Saturday, May 24, 2008

Quest for a professional website

Considering that I spend most of my time hooked to internet and basically in front of my computer, I myself was really disappointed with the last website I made. It's crappy looking, doesn't render well on browsers other than IE6 and basically looks like a website made by a class 2 student. I have the urge to give out the url to the website here, but my pride tells me otherwise. So.. I gave in to my mcp pride and decided against putting it up here (read on.. I may decide to give away the url after showing you my new web-page)

So, anyways, My father just started his own company a couple of months back. (He's been working in he jute industry for the past decade or so and he just basically got tired of saying Yes Boss!) When I agreed to roll out a website for him, I was sure of one thing - this time I wanted a pro job, maybe not just because this was for my own family business but just because it hurt my tech pride to accept awful website I came up with last time.

I began my quest for a professional website with the search for a professional web development tool (if you want a professional job, better use a professional tool). It took me about 10 days to finally get a hold of a healthy torrent for Dreamweaver CS3 (anti-piracy brigade - screw u!). But when I finally had the cracked software installed, I realised that the IDE had millions of buttons and even with all my experience with software, I was kinda uncomfortable moving around the interface. So, I spent another 3 days or so downloading a lynda.com tutorial for Dreamweaver CS3 (for the un-initiated - lynda.com is the best place for video tutorials for all the popular software tools. They give you a 2 week free trial as well). Boy, did it help or what. The tutorial was so well done that within a few hours I knew dreamweaver inside-out (at least all the basic stuff).

So I finally created my website. I'm hosting it on Google Pages (Google Apps is a free hosting facility which provides you 100 MB of space and 200 email ids). You can access it using www.ecosealindia.com / www.ecosealindia.com-a.googlepages.com/index.html (the first url basically just re-directs to the other one). I've tried my best to make it look professional. Some of the things I've tried


- Centered fixed-width page layout (a common thing on the web but a first for me)
- Product gallery using lightbox (http://www.ecosealindia.com-a.googlepages.com/shoppingbags.html)
- Corporate logo using 'Flash Text'
- Navigation bar using Spry (The fancy drop-downs that you see on each page)
- Link to maps.google.com
- Picasaweb flash slideshow
(http://www.ecosealindia.com-a.googlepages.com/index.html)
- Google custom search engine (though at the time of writing this, google hadn't indexed the ecoseal website)

So enjoy going through the website and tell me what you think about it..
(by the way.. here's the crappy old website I made last time .. www.champdanyblr.com)
I can be reached at aksh.sinha@gmail.com