Why Hire A Good Web Design Team

Web design is, contrary to some belief, an art form. It takes years of training, both off and on the job, and a lot of clients and prototypes to get to the level of quality a design company can label as their output. No five-minute fixes, no standard templates – each site needs to be unique, entertaining in its design, and useable without being patronisingly simple. This is a balance that takes professionals a long time and a lot of hard work to achieve, and it’s why your site is only safe in the hands of the best.

When someone first visits your site, the design is what’s really going to matter, in the same way a book cover will convince someone whether or not to pick it up off the shelf and read the blurb. Instantly, it’s a visual issue, and some websites can be really difficult to interpret, or just look plain unattractive. While functionality is a big deal, a company that puts a lot of focus on aesthetic and hooking visitors the moment the page loads – which should happen quickly, too, as slow sites are no good to anyone.

Clean code, custom designs and a close working relationship with the client is important to a good design team, and every design should be a consensus between what the client wanted to achieve, and what the company was able to grant them in terms of the finished site. You could be a new webmaster looking for his first step into site ownership, or someone who’s seen the clean designs of Facebook, Google, Amazon and partypoker and wants to have that same level of quality sitting proudly on their domain.

Lastly, it’s important to take into account the cost – sure, you can save money, but is it really worth it when a truly amazing site could pay for itself in ad revenue and loyal users who love the design and usability? Food for thought, certainly.

Live stock quotes in JSON or XML format at no cost

I feel like I have finally found the holy grail of true free access to near-realtime structured stock quotes of almost any symbol across the world. Fellow programmers in search of this for a while must be aware that Yahoo! Finance lets you download near-realtime quotes for many exchanges across the globe in CSV format. However, few are aware of YQL (Yahoo Query Language) – yet another beautiful service from Yahoo! that lets you convert CSV data to JSON or XML on the fly!

You fuse these two services and what you get is a pure free API which lets you access near-realtime stock quotes! You may use this YQL console as a starting point …and here’s how the output looks like in JSON …and here’s how it looks like in XML:

Hope this helps developers like me who may not have enterprise level access to expensive data, but have the will to create cool apps given this access.

Google best guess

It looks like Google has advanced their decision engine aspect of search. This has always been there, but was more like a command line response to specific search queries. Historically the search engine parsed a finite list of such commands for search queries like movie show times, currency conversion etc.

However, now they have now expanded this feature into the realm of providing a machine guessed answer like this:

On one hand, it would be exciting to see how search engines evolve into decision engines and thereby a content endpoint in order to gain user retention. Secondly the decision engine aspect also seems a start of fundamental battle between machine processing (prediction, modeling, AI) vs use of social graph in decision making (like how FB shows ads for things you have liked in past)

Themeforest author quiz answer key

I spent a while trying to complete the Themeforest.net author quiz, but while doing so I landed up compiling an answer key. Posting it here – just in case someone needs it:

1. If you’d like to use an asset within your file that someone else created and you’re unsure whether you’re allowed to, what should you do? – Ask a lawyer or the asset’s license holder
2. Who decides how files are priced? – The ThemeForest staff
3. Who is responsible for copyright violations in submitted files? – The author
4. What will happen if your submission does not validate (excluding browser-specific CSS)? – It will be rejected
5. Who is responsible for testing files to make sure there are no errors? – The author
6. Who is responsible for copyright violations in submitted files? – The author
7. Which of the following would be an appropriate file title? – CoPilot – WordPress and Tumblog Theme OR 20 Tiled Wood Textures
8. What should you do if another author has copied one of your files? – Contact Envato support
9. Your file must work properly in which browsers? – All major browsers
10. What will happen if your submission does not include documentation? – The item will be rejected
11. What is most likely to happen if your file is visually unappealing? – It will get rejected
12. What is most likely to happen if you copy someone else’s design, regardless of where you found it? - You will be banned
13. When am I required to provide a help file? - When selling an Add-On, or any time a file requires advanced editing or contains an asset which requires attribution
14. Who is responsible for copyright violations in submitted files? - The author
15. If you’d like to use an asset within your file that someone else created and you’re unsure whether you’re allowed to, what should you do? - Ask a lawyer or the asset’s license holder
16. When is it acceptable to upload a file type that’s on the files-we-don’t-need list? - When the file quality is especially high

Note: This may not be valid if Themeforest.net changes their author quiz. Last checked validity May 24, 2011
Edit – March 13, 2012: Added additional questions – thanks to Luki’s comment 

Basic cURL wrapper function for PHP

I recently started using snipplr.com to publish small bits of re-usable code with the community. Here’s a quick and dirty basic cURL wrapper function for PHP. cURL wrappers are often needed only when we are working on projects without a CMS or a framework, hence I have tried to keep it very basic. Comments and feedback is welcome.

Embeddable Google Document Viewer

Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.

Here’s the code I used to embed the PDF file:

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf&embedded=true" style="width:600px; height:500px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>

but you should replace the bold URL with your own address. As I mentioned, the document viewer works for PDF and PPT files.

Some other sites that offer similar features: Zoho Viewer, PdfMeNot.

Latest Project: Spans.co.in

Spans Envirotech provides planning, design and construction management services to meet the water and wastewater needs of municipalities, public agencies, private developers and industrial firms since 1995. An elegant yet modest and minimalistic design was the idea behind this microsite. This project uses WordPress as the underlying CMS and the theme is carefully designed to meet specific client requirements of a dynamic sidebar. By default the sidebar displays their mission statement, however some pages have their own sidebar content. This has been achieved using  ‘custom fields’ within WordPress. If a page has subpages, then the subpages are listed in the sidebar, else it displays the blog category list.

The homepage uses a a custom template (home.php) which draws its content from the about page and the two most recent blog posts. Apart from these, the resources page uses a client side table sorter implemented using the jQuery plugin- Tablesorter 2.0 and a custom JavaScript based download tracker.

HTML Table Queries through WP Web Scraper

Scraping HTML tables is easy, but parsing them has always been tricky. That’s exactly what my next release of WP Web Scraper will let you do. This feature will have methods to query HTML tables within your scrap. For instance, the scraper will let you filter by value of a specific table column and also restrict the number of rows using a ‘from’ and ‘to’ index key.

Further, it will also let you delete a certain column from the output and also apply specific CSS classes to even and odd rows. This feature is specifically designed for users intending to scrap and filter or parse data extracted from HTML tables. This feature will be implemented as a module within WP Web Scraper.

Commitement to Open Source

Since the time I started writing code in bits and pieces, I always dreamed of creating at-least one major open source project. Although the Open Source conceptually still revolves more around GNU/Linux or like operating system, I personally feel that any piece of code released with its complete source code for general public usage can be broadly categorized as Open Source. For me, it simply gives me pride of being usable to someone whom you don’t even know. Its a blissful feeling to check your mail after days work to find appreciation notes, comments and suggestions on some plugin or widget you have developed.

This post is a small thanks giving note to all those you downloaded my WordPress plugins – Flash Photo Gallery and WP Web Scraper. In all these have received about 6,000 downloads in just about 5 months! Thanks for all your comments, suggestions, bug notifications and Donations!

Google Search as JSON feed

Did you know that Google has an officially supported JSON feed of search results? Google half-way cancelled their SOAP API a while ago, but they now offer a parametrized URL that returns a JSON data set. Google says this REST approach is useful for “Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments.” This may be even simpler to use than the SOAP API. Here’s an example query:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Paris%20Hilton

This URL format can also be adjusted to grab results from video search, book search and so on. While the URL has the word AJAX in the string and this is officially part of the Google AJAX Search API, this has nothing to do with AJAX per se, as the URL can be called from other environments, including the server side. All you need is a JSON library to parse the results (JSON means JavaScript Object Notation, though it also doesn’t require JavaScript). The Yahoo Search API already utilizes a similar approach, though it can return XML as well. The complete documentation of this Search API can be found on the Developer’s Guide of Google AJAX Search API hosted on Google Code