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For long, Bangalore’s been considered a hub for technology and education. Easily, a hub, not just India’s, but surely Asia’s. The great outsourcing trend created a new term – Bangalored!!!

The reasons, vary, as to why this city was chosen for a bulk of outsourced activity. It wasn’t limited to “Hello, customer support—-We’re based in Bangalore, India” but applications for development were pushed here for coding.  People in Bangalore love code too.

Along came issues – poor quality, unprofessional attitudes, failing deadlines – repeatedly and general anger that a job was lost to Bangalore. But now soe of the most widely used apps and programs are built right here – and people aren’t complaining. They like it even. But mostly from a fabulous code perspective. The interfaces aren’t of the quality people want to see.

Hey, Indians are some of the best artists in the world, so why can’t we make things look good? We do now, but its almost impossible to navigate around or get the results one needs. Lack of Usability or rather the lack of attention towards the end-user and more towards the code (Brilliant-flawless code).

But now, there’s companies cropping out of this city, with a focus on User Experience, usability and ease-of use. They’re here to aid the technology firms that do brilliant-flawless coding create kick-ass interfaces.

We’re one of the few who dare do this. Brilliant-flawless code interfaces. Brilliant-flawless code UX.

And its from Bangalore!!!

Design trends are constantly evolving. There is now a marked difference in website design: from plain old dull and boring to bright colours and stunning graphics. Of course, as designers, we’d not just keep up with the trends, but try to create them as well.

Here is a list of the most prominent differences in web design currently:

1. Simplicity: Just look at Google. Clean, simple interfaces. No hassles. That’s what the users demand too now, but once signed in: greater amount of personalization.  Point in case: the new Yahoo! personalized homepage.
2. Large Images and branding areas on the homepage:
   

   Latest website design cues

   The header/branding region on the homepage generally have large attractive images/graphics. This helps in creating attraction. The viewers thus read a little more and there in follows the AIDA principle.

3. Use of Vibrant colours: Check out www.kalaa.in
4. More use of AJAX: Gone are the days of Flash sites. AJAX allows motions like flash, but a the behest of the user.
5. Personalization: Standard features, fine-tuned by the user to suit their preferences. iGoogle, Yahoo! 2.0 to even Wordpress or Joomla
6. Open Source: This is the era of co-creation and open-source is leading a revolution in the way applications and websites are being built. Wave truly will capture this spirit.

Here is a compilation of 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people by the team at Stanford. Read on…

General Page/ Site Attributes

1. Pages that are ‘under construction’. Why?
2. Pages that scroll horizontally. Stick to 1024 resolution
3. Pages that use frames. It’s harmful to your Search Engine ranking
4. Auto-play sounds. If you have to use sound, let the user control it.
5. Too many animations, non-stop looping animations, blinking texts etc
6. Splash/ Intro pages. If you have to use them, make sure you have a ‘skip intro’
7. Failure to check cross-browser consistencies.
8. Reliance on e-mail links as against using a form. Most of the users would not have had an Email program configured
9. Opening up too many new windows. Instead, have a better navigational structure
10. Asking for a sign up/ registration when it is not actually necessary. Why waste his time?
11. Auto subscribing your visitor to your newsletter/ email list without his/ her consent
12. Using pop ups. There are too many pop up blockers out there.

Page title and tags

1. People forget to add the most important ‘title’ to their pages (A search of the keyword ‘untitled document’ on google fetched 44 million pages! You can try this out yourself.)
2. And when they do, they give the same title and meta tags for all the pages. Title all the pages with a ‘unique’ and descriptive title and other meta tags. This is extremely important for higher search engine rankings.

Site Navigation

1. Unclear, badly structured navigation. You can easily get lost on 3 out of 4 sites you see around. Important pages are tucked way down. Most sites do not clearly inform the visitor as to where she or he is! Some pages open in a new window without navigation/ links.
2. Using drop down navigation unnecessarily. Most sites use Java Script navigation while they have all the space to keep them open. For example, if you offer 5 services, why hide them under a drop down menu. Keep the navigation simple and consistent. Even if you are using images/ Flash/ JS for the menu, make sure to add HTML links on all pages.
3. Using only image/ Flash navigation. Use text navigation cause some people switch off images while browsing the web.
4. Not declaring explicitly what you are linking to, especially when you are linking to PDF/ Word documents
5. Not providing anchor text to links
6. Not including Alt and title attributes to images
7. Inconspicuous links. Make your links conspicuous in a different color and preferably underline them. Try not to underline the regular text. Make sure to change color of the visited links

Content

1. Useless, bad quality, outdated content is the most common and tragic mistake.
2. Typos and grammatical mistakes can cost you dear.
3. Very long or short pages, orphaned pages, alien pages too are very common.
4. Content that cannot be scanned easily. Make sure that the content is scan able. Use Bullet points, headers, sub headers, lists. Anything that will help the reader filter what he is looking for.
5. Not including your contact details or making it difficult to find
6. Not having a site search feature on a large website

Design

1. Harsh color schemes that can give you a headache
2. Pages that look alienated from the rest.
3. Too many fonts, tiny fonts, too many font colors, weights, styles etc

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