Intricacies of Web Layout
In website designing an important but often ignored aspect is the layout of the site. In the muddle of SEO or complex scripts or images or flash, layout is forgotten. But remember if your layout is not appealing or user friendly, users are not going to come back.

Here are a few of the very basics of web layout pointers…………
User-Friendly
A user friendly website is simple and uncomplicated, so keep it that in mind when you begin planning the layout. It’s best to avoid complex navigational links with complex scripts or images that are hard to view. Curtail the use of huge images which take long to load, instead use smaller icons. Also avoid too many colors, tables or types of fonts, as this gives the site a cluttered look.

Placement
If elements are logically placed they connect to form a structure to your design. It is important to group similar elements as this communicates to the viewer the concept and theme of your site. These elements can be color, spatial relationships, shape, texture and typeface If there is no pattern to the placement of elements, it creates a confusing and often difficult to navigate situation for the viewers.

Repetition
Repetition of elements throughout a design can be used to enhance and reinforce information. Repetition lends to the visual appeal of your design. The repetition of graphic elements specially works to create visual unity.

Consistency
While designing you must always remember to maintain an overall aesthetic authenticity. It is important to keep visual and typographic elements simple and clear. It is also necessary to apply them uniformly. An inconsistent design results in decreased user effectiveness. There should be an overall visual system to the text, graphics and spatial relationships.

Dimensions
One of the most important aspects of layout is keeping track of the dimensions. It is best to limit the width and height of the webpage, so that the important content of the webpage lies within the top 600×600 area without scrolling. Limit the content of the page to four scroll lengths and if more content needs to be added, shift it to a new page, with a navigational link.

Color Balance
In Website designing color is critical for the layout. Balance your color wisely too many contrast or heavy or dark colors create visually unappealing sites. Color can also be used to define or create spaces. Multi-colored sites have the lowest visitation time, as a combination of warm and cool colors confuses the user. It will often make the site seem cluttered and ambiguous. So it is best to choose a couple of colors and stick to them.

File Size
File size is another major issue. It is very important your site to keep loading times to a minimum. Most users use a slow 56K modem to access the internet so it’s necessary to keep file size small. Keep small pages as they load faster, also avoid too many graphics as they delay loading. Target for page size should be below 35K for at least the home page.

Conclusion
The importance of a visually pleasing and quick loading layout cannot be stressed enough; it is the back bone of your site.

About Author:-
Sahil Kumar is a web development expert working with web development company also developing induction software.

The Importance of Color in Web Designing
A website is basically a marketing tool, representing the companies, products and services it is also a reflection of the companies personality, ideologies and philosophies. It is definitely a heavy burden to carry for a mere website, but it dose. Huge corporations spend millions of dollars to determine the perfect color for the branding and packaging of their product. This is due to the fact that the perfect blend of colors increases the profitability of their product. The same rule applies to the designing of your website

Color impacts your user on many psychological and physiological levels. Your site’s color scheme can have a dramatic impact, either positive or negative on your potential success. Color is an important element of website designing. In Website designing of color is as critical as the design of graphics and layout.

Color and its Effects on Website Designing
Once a visitor has come to your site you have around 8 to 10 seconds to visually appeal to the user and turn them into customers. Since Color affects our feeling, perceptions, and interactions, you can use colors to make a user feel welcome, comfortable, relaxed, and secure.

Before choosing the colors of your website it is important to get a basic understanding of color and its effects.

Warm colors
Warm colors are based on yellows, oranges, browns, yellow-greens, and orange-reds, colors. Warm colors have a tendency to be aggressive and exciting, so it’s best to apply them in small doses.

Intermediary colors
Purples and greens are intermediary colors that are either warm or cool, depending on amount of red or yellow they have in ratio to blue. If the color contains less blue then it is leaning towards a warm hue, and if it has more blue then it is more towards the cool side.

Cool colors
Cool colors are based on blues, greens, pinks, purples, blue-greens, magentas, and blue-reds. Cool colors tend to be soothing, calming colors and can be used in large amounts.

Neutral Colors
Neutral Colors include white, black, gray and colors that contain a large amount of gray. Neutral colors are great for back-grounds and for enhancing the effect of warm colors.

Multi-color
Multi-colored sites have the lowest visitation time, as a combination of warm and cool colors confuses the user. It will often make the site seem cluttered and ambiguous. So it is best to choose a couple of colors and stick to them.

Color Harmony
Too much color can be disturbing and chaotic, whereas too little can be boring. It is best to use a balance. So it’s best to Use only a few different colors on a page. Avoid using an excessive amount of colors, blend and use warm and cool colors.

Computer Color Display 
Computer monitors display colors using different amounts of red, green, and blue, these are called RGB color. This is an additive form of color, because red, green, and blue light in equal amounts “add” up to white light. All other colors are formed on screen by mixing the amounts of the RGB color. Since RGB color is completely different from the way colors are set in print, it has to be used differently.

Web Color
A common problem on the web is that color often does not reproduce correctly in Websites. The reason is related to bit-depth, a color may be beyond the range of the viewing display setting. Alternative colors may be reproduced, or color shifting may happen. Even if a visitor’s system is capable of displaying a color, technical features like hardware age to Gamma control may cause color distortion. Such problems not only cause aesthetic problems but ay also result in visitor retention issues. Given today’s technology, color management in the Web can be taxing.

Browser-safe palette
The browser-safe palette of 216 colors gives consistent and conventional results across the Mac OS, UNIX, and Windows platforms. Even though computers today can render millions of colors, you should use browser-safe palette if you think your website will be viewed from a 256 color computer, which can be the general case.
It’ll be more effective if you limit the color palette to 2 or 3 major colors with shade variations, as it is visually more appealing. Plus limited colors means smaller file sizes and faster loading.

Text Colors
Be exceptionally careful when setting text and background colors, Readability must be preserved at all costs. If the text is light colored then the background has to be dark and vice a versa. White and black always make a good combination, and red and blue are useful for highlighting. Try avoid using the combination of black as a back ground with warm color text, as it might be great clarity wise but has a tendency to make visitors nauseous.

Color Chart
When dealing with international visitors, it’s easy to get messed up by the meaning of color.

Blue: - represents peace, tranquility, calm, stability, Harmony, unity, trust, confidence
In China, blue is associated with immortality. In Colombia, blue is associated with soap. In India blue is the color of Krishna In the Middle East blue is a protective color.

Black: - represents power, sophistication, formality, elegance, anonymity, unhappiness wealth, mystery, fear, evil
In USA black is for mourning.

Green: - represents nature, health, good luck, renewal, youth, vigor, spring, generosity, fertility, jealousy
In India green is the color of Islam. In Ireland green has religious significance (Catholic). In some tropical countries green is associated with danger.

Orange: - represents energy balance, warmth, enthusiasm, vibrancy, flamboyancy
In Ireland orange has religious significance (Protestant).

Purple: - represents royalty, spirituality, nobility, ceremony, mystery, transformation, wisdom, enlightenment

Red: - represents love, danger, desire, speed, strength, violence, anger, and blood.
In China red symbolizes celebration and luck, used in many cultural ceremonies that range from funerals to weddings. In India red is the color of purity (used in wedding outfits).

White:- represents purity, simplicity, cleanliness, peace, humility, innocence youth, birth, good, and marriage,
In Japan, white carnations signify death. In eastern cultures white symbolizes coldness and sterility. In USA it signifies virginity.

Yellow: - represents joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, imagination, hope, sunshine, and cowardliness
In Asia yellow is sacred, and imperial.

Conclusion
Colors are a powerful tool, it is the first the first impression of your site, so keep the above points when deciding on the color scheme of your site.

Abot Author:
Vishal Verma is a Web Designer at BlueApple, a web development company with a well connected development infrastructure in India having a strong portfolio of global clients offers web maintenance services india.

Introduction
Classrooms are boring. Today students feel school is not challenging or interactive enough. It has been said that there are two reasons why we learn; some learning is essentially forced on us while the other is what we sit back and enjoy. E-Learning has brought back the joy in learning through its innovative and interactive content and delivery.

The old correspondence courses were the first Distance Learning courses but with the advent of Internet in the eighties, e-Learning became new mantra for delivering higher education courses over really long distances.

The Internet opened new possibilities and now any type of learning content, be it for school, graduate or masters level, employee training, research activity or any other type of academic offering is called e-Learning.

e-Leaning has already established its credentials and its popularity can be gauged from the fact that delivery is not restricted to just plain text but has crossed boundaries to video creating virtual class rooms via video conferencing. The introduction of a variety of technologies has made it possible to convert it from impersonal to highly interactive medium of pedagogy (the art and science of teaching).

The Future
According to Market Data Retrieval (MDR) in USA two thirds of colleges and universities offer long distance learning courses and the number of institutions offering accredited degrees have increased to 55%.

New varieties of e-Learning have emerged with help and push from emerging technologies. Besides distance learning now there is distributed learning. This term describes the educational experiences of individuals and groups that are distributed over geographies and cultures using variety of media delivery methods. This has moved education beyond the classroom to more interactive information by joining learning and experience together. This is developing into learning communities with their own focus on various branches, cultures and sub-cultures. It is a mind boggling explosion of information that is now available with lot of imagination and little effort.

With collaborative tools e-learning is moving into virtual classes and virtual communities where the old methods of practice and test have melted into new interactive teaching-learning methodologies.

Tuition on line has taken a new meaning where a varied help is now available both free and paid for on demand on any subject instantly. This has relieved pressure both on the teacher and the students.

Future learning is now focusing on learning beyond the classroom and curriculum. Companies need to upgrade employees by offering re-training programmes. These are both costly and time consuming. By designing these programmes and content via e-Learning methods both time and money are saved. The innovative method is also self promoting as it increases the curiosity level of individuals for self promotion and career enhancements.

In the technical field too doctors and other professionals are getting a fair chance for keeping abreast of developments and discoveries and even participation in these activities through interactive delivery processes.

Looking further, this being the global market era, the consumer is being made aware of immense openings, opportunities and bargains through this method. Medical tourism is one recent example of e-Learning where serious information and fun have been mixed for delivery of marketing content.

Conclusion
E-Learning has created a new dimension in education, both within and beyond the curriculum and is still looking at further opportunities of becoming more useful via new emerging technologies. We are really on the threshold of new opportunities and this is just the beginning of a new horizon of education.

About Author
Vishal Verma, is a development expert working with web development company. Currently consults and working on Offshore staffing service to hire dedicated developers.

Reasons to Invest in a Web Site
A website is an extremely valuable tool that bolsters your existing marketing, sales, recruitment and communications effort. So here are a few compelling reasons to put your business on the Internet. 

• The Internet functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has the most inexpensive and widespread marketing capabilities. 
• The Internet is an excellent way to market your business and sell your products and services as it has a broad audience base. 
• More and more customers are logging on, making purchases, buying services and researching choices and information through the Internet. 
• A good website will help you reach and retain customers; you can use it to interact with your customers send information to customers, reply to emails day and night. 
• You can reply to your customers or potential customers automatically without you having to get involved at all with “autoresponders”. 
• It can be used simply to let potential customers know you are there instead to just sell, particularly those that rely on a local customer base this can be an invaluable source of additional customer enquiries. 
• If your business needs to produce brochures or any kind of sales literature it is cheaper to have the customer download it to his machine and print it then you to produce a brochure which you then send. 
• You can use it to attract customers from outside you local area, you can take your products to totally new markets. 
• Customers expect to see you on the Internet; if you cannot meet this expectation then they will go to someone else. 
• Many people prefer to search for a company on the Internet rather than search their local Yellow Pages or newspaper. 
• They are an effective and efficient way to communicate with potential customers, employees and suppliers. 
• They can be easily updated, keeping your product listings and prices always accurate, everyone can see updated information without having to wait. 
• Web sites offer an ideal way of showcasing your previous work and accomplishments to potential customers and you can build reputation, credibility and trust with potential customers. 
• No matter what your size, a website offers your business the same advantage as your biggest competitors so with a well designed website of even a one man operation can have the same presence as a multi-national corporation. 
• It gives people the impression that you are savvy and smart enough to take your business to the next level. 
• An interactive online catalogue makes your company’s products accessible everywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. 
• Selling online is a cost-effective way to sell as it comes without the customary overhead of a physical store, like building leases, employees. 
• You can put an enormous amount of information onto your web site for only a little money; you can have pages and pages of information about your company, products or services. 
• Your web site can help with improved customer service by providing information visitors can access, there can be a list of frequently asked question’s about your service or product. 
• You can test out new services or products instantly and less expensively, simply put up a new web page setting out the relevant information, and sends an e-mail to your database of existing customers, and ask for their views.
• You can combine  email marketing with your web site and save hundreds on advertisements.

Your business small or big, local or international, if is not online or your existing site is unprofessional or ineffective, then you are losing business opportunities for sure.

About Author:
Sahil kumar, is a development expert working with web development company well known by the name web designing India.

Introduction to Gamers
The common myth that gamers are a useless generation is untrue. Gamers are committed, team-oriented professionals who play to win.
Consisting of millions of rising professionals, the gamer generation will at the end of the day lead the workforce, and they are already changing the rules of learning.

Misconcepts about Gamers
Gaming is not a waste of time, but an astonishingly effective training method for teaching vital business skills.

Researchers have found that all those endless hours engrossed in front of video and computer games have produced masses of employees with unique characteristics such as:

• Bold but calculated risk taking
• A remarkable ability to multitask
• Startling leadership skills.

The Gamer
Gamers intuitively recognize that their personal success depends on adding value to the business enterprise and they essentially expect to deliver an excellent performance. Gamers are used to being leaders.

Some valuable personality traits of the gamers are -:

• They have a cleverly camouflaged commitment to professional excellence.
• A well-built belief in competition gives the gaming generation a welcome impetus to perform.
• Even though they are focused on theirability and on competition, gamers care more about the business they work for than non-gamers.
• Gamers prefer recompense and bonuses based on tangible performance rather than a set remuneration.

The points where gamers as employees score over non-gamers are-:

• Gamers re-invent themselves: the gaming generation is self-educating and always onto something “new”.
• Gamers “think unusual”: for the gaming generation, personal control, trial and error, and continuous change are all just part of life.
• Gamers are born global: the gaming generation is exposed to a multitude of cultures through the gaming experience and thinks nothing of chatting to colleague’s across the world as if they were just next door.
• Gamers are tough: Gamers know, the only real restraining factor to be successful is a person’s own keenness to keep trying. The only real driver is the aspiration to reach a higher level.

Failure leads to Success
Gamers don’t just gain knowledge of people but of the rest of reality, too. Games demonstrate how the world works and that failure doesn’t hurt, it is a part of life.
Before winning a game, gamers will have failed numerous times. Such high failure rates can be exceptionally productive. Because of the high possibility of failure, gamers logically focus on what they did wrong, where they could have done better, and how to reach the next level.
So the gaming generation learns through replication something that countless trainers have tried to instill-: Failure is part of the procedure that leads to success.
Gamers have learnt to embrace risk for precisely the right business reasons-: to capture a suitably large recompense.

Conclusion
Without a doubt gamers are strong in precisely the areas that today’s companies require most. But to control these skills, managers need to understand and value the very special ways in which gamers think and behave.

About Author:
Sahil kumar, is a development expert working with web development company well known by the name web development india.

E-Learning Standards?
Any one stepping into the world of e-learning and LMS is bewildered by the question of standards what they are and what do they do and why they are needed and how are they formed. So here goes in the most simplest of terms………….

What are standards?
E-Learning standards are a set of common rules for content, authoring software and Learning Management Systems (LMSs). These rules or specifications specify how courses can be created and delivered over multiple platforms so that they all operate seamlessly together.

How are Standards Formed?
Before a rule can become a “standard,” it is called a “specification.” Specification is a detailed, exact statement of the functional requirements and particulars for something to be built, installed, or manufactured. Some specifications are further developed to the status of an accredited standard; it has to pass certain criteria’s to become an accepted standard. There are four common steps for gaining acceptance:

R & D: Research and development is conducted to identify possible solutions. Ex The Learning Federation, overall research at universities, corporations, consortia, etc.

Specification Development: When a tentative solution appears to have merit, a detailed written specification must be documented so that it can be implemented and codified. Ex AICC, IMS, and ARIADNE (Europe).

Testing/Piloting: The specifications are put into use either in test situations or pilots to determine what works, what doesn’t, what is missing, customer reactions, etc. Ex ADL SCORM plugfests.

Accredited and International Standard Status: The tested and complete specifications are reviewed by an accredited standards body. If approved, the specification receives official certification by the accredited standards body and is made available to all through this body.

Currently, e-learning standards are being developed by four main organizations: AICC, IEEE, IMS, and ADL.

Criteria’s for Standards?
There are main three areas for a standard

• Communication Interface or API-how resources communicate with other systems
• Meta-data-how to describe e-Learning resources in a consistent manner
• Content Packaging-how to gather resources into useful bundles

Communication Interface or API - The communication interface is how learning resources exchange information dynamically. These standards allow different system components to share information about learners across multiple system components. Learner profile information can include personal data, learning plans, learning history, accessibility requirements, certifications and degrees, assessments of knowledge (skills/competencies). In addition, systems need to communicate learner data to the content, such as scores or completion status.

Metadata - Metadata can be thought of as the subjective and objective data that describes the attributes and characteristics of not only content or “data,” for which it most is often noted, but also people, places, and things. Learning content and catalog offerings must be labeled in a consistent way to support the indexing, storage, discovery (search), and retrieval of learning objects by multiple tools across multiple repositories.

Content packaging- Industry use of the term “packaging” often refers specifically to gathering and describing the resources for a course. Content packaging specifications and standards enable organizations to transfer courses and content from one LMS to another. This is critical because content can created by one tool, modified by another tool, stored in a repository maintained by one vendor, and used in a delivery environment produced by a different supplier. Content packages include both learning objects and information about how they are to be put together to form larger learning units. They can also specify the rules for delivering content to a learner.

What Standards Do?
The objective of standards is to provide fixed data structures and communication protocols for e-learning objects. This enables interoperability between applications, such as an LMS and third-party or in-house developed content, by providing uniform communication guidelines that can be used throughout the design, development, and delivery of learning objects. LMS standards define LMS and courseware interoperability so that an organization can switch to a different LMS that adheres to the standards with minimal or no impact on courseware.

Why we Need Standards?
The e-learning industry continues to evolve, change and advance continuously, every day, and common methods and tools necessary to create and maintain content and infrastructure applications is critical, hence the need for standards.

Common standards for things such as content metadata, content packaging, API, interoperability, learner profiles, etc., must be in place and widely accepted for the knowledge economy and the future of learning to realize this vision. Products that adhere to standards will provide consumers with wider product choices and a better chance that the products in which they invest will avoid quick obsolescence.

Conclusion
E-learning standards are constantly evolving, like it or not you have to be geared up to educate yourself about developments among the standards organizations that create the guidelines as well the suppliers that use them to develop their products to be successful in the e-learning world.

About Author:
Rajesh Rastogi has been managing and maintaining various e-learning softwares projects for the past five years. A storehouse of knowledge about Learning Management System He has been working in close co-ordination with firm providing e-learning solutions.

Web Designing Services in India
India is a culturally diverse nation full of contrasts. One part of India may be ignorant while the other part is creating masterpieces in the web development services.

Web Services
Web development Services are the most vital technological innovation for this century. Web Services are a totally novel and different way of developing software. Companies and individuals can circulate their services on the web using standard internet protocols.

Web services include:
Website Development Services
Software & Technology Solutions
Database Design & Development
Online Business Development
Search Engine Optimization
E-learning Solutions
Ecommerce Website Development Solution
HR Software Solution

Web Services in India
India may have been a late bloomer in the field of internet but once it caught up, it grew at the speed of lighting spreading to all parts of the country. Web development services and software development services became India's niche. This is maybe  because India's youth are choosing careers in web development, services like designing, integration, web services, content writing, database integration, e-commerce etc.

Content rich solutions, documentation, presentation, security and Interactive User Interfaces are just a part of what is being offered by the Indian Web designers. Flash based tools to initiate dynamic products, XML, SOAP, WSDL Java, J2EE and client-server technologies, and the latest cutting edge technologies are also part of the Indian web development package.

These web development services are designed to offer maximum online presence  providing a functional and profitable e-solution.

Globally the Internet has proven to be the most profitable and powerful medium to promote and operate businesses. Marketing and brand promotions, customer acquisition and engagement, new market penetration or simply information dissemination and branding, corporate web sites and Internet platforms have become an absolute imperative.

Conclusion
Web development is on the threshold of a new era, abounding with opportunities and prospects; therefore it is an absolute must for businesses big and small to not miss this chance to create an online Internet presence. The best and most economical way to do this would be to get someone who has both expertise and technology; in short India is the best possibility for web development services.

About Author:
Vishal Verma is a Web Designer at BlueApple, a Web Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India offers Web Application Development India and solutions at competitive costs.

RSS the Future of E-learning
RSS wears many a hats - rich site summary, really simple syndication - RSS or even Resource Description Framework RDF.

RSS is basically a lighter XML format designed for sharing Web content. As it is one of the simplest uses of XML, RSS has become widely distributed. The RSS file can include a logo, a site link, an input box, and multiple news items. Each news item consists of a URL, a title, and a summary.

Because the data is in XML, and not a display language like HTML, RSS information can be flowed into a large number of devices. In addition to being used to create news summary web pages, RSS can be fed into stand-alone news browsers or headline viewers, PDAs, cell phones, email ticklers and even voice updates.

RSS files are created by content publishers and then delivered to people who have subscribed to that feed using a “feed reader” application also called a news aggregator. The feed reader program checks with the originator of the content regularly and if it finds any new content available from a particular site, downloads the information about it, called metadata, into the application automatically.

An RSS aggregator is a type of software that periodically reads sets of RSS files and indexes them for display or syndication. There are two major types of aggregator: centralized and personal. Aggregators are the most common use of feeds. Web aggregators make this view available in a Web page. Aggregators have also been integrated into e-mail clients, user’s desktops, or standalone, dedicated software. Aggregators can offer a variety of special features, including combining several related feeds into a single view, hiding entries that the viewer has already seen, and categorizing feeds and entries.

RSS & Elearning
Beyond personal use, RSS feeds can also be used to republish, or syndicate, content on Websites. Prescient learning technologist Stephen Downes discussed the usefulness of RSS with online courses back in 2000 in his article “Content Syndication and Online Learning.” He wrote, “[Using RSS or similar tools], any course… can tap into up-to-date resources from remote sources… [so that] content is tailored specifically for the course.”

Rather than collecting content in a central repository, requiring an expensive software application, the RSS model distributes content across the World Wide Web, allowing access piece by piece. “For that reason,” Downes says in his article “An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers” that “the distribution of content over the Internet will look a lot more like an RSS network than… an enterprise content management system.” More people will use the distributed learning object network “not only because it’s easier and cheaper, but because they can access much more content for much less money.”

Educational uses of RSS are many ………

• subscribing to feeds on particular topics to stay current
• publishing syndicated content on course Websites or blogs
• having learners create their own blogs and then subscribing to the feeds of all those blogs to check new content on them
• notifying learners about new available courses
• updating learners on new internal or external resources available on a training topic
• Subscribing to feeds from learning object repositories to see the newest objects added or objects added in a topic they’re developing a course on.

Conclusion
Though not the perfect solution, as it does have a few kinks that have to be worked out. Like the lack of digital rights management for both original articles and metadata feeds and RSSs inability to deal with mixed metadata. RSS has the potential to be the future tool of Elearning.

About Author:
Sahil Kumar, is a development expert working with elearning solution india. Currently managing and maintaining elearning management system, A storehouse of knowledge about elearning programs.