Tuesday 18 March 2014

Circle Of Karma - Website Design I

Circle Of karma – Website Design - I

The Winds of Change were slowly blowing across my personal landscape, it had happened and happened again, the last when such a change had happened, it had been years ago and the change had radically transformed my life.  I was a sucker for a change, "damn how I welcomed it," and lived for it, it wasn't as if I didn't realise the advantages of stability, however once things were stable enough, I once again began harping for something to change.  It gave me my sustenance for life, like there was a civil war constantly brewing up inside me, "thoughts of gun blazing inside my head," gave me this high of knowing that I could stand up and be counted when the time was right.

Last I had been to London was some three years ago, when the warm summer sun allowed people to shed their clothes finally and take stock of their lives in the dull suffused glow of it.  There were times when I had thought that my going to London had been fortituous, after all what is life unless you get the Big Picture and more often than not, moving away from the scene of action for a short span of time allowed for radical mental changes.  Kalpana had never questioned me about my trips, though she was curious, she would quieten, but I knew her and saw that I would have to satiated the part of her that wanted to more about me.


As I walked into an M.F. Hussain contemporary painting exhibition, "though there never had been anything traditional about him while he had been alive," he was an artist par excellence and an old rebel, I met this old friend of mine there, holy man and old, who was visiting the exhibition too, I had known him for well over 10 years and this was the first time I had seen him in a while, "damn how I hate perfection in numbers," so the "while" here had more to do with a time frame than anything else.  He was travelling with another friend of his, James Gooch, and they both were commenting on a controversial painting of Hussain, which depicted the map of India as the body of a woman.  James was really quiet and spoke and then stopped and allowed us to dominate the appraisal of the art piece.  When I walked into the conversation and said my hellos to them, "and how I hated these intros," we were in full flow, I listened to him too, "as I often do these days with most," and realised that James wanted to talk but was holding back.

These days there are too many people talking about a lot of things that make no sense to anyone, its the quiet introvert like James, who understood people more than anything.  James began to apply the same technique to me, he would seemingly want to talk to me and then stopped midway and allowed me to continue to tell her more about the painting, "a pigeon in the making eh ?".  I began to wonder at people like her who never spoke out and yet were instrumental in leading many conversations.  How did James do this, I wanted to find out, but there were more paintings to peruse today and miles to go before I slept.

“The Bluebird said to the Darkling
                    ,”I am gonna break your gilted cage and fly away.”


She walked in with a smile on her face, “New project and lots of work,” obviously beaming with the thought of some more money and lots of work to do.  “So you want to make more money and where did you find this new project?”  She had lots of work, needed to design a website, and sell her products.
Website design is an erudite process by its very nature, think of it as being a sum of the whole, each part has to be carefully designed and then integrated together.
So what are the parts that make up website design?
The first thing to think of is the Content, next is the Graphics, then the Design and finally the Code which is the integrator.  Let me take as little time as possible to spread out the process of each of these processes.  Also, you may think that the process is serial forward, however that may not be the case and actually is the reverse of that.  Take a look at the table below :





                       Content  -à Graphics -à Design -à Code

                                                                                                Table 1.1

The Code a developer writes is dependent on the Design, coder can only decide on the correct HTML/CSS/JavaScript/JAVA provided that the design is accurate.  So for the newbies, what is recommended is HTML code, typically comes in the form of tags, higher forms of coding evolve into Java coding, Visual Basic coding etc. :
<!-- This Script demonstrates the use of HTML- ->
<HTML>
<script>
-- This is where the functions and variables to be used by the HTML go into
</script>
<font face="Tahoma"><a target
="_blank" href="http://www.htmlfreecodes.com/">
<span style="font-size: 8pt; text-decoration: none">
HTML Free Code</span></a></font>
</HTML>

All website code, at least the basic HTML code is encapsulated within tags, the HTML tag, the SCRIPT tag and the formatting tags like FONT, SPAN and other such tags.
Similarly, the Design is dependent on the Graphics, its Colour Scheme, Size and Resolution.  Going back a little too where I said that the code is dependent on the Design, it is natural practice in a lot of shops to write code and then associate the other elements mentioned in the Table above.  Though this may sound like a quick-fire solution to get a website up  with readily available templates in the market, it pays to be original and spend time in each of the elements mentioned above.  Similarly the Graphics chosen are dependent on the Content.
So here is what you should do before you step into the actual realms of Website Design:
1.     Code Template – Have rough coding specifications ready, which would include specifications that would define the hardware platform the code needs to be run on, the kind of browser or browsers as the case may be,  the coding language of choice and a speed analyser software that says when this code is populated with design, graphics and content, it would run at a particular speed of the web dependent on the internet connection at the end users computer, mapping out speeds Kbytes/s for each dialup, broadband and higher connections.  The specifications are an important aspect of the coding process and any coder will have Code Templates available for testing.
2.     Design – Remember the code is modular and modules can be added or subtracted dependent on the design.  The design brings together elements of Graphic and Content, however it is the job of the designer to have a visually appealing and user friendly site design up.  This is a creative job and needs time and patience,  some designers ever prefer their designs to be run through a usability lab where each hyperlink, colour of text and graphics and other such usability issues are addressed.
3.     Graphics – Chose the graphics based on the scheme of the website, it may not always be possible to get the original proprietary graphics from 3rd party suppliers which are appropriate so remember to give your hand a try at designing those graphics yourself or hire a graphic designer who can give you the graphics within the scheme of design.
4.     Content – This is a specialized job as well and requires trained writers with the skill of writing to a specification, so if the content needs to be geeky and humorous, the style is modified accordingly.  Content Writers have the ability to write mass sellers as well as classics, so if the demand is for Dan Brown Mass Seller, they tune their content to suit the need of the reader, a Classic on the flip side may be for the discerning and need careful writing with attention paid to the prose and punctuation.

Now in conclusion a small note on the various tools available in the market for website design, these may be Integrators Software which include Adobe Dreamweaver, Quanta Plus, Aptana Studio, Coffee Cup Editor, OpenBexi Creative and Amaya, as also Graphic Creation Software which include Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paintshop Pro and Video editing softwares which include Adobe Premiere.

                      
                        “I am Content,” she said now.