Kamalika's Notebook

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Web Design Trends

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web design trends

With the arrival of 2010, innovative website design is going to usher in the new look of the websites. The trend doesn’t begin suddenly … there is a gradual shift in ideas and trends that evolve helping the web designers evolve as well.


Following are web design trends for 2010 which mark a different trend view from 2009 :

Over Sized Logos/Headers

Over sized logos with an over sized header is one of the trend that is gaining popularity, and will likely populate many newly designed or redesigned websites in 2010. The main objective behind a huge header is to increase brand recognition and leave a lasting impression on the visitors.

Slab Typefaces

While slab typefaces have been around for quite some time, they are just now gaining important significance in Website design. Slab typefaces are usually all capital letters and are bold and imposing. They go hand in hand with large headers and can help express who you are as a company.

Typography

Typography was a big trend in 2009 and will quite possibly remain so in 2010. Websites utilizing Typography as their main design element may be more interesting to a reader than the same site with a large amount of images.

One Page Layouts

The development of one page layouts in 2010 will focus on personal profiles with a reduced corporate influence. Think online business cards. This Web design will focus on the individual, their blog, social media hangouts, etc.

Huge Images

A huge image is about creating a visual impact that the visitor will not forget, similar to the oversized logo/header. They are designed to draw the visitor further into the Website

Interactive/Intuitive Design

The development of Websites with Flash has come a long way, with the advent of swfobject2.2, sIFR and other Flash technologies that enable it to be more accessible to major search engines. 2010 will see Web designers move towards some of the more redeeming elements of Flash. Since the average visitor is now more Web savvy than in previous years, designers will begin to create sites that are more intuitive and interactive.

Modal Boxes

In 2010, modal boxes are picking up steam. They are similar to a popup but much more engaging and less intrusive. Modal boxes are easy to design and use, making them a great solution for designers due to their ease of usability.

Minimalism

One of the trends Active Web Group sees coming in 2010 are Websites featuring loads of white space, bold typology and different color schemes. Minimalism will showcase some fresh colors that bring forth warmth and websites that are primarily focused in their delivery on information.

Retro

In an attempt to honor vintage art, 2010 will find Web designers turning to retro design. While a site that is done in retro might seem incomplete, the key to a successful retro design should be a focus on an inspirational tone and ‘playfulness’.

Intro Boxes

The attraction towards the development of an intro box on a Website in 2010 is the simplicity of introducing yourself to the visitor instead of struggling with the development of a creative ‘About Us’ page.

Magazine Layouts

The magazine layout in 2010 has come in part due to the migration from the traditional press to online infotainment. The development of a magazine layout gives the visitor all of the information they are seeking on one home page; this gives the visitor the opportunity to view everything quickly and at their convenience.

Article Source:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Latest-Website-Design-Trends-or-2010&id=3559022

HipHop for PHP by Facebook

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HipHop for PHP by FacebookOn 2nd February, 2010 Facebook announced a new project by a small team of Facebook developers who were working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. Facebook claims with HipHop they’ve reduced the CPU usage on their Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page and as well know less CPU means fewer number of servers, which means less overhead for high scale applications. They also claim that this project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook as it helped in reducing the huge overhead of over 400 billion PHP-based page views every month. The Web at large should benefit from HipHop but its in beta phase now so developers will have  to accommodate with it before trying it out.

According to Facebook HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

PHP belongs to the category of scripting languages and they are known to generally be less efficient when it comes to CPU and memory usage and according to Facebook:

One common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the more complex parts of your PHP application directly in C++ as PHP Extensions. This largely transforms PHP into a glue language between your front end HTML and application logic in C++. From a technical perspective this works well, but drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application. Learning C++ is only the first step to writing PHP Extensions, the second is understanding the Zend APIs.

Since 2007 we’ve thought about a few different ways to solve these problems and have even tried implementing a few of them. The common suggestion is to just rewrite Facebook in another language, but given the complexity and speed of development of the site this would take some time to accomplish. We’ve rewritten aspects of the Zend Engine — PHP’s internals — and contributed those patches back into the PHP project, but ultimately haven’t seen the sort of performance increases that are needed. HipHop’s benefits are nearly transparent to our development speed.

The project has taken two years: eight months to have a version that could be demonstrated, ten months finishing up all the coding, and six months testing the service on production servers and developers have written 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests.

The whole thing sounds very interesting and I guess it will create a buzz in millions of open sources developers but unfortunately the source code link provided by the HipHop Wiki seems broken but I’ll still follow the instructions and give it a try.

You can also check out Facebook’s video on HipHop for PHP:

Courtesy: HipHop for PHP: Move Fast

PayPal’s suspension of Indian bank transactions

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PayPalOnline payment system giant Paypal, in a surprising move has blocked all personal payments to and from India. This suspension also includes transfer to local banks in India. However, customers can still make commercial payments to India but merchants cannot withdraw funds in Rupees to local Indian banks. According to some sources this is due to an issue between Paypal systems and RBI regarding transfer regulations and monitoring.

While the suspension continues, freelancers and personal account holders with PayPal will be facing the most difficult times. Although PayPal has assured of sorting out the issues to the earliest possible date and constant help to all it’s customers, but the move has brought about a sudden chaos. Freelance websites and all others who have Paypal support integrated to their service have been sending out alerts to all it’s Indian customer base regarding this sudden change. The move has also affected the Indian eBayers significantly with mounting levels of irritation.

The reactions from the general masses (those aware of this move) have been mixed. While some have denounced it as dubious move on part of PayPal or RBI, some have uplheld it as a righteous move to save other  genuine accounts and transactions. It is now only a matter of time, to see what awaits in the near future. Till then hope is the only “currency” we can “bank” upon!!

For more updates, check out PayPal’s official blog.

Courtesy: Suman Banerjee

Basics of Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the more traffic is driven to that Web site.

What is the difference between “organic” search listing and paid listing?

An “organic” search engine listing is a free listing of a site, usually found by a search engine’s spider and then ranked by relevancy according to the search engine’s methodology. In contrast, a paid listing is ranked according to how much an advertiser is willing to spend.

Do’s and Don’ts of SEO

The Do’s:

Do a thorough analysis of all your keywords and key phrases for your site, on the products or services that you are trying to promote through web.

Make sure you write a short descriptive title tag of what each page of your site is all about, and make sure they are all different. Search engines use the information contained in that title tag, compare them to the text on that page and rank it accordingly.

Provide relevent description, keywords for home page as well as internal pages

Provide ALT tags for all the images in your website. This will enhance your listing in the search engines  your key

Develop the content on your page using the same keywords contained in your title tag.

Having a well-designed sitemap will ensure that each page of your site gets properly indexed by Google and the other search engines.

The Don’ts:

Don’t make your site entirely in Flash (or if you do, make sure to develop a html version of it)
The majority of search engines have problems crawling the links and text in flash objects.

Don’t make your site in frames.
The search engines only see the first page of the site and can’t crawl deep into your website.
As content is the king in getting search engine listing, so it is advised that you should all your contents crwaled by the search engines robots.

Submit your website once to the search engines and then wait for at least six weeks! Don’t use software that automatically submits your sites on a weekly or monthly basis, since it might penalize you in the long run.

Courtesy: Mithu Sarkar

Koyelia Gaan Thama Ebaar – UCO HUT Saraswati Puja 2010

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