About
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.
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COLLECTION
Collection
Website Making Howto
From Notes
Ideation
- How do you get Good Ideas for Startups? by Paul Graham
- How to Evaluate a new Product Idea by Evan Williams
- Make Meaning in Your Company by Guy Kawasaki
- How to Sell an Idea
Howto / Philosophy
- Strategic Design: 6 Steps For Building Successful Websites by Smashing Magazine
- Don't treat software as an artifact, but as a process of engagement with your users -- Tim O'Reilly
- From Powerpoint to Webapp
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn by Paul Graham
- Entrepreneurial Proverbs list by O'Reilly Radar
- Lessons Learned while Building Basecamp
- Iterate
- Why It's So Important To Just Start by Jason Calacanis
- Find the gradient, then follow it by Paul Buchheit
- "Release early, release often" lesson in 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' by Eric Raymond
- How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows
- How to Become a Rifter by Seth Godin
Sketch the design/workflow
- Paper Prototyping
- Prototype with XHTML
- An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design by 37 Signals
- The Getting Real online book by 37 Signals
- How To Write a Good PRD (PDF)
- Balsamiq Mockups
- Uniqueness of the website
Build the prototype
If you want somebody else to build it for you:
If you are building it yourself:
- Have an organized workflow
- Use the same tools for prototyping that you would use for your production website
- Use a good RAD web framework
- Depends on language, capabilities required and deployment options
- (Languages, frameworks, etc. are mostly based on personal taste, so no recommendations are listed here, but there are plenty to choose from)
- Use an IDE
- 35 Useful Source Code Editors reviewed by Smashing Magazine
- Komodo IDE
If you are clueless of what you want, there is a website that provides free preview at no charge:
Design, Look & Feel
- Philosophy
- "Don't Make Me Think!" by Steve Krug
- Most important take-away : Don't make the user think - we should be able to use the site without effort, without thinking about it.
- We don't read pages, we scan them.
- We don't make optimal choices. We "satisfice" (first reasonable option).
- We don't figure out how things work. We muddle through.
- Design websites for scanning, not reading (like billboards)
- Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
- Take advantage of conventions
- Break pages up into clearly defined areas
- Make it obvious what's clickable
- Minimize noise
- "Don't Make Me Think!" by Steve Krug
- Thoughts
- Content is King.
- Less is more.
- Make it personal.
- Designing for Programmers
- Mobile UI for viewing on mobile phones.
- The Mobile UI Pattern Library by Little Springs Design
- Reduce cognitive load
- Concepts
- Design Howto at Design Meltdown
- 12 Steps to Creating a Professional Web Design
- 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design
- Usability and Interface Design Books list by Smashing Magazine
- 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design by Smashing Magazine
- Are there 10 Commandments of Web Design?
- 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of by Smashing Magazine
- eXperience Design group at Adobe
- 6 Keys to Understanding Modern CSS-based Layouts
- Get In Shape
- Visualizing Fitts's Law
- Pattern Resources
- 5 Great UI Pattern Resources
- Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
- Pattern Library by Welie
- 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box by Smashing Magazine
- Color Schemes
- HTML
- Open Web Design for HTML themes
- Flex
- Scale Nine for Flex themes
- Icons and Logos
- CSS
- CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch by Smashing Magazine
- Free CSS Templates
- CSS Zen Garden - showcase of CSS
- Dynamic Drive CSS Library
- 40 + CSS Tools
- Visual Effects
- Need to get a good enthusiastic designer
- How to Choose the Right Web Developer
- Possibilities
- BuildItWithMe - a networking site for developers and designers to find each other to work with, whether for fun or for profit
- Divya Manian
- Chugs Hussain
- Surya/Harsha of adventure
- Aashish Solanki
- Guru.com for freelancers
- Indian Web Devs forums
- Design inspirations
- Screen Fluent
- Web Creme
- 45 Excellent Blog Designs by Smashing Magazine
- 50 More Excellent Blog Designs by Smashing Magazine
- CSS Tux theme directory
- Miscellaneous
- 13 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons To Make Designers Lives Easier
- Freebies by Smashing Magazine
- 99 designs to crowdsource any designing
- Web Development Goodies Bag
Technology Howto
- "Building Scalable Websites" book by Cal Henderson
- Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites
Coding Howto
- Layers
- 4 Layers of Separation
- BuiltWith - profiles which technologies are used in a given website
- JavaScript
- 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques by Smashing Magazine
- RegexPal
- Live Validation
- Introducing YUI by Smashing Magazine
- MapsTraction - a "cross-platform" Mapping Library
- CSS
- Backend
Technology Options
- Desktop development
- PHP: Vertrigo
- Python: Instant Django
- Web Frameworks
- PHP: CoughPHP + LightVC or CodeIgniter or Symfony or CakePHP
- Python: Django or Pylons or many others
- Desktop deployment options
- Technologies
- Facebook's Thrift for Web Services
- Mashery for Web Services Infrastructure
- Amazon Web Services - S3, EC2, SQS, etc.
- Programming Amazon Web Services book by O'Reilly
- Hosting
- VPS (Virtual Private Servers) at Linode/SliceHost/VPSFarm
- How to Find the Best Host for your Site
Testing
- Cruise Control.rb for testing
- BrowserShots to get screenshots on different browsers
Mobile version
- iPhone Likeness - same principles apply to mobile-friendly websites
- W3C Validation of Mobile-friendly website
Performance
- Best Practices by Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team
- 15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages
- Presentation on Even Faster Web Sites
Operations
- Operations is a competitive advantage... (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
- Deployment options such as Fabric or Puppet
- Splunk for monitoring all your servers, logs, etc.
- Continuous Deployment
- How to backup your webserver
- How to hide development projects available on the internet
Scalability
- Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps video by Bhavin Turakhia
- Building Scalable Websites book by Cal Henderson
- : High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages video by Steve Souders
- Scaling Early
- Videos from the Google Scalability Conference
- Lessons in Building Scalable Systems by Google Talk team
- Scalability and Scalable Architecture Video Lectures - a huge list
- Architecture Template
- Make Your Site Run 10 Times Faster
- Scaling would mean (as discussed in irc.freenode.net#slicehost):
- A server for the storage/database, may require sharding
- Multiple servers with replication/synchronization
- Multiple web servers
- A reverse proxy in front to do load balancing
- Would not be required unless you have 10,000+ users, etc.
- A server for the storage/database, may require sharding
- Amazon Web Services
- Perlbal in an interview about the making of Pownce.com
- Hardware recommendations by Jason Hoffman
- YouTube Architecture
- Amazon Architecture
- Useful Firefox extensions
Analytics
- Google Analytics
- 10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools
- CrazyEgg for visualizing the data
Security
- Secure Password Schemes
- The Definitive Guide To Website Authentication (beta) on Stack Overflow
- Why SSL? on Hacker News
API
- OAuth for authentication
- OEmbed for embedding media
- ProgrammableWeb's list of APIs
Launch
Miscellaneous
- 30+ Great Adobe AIR Apps for Designers and Developers
- Use Crypt::GeneratePassword to generate username and password for MySQL database, etc.
- Use Data::Faker to generate fake data for testing out the application.
- Content editing with Markdown in a GUI manner, instead of Rich Text Editors directly creating HTML and markItUp! Universal markup editor or even WysiHat
- Rich Text Editors comparison
- SMSIntegra for sending SMS updates.
- How to fix MySQL databases
- Mailing List software
Open Licensing
- Open Data Commons' Public Domain Dedication and Licence
- Open Data at Web 2.0, and Wesabe's "Data Bill of Rights"
Name
- What's in a name?
- Do a domain hack
- Check domain name availability at net4india
Feedback / Customer Engagement
- User Voice for customer feedback and voting
- g|Tail.rb - realtime logfile visualization
- Queen Bee
Business Plan
- So you've Got an Idea. Now What?
- Business Plan format
- Business Models
- Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Raising Venture Capital
- NEN India Knowledge Bank
- Numbers Game
- Anatomy of a Good Business Plan - Combination of Strategic, Operational and Tactical Plans!
- Demystifying a Business Plan - What makes one stand out from the rest?
Marketing
- Marketing has Five easy pieces by Seth Godin
- How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) by Steve Pavlina
- Unleash Your Ideavirus (PDF)
- Allocating Marketing Resources (Harvard)
- Startup Marketing Advice by Balsamiq
- Top 10 Tips To Get Your Startup Noticed
- Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Money
- Choices for e-commerce transactions
- Adsense Revenue
- PayPal
Funding
- Startup Financing by pluggd.in
- Is your Startup Fundable?
- Early Stage Technology Entrepreneurship and Incubators in India
Further Resources
- What should a developer know before building a public web site? discussion at Stack Overflow
- Web Development Tools and Links: A Wealth of Resources!
- Resources list at ScaleNine
- Web Design Resources
- Web Design
- Smashing Magazine weblog
- Signal vs. Noise weblog by 37 Signals
- The Best of YCombinator discussions
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