web-design

A web site is a very commanding and an inexpensive marketing and advertising gizmo and a great way to develop your business into the online market world. Web Designing is an innovative work. For the millions and millions of web surfers, your web site is only the first impression of your business and your trustworthiness. The key concern in web design is how to add value to the user's experience and how to make them feel that they are truly got something by visiting your web site.

Some time ago, I came across Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Expression Web Designer. Expression Web Designer is a professional design tool to help create modern standards-based Web sites. It helps create and work with:

* Standards-based Web sites
* Sophisticated CSS-based layouts
* Extensive CSS formatting and management
* Rich data presentation
* Powerful ASP.NET 2.0-based technology

The folks at 37signals.com have released a book that encompasses their business philosophy that is very innovative and agile. The book is called Getting Real and is available at http://gettingreal.37signals.com It is a fairly quick read and is easy-to-read even for the non-technical readers.

This current month's issue of BusinessWeek also has a feature on 37signals and their approach to go from concept to released product in 3 and a half-months or less. I am a big advocate of their philosophy because it can be a great mantra for Indian IT start-ups. The book professes a low-cost and lean approach to starting up that enables you to move quickly and engage customers early. Other key points in the book include the technique of being customer-centric in your product design and starting at the market-end, not at the engineering-end. They also list pitfalls that web-application-developing entrepreneurs commonly run into, and suggest how those can be avoided.