On the onset of web development work for the Kolkata , India based company , we knew that we were dealing with a very professional group of people. They had a clear understanding of their website requirements . The deliverables and expectations were well defined , and they gave us well prepared materials for their website. When our web designers created the initial design layout, they liked it right away also. Building up on a custom CMS and a database driven Store Finder took place in the next 7 days .

With the website completed such quickly, we are now almost ready to begin for their website promotion and another new website for the Wall Depot group of companies. It would be our great pleasure if you can take a look at their new website and leave any feedback on the same.

Website : Wall Depot Retail (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Here are some tips on what all to be kept in the forefront of your mind while making your business website.
Useful graphics and stock images on your web pages make them a lot more attractive than boring textual pages. But do remember the fact they put extra strain on your pages and pushes up the loading time. Adding to many graphics and images is not a healthy either.

Some regularly followed strategies are…

1. Choose thematic colors – don’t use too many colors unless the theme really demands it.
2. Optimize images for the web – try using JPEGs
3. Gifs have always come with the “Interlace” feature. Interlaced images cause less flickering than non-interlaced ones.
5. Slicing animated Gifs makes it faster to load. Slice your animated Gifs.
6. If the page is a gallery of sorts, try using thumbnails. Large images are best if used on headers etc.
7. Scaling solid colors, without using gradients would be beneficial
8. Specify dimension – height and width.

Major search engines – especially Google tend to stress more on the loading time of your website. Lesser the loading time, better your Google ranking tends to be. At Websys, we are passionate about web design and are pride ourselves of being admired as a renowned firm doing web development in India. Give us a shout when you need to design your website and subscribe to our RSS Feed here for more tips and case studies.

It is often a common practice/ demand for many of our clients of web design in India to have the exact same features he/she has seen elsewhere. It’s innate to believe that the more number of options you invest in, the more it will awe your customers. But, it is not always the case. Sometimes the simplest features, pays you back more on a simplistic approach to web design.

Websites for people and professionals, as opposed to websites for companies and online stores are expressions of the persons themselves. Truly speaking, we do not do personal websites as much as we would like to . Continuing to work with clients and corporate websites who outsource web design assignments, it was a breath of fresh air designing a website for a professional photographer.

Ashwika Kapur is a young creative wildlife photographer from Kolkata, India, with a variety of passions. Our work started with a brief initial discussion and a basic mock design. Even though the design was very modern , the client wanted a total redo. Being a creative person herself, she chose to guide us on the way she wanted her website to be – from the fonts on the site to the way the menu items had to come , she has been very hands on and we thoroughly enjoyed working with her. The final request , which did take some to and fro was how she wanted her photos in her African portfolio was to come across , specifically with her watermark .
Now the website is up, we look forward to any feedback you have on the current design as well as the initial mock, we really look forward to it. Visit AshwikaKapur.com

The first and foremost point here is that website is a form of Advertisement. Business’ which are controlled and operated by forward thinkers , people who have interest in leading among other business and have interest in business growth will consider such Advertisement a worthwhile expenditure.

Almost all forms of advertisements bear costs – be it in the print media such as Newspapers and Magazines . In a metropolitan city like Kolkata, cost of such an advertisement is often quite high. Comparatively, total cost of having a 10-15 page website would be lower.

And in actuality, we have been seeing more and more small to medium size business, shop owners and professionals have been finding the exposure that has been received by their competitors, who already have websites are tremendous. Some of our clients include punjabi shops, budget hotels, imported tiles distributors. In all these cases, we did not have to explain the need for a website, rather the client came with their own vision as to why they wanted a website and what they expected from it.

Not to mention, that in my last count I found almost over 300 web design companies in Kolkata and numerous freelancer web designers.  With such a high provider count , the market for web design and development surely is booming. It is only upto you , the visitor – to stop thinking and start contacting a professional web development company like WEBSYS.

Websys

Our old website or should i say the current one ( as of today ), has provided to be a great tool in advertising our abilities , displaying our portfolio and also attaining top positions in the search engines such as Google and Yahoo or Bing. However , these are the following points we ascertained which needed changed or worked upon.

• The website did not have any white area – while colored backgrounds are nice, many people associate websites which sell packages or services with the white color or are accustomed to it. It also helps in displaying text easily.
• The design had its uniqueness in shape , but did not allow ample space for text content. With more content writers and seo staff in our team now, this was a major demand .
• As already mentioned , the old design has been there for almost 2 years now . So a new fresh look was very much on the cards. Our new batch of designers were waiting for such an opportunity to showcase their talents and magic.
• The new design will also be offering easy navigability and various text links for the while site in all pages, thus making the full website more accessible and search engine friendly.
• Along with text links, there will also be options to connect to us in various other social network and business networks.
• An important aspect – the new website will be totally managed by a CMS and shopping cart – thus giving a total experience .

I am so excited that I can probably go on and on writing on this event / topic. But I think this is good to start with , and as the work progress or completes – i will follow it up with another post with more highlights.

If all this interests you , drop us a line and we would be most interested to talk to you about your website redesign.

Additionally, here are 2 client’s websites we recently revamped :

• http://www.balasorealloys.com
• http://www.flexitechservices.com/

Often it can happen that a business idea springs in , and you have decided to build a website for the same. Getting a business website up does not take much time – you can choose from a variety of free and low cost template designs. Or you can get hold of a freelancer from your locality or freelancing website; Or even you can get a true and professional web development company and get started. With the website up and running, add to it a shopping cart and you are already making sales. But without a proper business logo, what are you loosing out ?

You have a business but you do not have a brand . Be it a online ecommerce shop or a offline business – you need to build your brand . Creating a business logo does not cost too much … depending on the time and dedication and thought you want to involve in building your brand identity – it can be anywhere between 55 USD and 199 USD and you can have use prepare various concepts for your custom logo . During a logo design process we remain closely attached with you to find out more about business and the identity you wish to display. We have our graphic artists to hear from you and show you variations and how it can look on a webpage or a business card or a poster.

When you are operating offline through a store with daily customers, names of business are less easy to remember but a impressive logo on your product or stationery – be it a mailer or brochure can help you catch  peoples attention. And when you are operating online, your logo on each page header, banners on other websites, Favicons, and avatars in blogs and forums will go a long way in getting popular among millions of websites springing up every day.

When you choose your new outsourcing vendor , you better make sure your outsourced partner is aware and is ready to take care of these points and probably more – and Language will not be a TRUE BARRIER .

Advantages for the client : All the clients needed was easy option to update basic changes to their website such as names of staff or products. They had their design fixed , either in PSD or equivalent or even existing websites which they wanted to be converted / handled through a CMS. WordPress provided them with this – through its Page creation or Post creation option with it’s Rich Text Editor and category creator . They did not want to further go for a customized content management system programmed for them , as the budget was low . Yet they could manage over 50 pages with set templates they never had to tinker with . WordPress with it’s plugin also proved worthy of handling image galleries as well .

Advantages for us :  Even though a full fledged CMS development project would have been more interesting , as developers , as well economically, we were quite happy to customize the existing open source application / wonder tool / WordPress and use it for regenerating all the client’s existing webpages . Our development time was less spent and quick delivery could be achieved – but we did gain lot more working experience in customizing and creating multiple Page Templates , programming different headers and sidebars for different sub sections of the same wordpress installation.

Total budget for the typical site of 20-25 pages : 700 USD , which included installation , configuration , customization of design and creation of the pages.

Total time taken : 5 days – 1 week .

A few years back even there used to be dedicated portals for different topics and subjects providing detailed tutorials expressing step by step instructions for numerous techniques and problems . I have learnt photoshop from reading many a tutorial from Pixel2life , Spoonno many a time. In the current day, blogs have replaced most of such sites … people still provide tutorials but now through blogs, with not just the steps or instructions but also expressing there viewpoints and comparing it with related ones. Forums also help in the learning process , even though in a scattered way and often by just posting snippets of code or via to and fro by several members / readers.

So are books still a viable source for knowledge – primarily in the case of web development topics ? Why should they be still be considered as an alternative ? Is it worthwhile to spend around 30-100 USD on a hard bound book when simmilar knowledge can be obtained for free just by using 2-3 hours on the internet ?

For one thing , books are printed material which can be carried anywhere and does not require an internet connectivity or the PC where you might have downloaded the tutorial . Since it is a physical item , you do not have to worry about the blog / website from being inaccessible / down . Books are something that you own and you don’t have to search for it everytime you are in need of the reference. ( It has often been my experience , quite frustratingly , that the blog / site i was reading is inaccessible , even though i agree really large sites has less downtime ). Books are also very planned and compact , which is hardly the case for forums topics / comments and somewhat also possible in blogs . Even though good blogs are often nicely categorised and cataloged , they do not compare with the structure and systematic disbursement of the topic in the case of a hard bound book. You may often find a random good article on one topic in a blog , but you are more likely to find constantly coherent advice if the book is by a good author . Books also lack the problem of missing images , and extremely disturbing adverts all over the place ( as always accompanies by any popular website / blog ). A blog or forum can also be plagued by various distracting and often irritating comments by spammers of less qualified webmasters. And finally and quite importantly , a book requires much more attention and interest to read through where as seeing a blog , a developer might be tempted to simply grab and copy paste the required code and use it in his project and not actually learn anything worthwhile from author; whereas in the case of a book, even if someone tries the same , he would have to type it out and in the process might even learn something

Saying all this , i am not trying to say that books are better than blogs or forums or anything of that sort , but i do believe that books do still provide lots of value to a person who is still in the process of learning – especially web development and designing. In the past 2 years , i have bought multiple web development books from Sitepoint.com , Packtpub.com and Amazon.com and we have bee creating our own collection of books , which is available for all our designers here at Websys.