hungry. It takes almost 10-15 seconds to load!
3. Frankly speaking, I hate their patents listed in splash screen.
4. If a PDF file has high graphics it sucks further and application hangs for few seconds.
5. Seriously I’m looking for a replacement!

Hmmm! a serious problem that affects my efficiency directly. Let’s search for a better solution. Wow I got it as first result!

Foxit v3.0 is the answer to all my worries. It’s a free light-weight (only 2.98 MB) and amazingly fast PDF viewer and printer. A 19 MB PDF file when opened, virtual memory required by Foxit was just 10 MB against massive 23 MB for Acrobat Reader.

Even the installer is just an extractor and does not require specific permissions to install. Quite handy in cybercafe. Its user interface is same as Acrobat Reader and you won’t feel using a different viewer.

- Ankit

C# 2.0 + ADO.NET = LINQ = C# 3.0

In simple words Language Integrated Query (LINQ) exposes the power of SQL queries within C# syntax. This technology along with its tools allows you to connect to SQL database, extract metadata, build typed datasets/classes (using C# Generics) and make you use them along with C# syntax using just two lines of code. And not necessarily SQL databases, it can execute on any collection type.

int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };
var lowNums =
     from n in numbers
     where n < 5
     select n; Console.WriteLine("Numbers < 5:");
foreach (var x in
lowNums)
{
    Console.WriteLine(x);
}

Have a look at Linq Project @ MSDN and 101 Samples all to sense this. Here in this short -n-simple post I’m just showing how to do things for databases stored as *.mdf files and generate wrapper classes.The LINQ preview includes SqlMetal.exe, a utility to auto-generate a strongly-typed C# DataContext class file from an SQL Server 2000 or 2005 database’s metadata with this execution syntax:

$>sqlmetal.exe /namespace:NWind /language:csharp /code:Northwind.cs c:\ Northwind.mdf

- Ankit