Swaroop C H is 29 years of age. He is a coder and startupper. He has previously worked at Yahoo!, Adobe, his own startup and Infibeam.
Email: swaroop (at) swaroopch.com
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When making a website, there are simply so many aspects to consider. I’ve been gathering some useful links and information on the same, right from How to Evaluate a new Product Idea to choosing color schemes.
I’ve put all of these links together into a Website Making Howto on my wiki.
Discussions and contributions are welcome.
There have been two recent changes on my website – the redesigned theme and the book-as-a-wiki. They are related developments. The reason I needed a new theme for my website was because I wanted a blog and a wiki integrated into the same website with a seamless theme.
If you visit the blog and the wiki, you will not immediately notice any difference except for the sidebar. This is intentional so that there isn’t a abrupt transition between the two software. After all, the content is more important than how it is being displayed.
But why a wiki?
Ever since I read about Tantek’s personal wiki, I have been fascinated with the idea. Having a wiki of my own to post anything seemed useful. As Tantek said:
“It’s also a place I’ve kept notes or documents that I expect to keep current / update in place, as opposed to blog posts, which are more like snapshots of thoughts in time.”
LifeHack also has a good introduction to personal wikis.
The advantage is that anything that can be benefited by many eyeballs can be put up on the wiki. For one, I can send it to people and get their feedback and improvements. Second, people can always stumble on to it via google or yahoo and they can contribute as well.
And then, there’s always all the goodness of MediaWiki such as versioning, ability to undo and rollback edits, good anti-spam features and even generate PDFs, thanks to PediaPress.
All these advantages of the wiki led me to recreate my book into the wiki, and it is already achieving great results. How else would a 20-year old student who lives in the Amazon work on a Brazilian Portuguese translation of a Python book and collaborate with others?
All the content is under a Creative Commons license so that the information belongs to everyone.
I’ll be slowly adding my tidbits, notes and link collections on different topics to the wiki. Of course, they will be always in a state of work-in-progress. Many things can go in there – right from trekking howtos (I get quite a few emails on that, surprisingly) to some entrepreneurship resources in the Indian context, and so on.
However, it’s important to keep in mind is to NOT add to the information overload, but to simplify things and cut the crap out.
You are welcome to add your suggestions and comments on the wiki using the discussion pages.
I was trying to analyze the feedback on my website’s new design. There seems to be a trend that relates their usage of the website with their feedback.
While researching on this subject, I found a paper by three people affiliated with the University of Manchester, UK. The paper makes three interesting hypotheses that are eventually proved in their paper:
They randomly asked students to consider three departments for either a one-month summer internship or a five-year PhD. Based on this, they were asked to judge the department websites. The three departments were under the same university, Stanford – the Design department, the HCI website and the D-School website.
What was interesting to note was that most of them rated the D-school best when asked to consider the one-month summer internship. But when the task was shifted to the five-year PhD, they all rated the HCI website better! All other constraints remained unchanged – the same university, the same websites, the same variation in backgrounds of people, etc.
From my understanding of the results, people prefer less-aesthetic websites for serious/regular usage . Perhaps this explains why advanced users prefer Gmail vs Yahoo! Mail – one focuses on simplicity and elegance while the other focuses on usability and attractiveness.
On the other hand, the study “suggests that users’ overall impression of a website could be a determinant of user satisfaction and system acceptability, even overcoming poor usability experience and poor content”
Perhaps this explains why we are okay with a not-so-great UI on the IRCTC.co.in website but still use it because it has great value since it solves a “critical” issue of buying train tickets. Yet, we wouldn’t have tolerated this kind of UI for other purposes. For example, such a UI could have never worked for a survey website or a form-builder. That’s exactly why Wufoo.com has to have such a great UI.
This reminds me of an amazing talk by Geoffrey Moore in an internal Adobe conference. He explained the different types of innovation : product leadership, customer intimacy and operational excellence, which in turn have four types each. The trick for a good company is to have aligned vectors of innovation where they have to excel, and non-aligned vectors of innovation where they have to be “good enough”.
So, in terms of websites, ideally, a website should have to either excel at content and service and be good enough at the aesthetics, or should excel at aesthetics and be good enough at content and service. It does NOT need to excel at both (but of course, it’s good if you can).
I’m such a sucker for good design.
After a couple of years of the nice pop colored theme, I decided to get a new theme, this time by the talented Divya Manian a.k.a. “NimbuPani”.
The main characteristics I was looking for was that the theme should be simple, elegant and functional. And Divya was bang on target.
Three months later, the theme is live. I got eager, so it’s not quite done yet. I’m still tweaking things all over the place.
Update: As always, when there is something new, there will be new glitches. Commenting was broken but it should be working now. Thanks to Manish for alerting me.
This website is now available at both www.swaroopch.com and www.swaroopch.info. Officially, my website is now www.swaroopch.com.
Why? Because the iPhone has a “.com” button on its keypad.
Well, there’s another reason too. It’s because the .info domain was registered a long time ago by a sponsor when I was a student (and I couldn’t afford it myself), and now I’m not able to convince the sponsor to transfer the domain name to me. So, as a backup option, I registered the .com name and both web addresses are now equivalent.
To sum it up, if some day the .info domain is not reachable, try the .com one.
Chug’s awesome design for my website has been getting great reviews and has been featured on many design review sites:
A Bray-style statistics of the software used by the visitors of my blog:
Browsers
Operating System
Source: Statistics for the past week from “Hits Drilldown” in Urchin.
One of these days, I want to do a Aggregator breakdown, that’ll be fun.
…. asks Vijayalaxmi in The Telegraph newspaper.
Excerpt:
Unfortunately, figures on the number of women who blog in India are simply not available. But anecdotal evidence suggests that women write about personal or social issues, unlike men who focus on work-related issues. For instance, there are more chances of a male IT engineer running a tech blog than his female counterpart doing so. Says Swaroop C.H., a software engineer who works at Yahoo! Bangalore, and runs a tech blog (http://swaroopch.info), “I don’t know of many tech blogs run by women. Neither do I know of women’s work blogs.
Interestingly, Sriram just made the 1,000th comment on my blog.
Btw, Sriram joined Microsoft last month (in Hyderabad) as a PM in the DevTools team.
To Sriram : blogs.msdn.com/sriramk doesn’t seem to be taken yet 
