BTW designers can check out the Jacob Cass’s $11,000 Writing Project here. We are one of the sponsors!

A lot of designers are confused with all the options available today in the web world. Different projects have different requirement, based on the requirement the designer can choose the following.

1. Simple Corporate/Personal Sites:

This is the first level of sites that you design and build. Usually 5-7 pager site. To keep it simple do regular htmls and apply design. No complex things to do. Nothing to worry here.
Best use: Text Editors/DreamWeaver/CSS editor. Tutorials here, here and here.

2. Medium Sized Websites ( 10+ pages )

If requirement is more than 10 pages go for a CMS. A Content Management System is very much recommended. There are tons of CMS systems available. Pick the simplest.  Drupal is great and simple. For more functionality and feature set you can give Joomla a try. It has a much improved documentation and support now. Another brilliant CMS is Expression Engine. Elegant but is a paid CMS.

3. For Blog Designs

For blog designs I strongly recommend Wordpress. The number of plugins/features and support it offers, it simply beats the nearest competitor flat out. Designing a theme for wordpress may require you to know a bit about its architecture. Other options could be Typepad & Movabletype.

4. For E-Commerce Portals.

Gone are the days of OSCommerce and dull looking commerce sites. Move to Magento or Shopify today. They are the slickest open source paltforms available for e-commerce today. Magento has a huge feature list and is ver very exhaustive. Shopify is simple and smaller carts can easily do with it.

5. For Web Apps and Big Portals

This is the last leg of development you can get into. Use a php framework if you need to build a site that has n number of pages and serves 1000’s or millions of users. CakePHP, CodeIgnitor and Symphony rock. Stick to any one of these. You will need to hone your coding and php skills before you even think of jumping into these platforms. You can find a comparison here

These are some very best of the web solutions. A lot more are available for enterprises, crm’s or custom applications. Will share more in the coming posts.

Stay tuned!

1.Launchy:

I rarely touch mouse while navigating in Windows. Thanks to the Lauchy Opensource Keystroke launcher. With this you can rapidly do tasks like launching applications, running scripts, use as a calculator, … many more can be added by adding more plugins.

http://www.launchy.net

2. Digsby:

Gtalk + Yahoo… + LinkedIn + twitter I’m happy to have everything in a single App.
I know this came very recently and I lived through the age before that. But since I came across this superb piece of software, I can’t live without it anymore!

http://www.digsby.com

3. muCommander:

A good replacement to the famous Total Commander which was unfortunately a paid software. muCommander is a lightweight cross-platform file manager, with features like support of FTP, SFTP….. Full keyboard access, in-built support for Archive files like ZIP, RAR, GZIP….. & many many more.

http://www.mucommander.com

4. Firebug:

Its an addon to the Firefox. Just a keystroke away, with this you can inspect and edit live HTML pages, tweak CSS to perfection, debug JavaScript, monitor Network activity and the list goes on. A must tool for a web developer.

http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

5. Kuler:

A great place to get color inspirations and even a great place to store your own color palettes privately or publicly. You can make color palettes from a base color or from a image(This feature I LOVE VERY MUCH!).

http://kuler.adobe.com

6. Gvim

I know there are hundreds of editors out there. But I some how got stuck on this brilliant editor!!!!

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing and configuration of files. (Source: About @ Vim.org )

http://www.vim.org

7. Cygwin

Earlier I really missed the commands like ls, Grep, diff, sed…. in Windows. but with Cygwin you can get all those super duper commands and other Unix tools in Windows. In windows it is very difficult to do tasks like cleaning up. svn folders from a project before deploying to production server. With Cygwin you can do this with just one line of code

http://www.cygwin.com

8 & 1/2. Dropbox

It’s a simple online file sharing/synchronizing app packed with features like automatic syncing, upload when internet is inactive,… and other cool features. With the free account you can share up to 2GB of data.

http://www.getdropbox.com

uTorrent, puTTy, Filezilla, Kmplayer… are again cool & useful free tools which I use everyday. But are replacable and I can handle my life with out them.

So that was a small list of must have’s.

While we re-affirm our committment to our work, as a small token of gratitute we present the ‘NetBramha Diyas’ to our clients and loved ones! If you have not got it ask for one today!

Happy Diwali From Team NetBramha

07.00 a.m Turns off the alarm clock

07.10 a.m Brushes his teeth

07.15 a.m Hurries for his cup of tea reads his paper

07.45 a.m Gets a clean shave

08.00 a.m Takes a quick shower

08.15 a.m Sets his hair

08.20 a.m Sprays extensively

08.30 a.m Completes the look

09.00 a.m Zip drives to work

09.15 a.m Stops for petrol

09.45a.m Turns on radio to pass through the traffic nuisance

10.30 a.m Starts work on his p.c

12.30 p.m Browses on the net to get a break

01.00 p.m Grabs a can from the vending machine at work

02.30 p.m Has a wholesome lunch

04.00 p.m Playing on his phone

05.00 p.m Catches up with friends online

07.30 p.m Hangs out with friends

08.30 p.m Watching sports channel at home

12.00 am Hits the bed.

There are many more brands that I haven’t mentioned on the list. How many of these brands do we want to be identified with? How important is it for a start up company to brand themselves to be able to fit into the consumer’s routine? What is the role of the designer to make this happen? It’s not just the right way of branding that will lead to success in the market, with the right branding only half the battle is won delivering the quality is also equally important. Achieving this is a huge challenge…. For a matter of fact there are a number of brands we use, we are surrounded with…Given a moment to think of all the brands we are associated with in just a day, the number is really huge… How often does anybody give a moment to think about this?  So give it a thought and give us a number!!!! I am sure you will be as surprised as I was when I took up this exercise.

Do let us know what you think about the design. After-all it’s you who let us be us!