ClinicYou – clinicyou.com is a Web 2.0 based application for clinicians and medical services. A web based practice management software with nothing to install. Its design perfectly suits the description of ‘Web 2.0 Design’.

1.Artistic attraction

The biggest advantage of web 2.0 design is that you get an opportunity to vent out your creativity in a very artistic way. It captures the audience attention easily and helps you keep them at your site for a long time. You can clearly see this on the ClinicYou.com homepage;

2.Content range

In Web 2.0 design, you can use larger fonts to decorate your webpage. Experimenting with new fonts is a basic change which has come with web 2.0. You can focus on vital key phrases with a larger font.

3.Effortless Navigation

Viewers of your site expect flawless navigation when they come to your website. Every Web 2.0 website demands that you keep the navigation system very easy for your users.

4.Design Capability

The best feature of Web 2.0 design is mainly the logo design capability. You can design significant large logos which is very important for brand promotion. This can easily capture the eyes of your viewers.

5.Use of Helpful icons

One can use impressive icons on the important areas of a website to draw attention of your viewers. Putting noticeable icons is again increasing design capability. The icons will automatically put visitors at your required area.

6.Number of columns reduced

The less the number of columns, the more is the clarity of a website. Infusing too many columns reduces the simplicity of the website. In Web 2.0 style, columns are kept minimal.

7.Simple Looking

The Web 2.0 concept has a lot of new features, so the design is kept simple and minimal for the users. You can achieve your objective only by keeping the design simple.

The Web Designing world is marching forward with an array of features. Web 2.0 designs are taking a step ahead with modernized features by capturing viewer concentration.

You know your website needs a revamp and a new web 2.0 look and feel. Probably, you are no longer that “very small business” but have qualified to become a small business.

Yes, businesses grow over time and they need to communicate this to their clients, channel partners, media and to the trade associations. All this helps them gain a better position in the eyes of all those who might positively or negatively affect the business.

1. Communicate what is new and what is important - These two may not always be in consonance with each other but you need to tell the most important things that seem to be happening at your company and that too in a reverse chronological order with the newest items listed first. First things that come to mind are the recent products and services added to your portfolio, the growth in number of employees or the counties/states that you represent in and may be signing up of new clients and business channel partners.
2. Your audience and your objectives - Know the likes and dislikes and craft your website redesign strategy around it. Also, never loose the focus of what it is that you wish to accomplish with the redesign. A redesign, just for the sake of redesign is bound to fall flat. Instead, ask questions to yourself as to what you look forward to changing. Are you receiving inquiries that are very small in nature? Do you which to get bulk orders and bigger orders? Do not fix all objectives on one website and all call to actions on one page. Give the command to your users with simple options that are easy to understand and are actionable. Read more…
   

It is so true that it isn’t in the tool but in the hands which use those tools. A bad workman WILL blame his tools. So do not really think about the tools too much before really conquering the design and design standards naivety in you. No doubt, understanding the workflow of a design tool like Dreamweaver can work wonders and is required for authoring your website; criticisms mushroom if you do not pay heed to some points and avoid design mistakes.

Not only amateurs but experienced designers too can sometime make a few mistakes that can tarnish the usability and usefulness of a website. Let’s take a look at them.

1. PDF Files for Online Reading – Think from users’ perspective. Would you like to have your flow of surfing the website being broken? Not at all! Moreover, the standard browser commands don’t function the same way for PDF files as they do for an HTML page which makes the surfing more frustrating. Because the PDF file is not a web page, it does not show the navigation bars. This makes impossible for the user to directly hover to any other pages on the website. In short, PDF files are optimized for printing and are quite repulsive as far as reading and navigation are concerned.

2. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links – The implications of not implementing the minute details can be adverse. In case of sites with number of pages, users tend to identify their navigational pattern by recognizing the color of links. Read more…

User Interface is the most important aspect of that killer web application,  the deployable software product or teh website that you’ve just released. The technology component, proper marketing and beautiful packaging often take a backseat when it comes to website  user interface. User interface is the first thing that users come across and is that aspect that can make or break the version 1x of your software. Read more…

Google’s technology is evolving quite rapidly and search is not the only place where the company is making big strides. The pace of technological innovations has placed Google ahead of every other major company in a highly competitive market. Not to say that the niche players are sleeping, but with its demonic size and sky touching stock prices, buying out competition is not a problem for Google. In web advertising, Google is already the undisputed leader, the doubleclick acquisition even irked many a competitors and industry watchers alike. Not so long ago, Google announced a bunch of new features at its Google Searchology event, then at the Google I/O it was Google Wave and now it’s Google Translator Toolkit. Read more…

The Microsoft ASP.NET Chart Control

We were looking high and low for an easy to implement and lightweight chart control for an on-going ASP.NET web application. We got down to working with  our best friend, the Google search to look up for the available options. There were many third party Chart Controls available and some were really fancy and good-looking. They were rather bulky and wore exorbitant price tags though, and the two factors made them look less attractive. After short listing, we finalized one of them thinking it was the best solution, though I wasn’t too keen on it since it lacked luster and sent information outside the application each time to generate charts. But it worked well, was free and better than most other alternatives we had come across. We tried the product, made a demo application and finalized it for use within our application. This was just, till the client questioned the free status of the product and for how long it would remain so.

That sent us scurrying back to Google search. My colleague, an eagle-eyed developer (who had suggested the other option as well) with an uncanny knack for Googling up the right stuff surprised us with an even better solution this time- the perfect chart control that we could use with complete ease! One look at the charts the Microsoft ASP.NET Chart Control could generate and I was an instant fan!

After a long drooling over the charts that the control sprang up (erm, yes), I got around having it set up to check its feasibility in the application. After a demo to the client and a clean chit from the developers, and it was clear that this was the chart control we were going to use in our application.

It’s unbelievable how effortlessly we can use the Microsoft ASP.NET server control (for free) with C# and ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charts. The control provides a useful addition to your standard ASP.NET toolkit of functionality, and enables you to easily add richer visualization and data workflow scenarios to your ASP.NET applications. The web chart supports many types of charts amongst which are Area, Bar, Column, Doughnut, Line, Pie, Radar and many more. And, they are very good looking. The best part is, it’s a .NET control so it makes sense to opt for it over the bulky third party tools.

Features supported

• Multiple chart types supported
• Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more
• Data binding
• Built-in data manipulation and formulas
• Comprehensive chart appearance, such as 3D, lighting, perspective, and more
• Events and customizations Read more…
  

How many times have you clicked a link or followed a search engine to land on a page that has no information display and says, “the page cannot be displayed”? Many a times, huh? What do you do next? Do you move up the directory level? Or do you slice the URL and visit the webpage? Not many do that. The best practice that majority of the web surfers will follow is use the ‘back’ button and visit another website. Isn’t that what you do as well? Read more…

My company (Viscus Infotech) has grown insanely popular and everyone and their dog seem to be copy pasting stuff that we’ve either produced or have designed. Read more…

A fortnight ago I got a mail from a site stating that I have registered on it long back but have not used its services since then. Thanks to my knack of reading the log files and examining the cookies, I was appalled to find that I had never been on this site before. After further investigations, I came across a scary fact. The site that has sent me the mail had all the details and information about me which I normally have on my profile on various social networking sites.

Now the situation was clear in front of me. There can be two possible reasons for it. Either these social networking sites are selling the user information or hackers have the keys to their databases. Though both of these reasons were born out of the fear and insecurity, but were quite impossible. I had a discussion with few of my friends who are part of the cyber world and then after a long discussion I came to conclusion that it was none other than me who did the foolish act. This website only exploited it. Read more…

Introduction

When I asked my Dad to help me by doing some charitable donation towards my wallet as I had to buy the Nokia 8800(Gold), he mysteriously smiled and told me to check my wallet the next morning. To my utter surprise, I found a note that said “Mobile phones are meant for talking. What to do with a flashy jazzy instrument. Please find Rs 500 note behind”.

Is that really so? Then why so much money is being poured in for designing interfaces? If TV is for watching movies not the TV itself, why LG’s Scarlet boasts itself to be the “Hot New Series of TVs from LG”? On a funnier note, it leaves another doubt in our mind, “Are the days over when actors and models used to be hot” apart from your favorite colleagues, classmates, college buddies etc? Why can’t we just add features and keep continuing with the existing models, thus, just investing in R&D instead of look and feel? Are humans more receptive to appearance than to functionality? The more potent question, “Does it apply to websites also?” Read more…