Web Design

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design, interface design, authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimisation.

Web/Mobile App Monetisation & Revenue Generation Strategies

Mandar Apte Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Animation Film Design, Apple, Apple macOS, Apps, Art & Design, Company, Graphic Design, Personal Experience, Print Design, Reviews, Typography, User Experience Design, Web Design Leave a comment

All business survives on net profit.

In accounting terms, here is how you calculate Net Profit. i.e. (Total Business Revenue) – (Total Business Expenditure) = Net Profit

In the business world, there are two types of industries Service and Product.

So if you are in the service industry, you survive on a paycheck by paycheck or hourly charges to the client. You have to work every hour of every day to make ends meet.

But if you are a product company, you create a product based on your market and user research. You find consumer problems/requirements/gaps in the market and then try to solve them by creating your product in that category. So building a product is based on solving problems that your users are having.

In my case, I was a designer by profession. I graduated with a BFA (Bachelor of Applied Arts) in Advertising. After my first two jobs, I tried freelancing in the web, UX, print, branding and animation film industries. I was the lone proprietor of my business. I was doing everything talking to clients, executing a project, delivering it and then waiting for the final payment to be released. It was too much for me at that time.

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In-depth Review of Matrimony Website by Anuroop Wiwaha (anuroopwiwaha.com)

Mandar Apte Apps, Art & Design, Company, India / Bharat / Hindusthan, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Personal Experience, Reviews, User Experience Design, Web Design 1 Comment

I have used the Anuroop Wiwaha Matrimony Website for the last four to five years. In addition, I have extensively used their mobile Apple iPhone app and website for my bride search. As a result, I discovered a few points that Anuroop Wiwaha Portal / Company improved upon to help the community get the right matrimony match for their search.

Observations:

Few Points that they can improve on.

Mobile App & Website Portal:

  1. At every event, they talk about having 20,000 Profiles / Accounts of the bride and groom registered on their portal. An average Anuroop Wiwaha account cost is INR 5,000/-.
  2. The user (Bride or Groom) can’t register with a free account as they don’t support free accounts. The user must pay an account fee upfront before registering to the portal. So it gives assurance that the user is at least serious about their search, and even the user has to submit identity proof within seven days of registration. So in a way, it eliminates the possibility of fake accounts or fraud.
  3. Even with this money of 20,000 Accounts * 5,000 Fee, the Bride or Groom Search is cumbersome and hectic. The mobile app is not full fledge as compared to a web portal. They use non-native software technologies for the Apple iPhone app, which takes minutes or sometimes fails to load content and data.
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Let’s learn how to use the ‘Meta Theme Color’ tag to colourise Apple Safari 15 user interface tailored for the website.

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple iOS, Apple macOS, Art & Design, Tutorials, Web Design Leave a comment

Apple Safari has started supporting theme-color Meta Tag from Safari 15 release.

Here is how to Implement theme-color meta tag in HTML.

You have to copy-paste theme-color meta tag in section of your website. It will look something like this:

<head>
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ff0000"/>
</head>

You can use the following code to implement theme color specific to system light mode or dark mode.

<meta name="theme-color" content="#ff0000" media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ff0000" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">
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Best Design Advice that I ever received

Mandar Apte Art & Design, Graphic Design, Personal Experience, Typography, User Experience Design, Web Design Leave a comment

Best advice I ever received about designing logos and symbols is use humanistic elements / curves / lines in your design and totally avoid mechanical drawings. As mechanical drawings can be taken care by computer itself.

This advice was given to me by Shirbhavikar sir and Pawar sir when I was doing BFA Applied Arts at Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art.

It seems I don’t follow this advice totally in my drawings / designs and illustrations. Even after 4 years of my graduation when I met Mahendra Patel sir at his SID office he told me the same.

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In-depth Review of Matrimony Website by Suyog Ranade Vivaha, aka Shree Suyog Vivaha Mandal

Mandar Apte Apps, Art & Design, India / Bharat / Hindusthan, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Reviews, User Experience Design, Web Design Leave a comment

I have written a complete in-depth review and analysis of the Suyog Ranade Vivaha or Shree Suyog Vivaha Mandal Matrimony website that I used for 6 to 7 months, mainly on WhatsApp groups, because of bad user experience on website format. I reported the following issues to them, but they were not ready or in the right frame of mind to accept it.

So I just unregistered myself from their portal and exited their WhatsApp groups.

Following are the points that I noticed about their matrimony service:

Point 01: No or Failed Business Model. The matrimony section mainly runs on WhatsApp Groups of 250 people. The group is unmanaged sometimes; people post their profiles multiple times. Some people even post political or comic forwards. Because all members are in an open WhatsApp group, there is no contact number security or number privacy. Sometimes admins or business owners post repeated WhatsApp Messages asking every user to register and pay a fee to use WhatsApp groups or websites. Admins even warn users they will remove everyone who never pays the matrimony section fee, which showcases the main point that there is no thought behind Successful Business Model or Revenue Generation.

Point 02: No Privacy or Security: Because of the open group with visibility of contact numbers to everyone, users are prone to scammers and fake profiles or spam calls

Point 03: Suyog Ranade Vivaha lost complete user profile data and even registered account data three times while upgrading their website and transferring the website to their new domain. They had to ask every user individually to reregister for their website repeatedly—a failed system.

Point 04: Website owners had to change their Web Domain as a similar web domain was used by its competitor with a slight name difference. It shows no thought about branding or company structure. Because of this exact domain by competitors, Suyog Ranade Vivavha’s Matrimony users were registering wrongly to competitors’ websites, thinking to competitors that they were the original company. This shows a loss of identity and company branding. And a loss of revenue.

Point 05: Even you can see in the screenshots website structure is broken and faulty with buggy coding and development.

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How to set up a CloudFlare Flexible SSL Certificate within 5 minutes for your WordPress website’s all subdomains & main domain.

Mandar Apte Apps, Cloudflare, Reviews, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress Leave a comment

Prerequisite: Please make sure have active CloudFlare account and you have added your WordPress Website to CloudFlare. Also, make sure you are using CloudFlare nameservers for your domain.

 
Step 01: Sign in to your CloudFlare account

 

 
Step 02: Make sure flexible SSL certificate is enabled under the “Crypto” tab for your selected website

 

 

 
Step 03: While you are already signed in to your CloudFlare account go to > My Profile > Scroll down to API Keys and locate Global API Key & copy the same key for further use inside your website.

 

 

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Using Google Public DNS for IPv4 & IPv6 to speed up internet browsing, A resource for Web Designers, Developers & Internet Surfers in General

Mandar Apte Art & Design, Freebies, Google, Open Source, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress Leave a comment

As Wikipedia explains,

 

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most prominently, it translates easily memorised domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for the purpose of locating computer services and devices worldwide. By providing a worldwide, distributed keyword-based redirection service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of the functionality of the Internet.

 
Google’s Public DNS will speedup your computer internet connections performance with faster speed for domain name lookup.

 
google-public-dns

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Irregularities of AdSense Advertisements Delivery, Why smaller 300×250 unit ads are delivered in 336×280 ad unit. Here is why?

Mandar Apte Art & Design, Google, Google AdSense, User Experience Design, Web Design, WordPress Leave a comment

For a while I was observing unusual behaviour of my 336 by 280 Ad units where smaller sized ads were get delivered in the size of 300 by 250 units.

 
I even report this issue to Google AdSense Support Team but received no reply & currently they were not accepting any new support request but any how I got the solution that I wanted.

 
I got the solution to the problem why smaller unit ads were get delivered in bigger size ad units & there by ruining my ‘Website Design Layouts’

 
Here is what Google Says about that:

 
(Source: Adsense Resource Tab)

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How to put comments in .php, .html, .css files to declare, remind explanation of code to third party developers, designers or even users which may even includes you, This technique can also be utilise while writing or debugging code by selectively disabling or enabling lines of source code

Mandar Apte Art & Design, Open Source, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress Leave a comment

There are different ways of putting comments per type of file on world wide web.

 
Comments helps developer of code to explain third party developers, designers, users or even to himself in space of time why he used that line of code & what function it performs in that web application.

 
So it is real handy to have that knowledge of how to put comments in your files in PHP, CSS & HTML.

 
Here is example how you will put comments in ‘HTML’ & ‘PHP’ pages (outside of the PHP code) & it will look like this:

 

<!-- put comments here to explain it more -->

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