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22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts >> Website Design, CSS and Search Engine Marketing
posted by Sam @ 7:07 AM   0 comments
10 Ways To Get Design Approval
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Design Approval
posted by Sam @ 7:48 PM   0 comments
25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Headlines can make or break a story. With thousands of different articles vying for our attention, web users can afford to be picky.In an ideal world we’d give articles a fighting chance to prove their worth, but in truth, unless we have pre-existing faith in the author, we often make the decision to read or ignore before our eyes have reached the end of the headline.Web writers have only recently, it seems, started to realize the crucial importance of the headline. The ascendancy of the headline has been one aspect of Web 2.0 culture which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0
posted by Sam @ 9:56 PM   0 comments
50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs
Monday, June 11, 2007
2006 was rich on creative, beautiful and unusual design concepts. We’ve seen a lot of whitespace, many examples of readable and usable text-design, badges, stars, rounded corners, shapes, gradients, mirror and 3D-effects - just name it. Let’s take a close look at some of the most beautiful designs we’ve seen in 2006. Some gorgeous designs are missing? Let us know - comment on this article!

Vibrant Designs


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SteveLeggat.com


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Emotionslive.co.uk


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Dinis91.com


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WeCreateThings.com


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Joyent.com


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Haveamint.com


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Vivabit.com


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olivier.danchin.neuf.fr


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Foxie.ru


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Cameronmoll.com/portfolio


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Tonyyoo.com/v2


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Komodomedia.com


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Bartelme.at


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Quatuour.be


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Onlinecenter.nu


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Fall.tnvacation.com


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Zero.ru


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Methodarts.com


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Summer.tnvacation.com


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Icebrrg.com


Dark Designs


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Kineda.com


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Colourmod.com


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Rikcat.com


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BeSuperCharged.com


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M122arts.com


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Rudeworks.com


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Veerle.duoh.com


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Obuweb.com


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Slideshowpro.net


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Whitwa.net


Light Designs


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Mstefan.com


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Subdued.net


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Devlounge.net


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Dartadesign.ro


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Theologisches-seminar-elstal.de


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Nice-Design.co.uk


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Media2006


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ElectricPulp.com


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SusannePaschke.de


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PixelEden.net


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Jek2k.com


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Thegoodness.com.au


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Morellc.com


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Attitudedesign.co.uk


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CSS Vault


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Evaneckard.com


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WallopCreative.com


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Jeffcroft.com

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posted by Sam @ 12:09 AM   0 comments
March's Latest 39 Web 2.0 Applications
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
This list is wrap-up for all web 2.0 applications that released/published in March. The list is categorized in tags (Chat & Networks, Sharing, Files, Email ,Video & Music, Blogs, Business & Management, Programming & Web Masters Tools, Marketing and Mapping).
Chat & Networks
Twitter - A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!
yackpack - Simplify your connected life the way only YackPack's patented interface can. See at a glance who is in the 'office', and hold a conversation as if you're right there - no 'calling', no 'composing a message', no 'opening a chat window' - just instant, effortless communication.
experienceproject - It's a community website that builds custom emotional support and friendship networks for members, based on who they are, not who you know. Life experiences are the nodes in the network, and the more one has in common with another, the stronger the link. It's also anonymous, so people don't have to worry about being judged by others.
ThisNex - It is a shopcasting network where you can recommend, share and discover great products. Every product on ThisNext is picked by the ThisNext community (That means you!). You can organize your picks into product playlists we call shopcasts.
Sharing
bzzster - Bzzster allows you to recommend about cool videos, news stories, blog posts to friends easy and something you look forward to doing. Bzzster goal is to make Bzzster the best way to recommend links.
grapheety - Explore the world or your own neighborhood with Grapheety. Share an experience for someone else to discover. A site for sharing stories via location. (google maps) The goal being to detail people's stories all over the globe, so a person exploring can see what's going on before they go there.
Sloog - It is a bookmarking service for Second Life residents. It allows users to save favourite places and avatars and search for them later, both in-world with a simple plug-in (HUD) or via the web browser.
Ideawicket - It is a platform for people with novel ideas, designs, innovations and inventions to showcase their creations. Share your ideas for new products, new designs, better processes, new uses, new art or your original creative work. You can post solutions for everyday products, processes and services that save time, cost and space, increase productivity and efficiency, foster easier communication, improve consumer experience, are socially and ecologically responsible, delight the senses or enhance quality of life
MegaBuzz - It is a Web site, where users can ask questions, share opinions, and choose sides on hot topics for points and prizes. MegaBuzz fills a gap in the social media space by bringing together people, viewpoints, and money
Quickeo - It is an application for people who want to share their private digital photos, videos, music and other files with their friends, family and community – not the whole world. It simplifies the transfer of private multi-media files for both the sender (no uploading to a server necessary) and the receiver (no downloading necessary).
mythings - We all have things - consumer electronics, valuable furniture, collections, or collectibles. Whether you have a household of stuff, a collection of great art, wines, comic books, or sports memorabilia - you name it, MyThings provides a safe, easy-to-use place for you to catalog it and track it online.
Files
Weebly - Weebly is the easiest way to create, upload a website, and share it with the world for free. From personal to professional sites, Weebly will enable you to spend your time on the most valuable part...
Email
forlater.net - Easy to use e-mail reminders. Just enter your message, the method and a date. forlater will then remind you at the right time.
Video & Music
Vmix - The VMIX free video sharing and hosting community allows you to upload your favorite homemade videos and funny video clips and share them with your friends ...
Koonji - It is an interactive guide that assists you with any online activity, for example buying a tv, planning a birthday party, finding a job, etc. It provides a step-by-step process for accomplishing the task and travels with you to guide you through the process. It also learns from the community as they are using it so that it can get better over time.
Jabbits - It is the place where People can ask a question and watch other people’s answers. If you know the answer to someone’s question let everybody know. Have a great idea or thought? Bounce it off others and find out what they think. Watch and listen to other’s viewpoints. Broaden your horizons or confirm your point of view
Foxytunes - Planet is an aggregates music videos, photos, news, bios and much more from any number of sources all over the Web into one convenient place. The Planet is universal - it can support any music site, service or store. Many great sites are already supported, and the list will be growing fast
5min - It is a place to find short video solutions for any practical question and a forum for people wanting to share their knowledge. 5min aims is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides covering variety of subjects.
eyejot - Eyejot is the first, comprehensive, client-free online video messaging platform ideal for both personal and business communications. It offers everyone the ability to create and receive video messages in a self-contained, spam-free environment. With no client to install, you can start using Eyejot immediately with any browser, on any platform. It even features built-in support for iTunes (and iPods™), mobile devices and social networks like MySpace.
Blogs
BlogRovr - Download BlogRovr’s browser plug-in and tell Rovr what blogs you like. While you browse, Rovr will show you posts from them about the page you’re on. Rovr’s tray slides in briefly showing summaries of the posts it finds. Click on the summaries and read the full posts, hovering right on the pages they discuss.
Nexo - It was created to simplify your life by providing an online service that lets you coordinate communications and collaborations with all your different groups of friends, colleagues, neighbors, teammates and community. Nexo provides a website, email communications, real-time updates and social networking all in one. Nexo makes it easy to keep everyone up-to-date and makes it fun and easy to participate.
Huminity - It is built to facilitate friendships, make it easy for people to find and make friends, find jobs faster, make better deals and reach anyone in the world, through combining Instant Messaging with Social Networks open a whole range of possibilities to enrich everyone’s life.
TwitThis - It is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
Blogsticker - It is a new and original service that allows you to display stickers on your blog.
Business & Management
Salary - Salary builds on-demand software around a deep domain knowledge in the area of compensation to help customers win the war for talent by simplifying the connections between people, pay and performance. Salary's cutting edge technology is integrated with actionable data and content, empowering customers to make the best decisions about pay and performance and help them to attract, motivate, reward and retain top performers.
Approvr - It has created a web-based Approval Workflow Manager to give users a faster, more efficient way to manage proofing and approval of documents. Approvr’s simple workflow allows organisers to quickly send documents for approval, and reviewers to easily review and comment on those documents. Approvr brings simplicity and ease-of-use to a traditionally difficult and time-consuming process.
HiTask - It is a simple task management application that is designed to satisfy both sophisticated followers of David Allan’s 'Getting Things Done" methodology and anyone who just needs a quick and easy tool to manage their everyday tasks. HiTask gives you maximum comfort with minimum features to make your working day run smoothly and easily.
Goplan - It is an online project management solution. It allows teams and individuals to collaborate through tasks, file management, real-time chat, online calendaring, and many other features. As an always-on access-anywhere hosted solution it saves companies the trouble of purchasing, maintaining and securing a platform for collaboration
City Book - It was designed to make finding a business quick and easy. The location based services provide users with information on where good businesses are based around their areas, and the deals provided by these businesses. City Book gives users the power to recommend good businesses they may have used as well as review hotels and restaurants. This allows businesses rated better to show higher up in search results - thus helping other users and good businesses themselves.
Hitflip - It run Europe's biggest P2P swap platform for media products (DVDs, games, CDs, audiobooks, and books).Hitflip aims to excite their members by making the swap of media products as easy and cheap as possible. All members have to do is enter which products they have and which ones they want, and Hitflip does the rest
lyro - It aspires to become the world's largest repository of online business cards – where everybody who’s anybody can be found. Lyro makes it faster and easier for potential customers, business partners, colleagues and acquaintances to search, find, and contact you.
WeSquare - It gives businesses and professionals something which was previously unthinkable: the ability to work with any client, be they in the same city, country or another continent. A limited base of clients has now become boundless.
Barracuda Suite - It is the flexible and intelligent way to manage your retail business. It's simple to use interface shows you just what you need, when you need it. It's intelligent structure automates your most common tasks like inventory reconciliation, order fulfillment, credit card processing, customer management and much more.
iZeit - It is an easy to use online PHP calendar. Unlike other online calendars such as Google or 30Boxes, iZeit runs on your own server, so it's totally customizable.
Huddle - It is a network of secure online spaces that combine powerful document, project & team tools with the simplicity of a social networking site. Collaborate on documents (with access control, version management and approval workflow), create project milestones and share ideas online. Fully hosted, no special software required. Free package (1 project huddle, 5 users, 25MB of storage) and several paid subscriptions available.
Programming & Web Masters Tools
Tapefailure - Tapefailure lets you record your users' browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous useful statistics about your users. Tapes can be viewed online or downloaded for later, offline, viewing. Statistics include percentage of page scrolled, distance the mouse has been moved, average number of clicks per page, user sight focus, and general paths, and numerous others.
SWiK - It is a community driven resource for open source software. Try starting a page about your favorite project, syndicating a blog for a topic, or browsing through tags people have added to projects or pages.
Marketing
Gumiyo - It provides a totally new way to post, find, and target online classified ads that connect buyers and sellers. As an online marketplace and an innovative classifieds site, Gumiyo helps you publish ads to a wide yet targeted audience - wherever they are. Gumiyo is accessible from your mobile phone or from your web browser. Gumiyo teamed with JAJAH, PayPal, Amazon Web Services m-Qube and many classifieds sites such as Froogle, Google Base, Edgeio, Trulia, Vast.com, Oodle.com and more
Mapping
Kayuda - It is a web-based visual wiki, a mind-mapping tool, and a non-linear writing tool that allows you to track ideas and the relationships between them. It's free, and any number of people can collaborate simultaneously in real-time
posted by Sam @ 11:12 PM   1 comments
CSS layout tips tricks
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
I always search for CSS tutorials on the internet. Some of them are really helpful and some really hard to understand. I made a list of articles that I recently studied and found really helpful to a newbie.
  1. CSS tips and tricks
  2. Announcements of new CSS specifications
  3. Five Principles to Website Design
  4. Freitag
  5. Rounded Corners
  6. Rounded Corners without images
  7. Creating a Netflix style star ratings
  8. Tableless forms
  9. Usability Tips for Ecommerce Web Design
  10. Styling Lists with CSS
  11. 2 Column Layout Technique
  12. 3 Column Layout with CSS
  13. 3 Column Fixed width centered layout
  14. Printing with CSS
  15. Adding a CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
  16. Footer Stick
  17. CSS Element Hover Effect
  18. Styling Horizontal Rules
  19. Clearing Floats
  20. CSS Popups
  21. Box Punch
  22. CSS Badge
  23. Orange RSS Buttons with pure CSS
  24. 10 CSS Tricks you may not know
  25. 10 More CSS Tricks you may not know
  26. Spiffy Corners - Rounded corners without images or script
  27. More rounded corners with CSS

Other cool tips and tutorials

  1. Ten CSS tricks you may not know - from Evolt
  2. A list apart - the greatest of all!
  3. Complete layout techniques and tutorials - from MaxDesign
  4. 12 useful CSS templates - easy to understand
  5. CSS template gallery - Awesome collection of CSS template
  6. Advanced CSS layout - Step by step guide
  7. Businesslogs' 5 CSS Tips
  8. Creating a Style-Guide for your siteDroppyale's cool list of CSS tips
  9. Turning a list into a navigation bar
  10. How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup
  11. A CSS styled table
  12. Generating Dynamic CSS with PHP
  13. A CSS Framework
  14. Avoiding classitis
  15. Architecting CSS
  16. Creating a Star Rater using CSS
  17. Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module
  18. In search of the One True Layout
  19. One clean HTML markup, many layouts
  20. PHP + CSS Dynamic Text Replacement (P+C DTR)
posted by Sam @ 11:12 PM   0 comments
Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to evolve.

The Amazon E-Commerce API - open access to Amazon's catalog

The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services opened up by Amazon was the E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products.
Why has Amazon offered this service completely free? Because most applications built on top of this service drive traffic back to Amazon (each item returned by the service contains the Amazon URL). In other words, with the E-Commerce service Amazon enabled others to build ways to access Amazon's inventory. As a result many companies have come up with creative ways of leveraging Amazon's information

The rise of the API culture

The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an API. Many services followed, giving rise to a true API culture. John Musser over at programmableweb has been tirelessly cataloging APIs and Mashups that use them. This page shows almost 400 APIs organized by category, which is an impressive number. However, only a fraction of those APIs are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself. This is an important distinction to understand in the context of this article.
The del.icio.us API offering today is different from Amazon's one, because it does not open the del.icio.us database to the world. What it does do is allow authorized mashups to manipulate the user information stored in del.icio.us. For example, an application may add a post, or update a tag, programmatically. However, there is no way to ask del.icio.us, via API, what URLs have been posted to it or what has been tagged with the tag web 2.0 across the entire del.icio.us database. These questions are easy to answer via the web site, but not via current API.

Standardized URLs - the API without an API

Despite the fact that there is no direct API (into the database), many companies have managed to leverage the information stored in del.icio.us. Here are some examples...
Delexa is an interesting and useful mashup that uses del.icio.us to categorize Alexa sites. For example, here are the popular sites tagged with the word book:
Another web site called similicio.us uses del.icio.us to recommend similar sites.

How Web Scraping Works

Web Scraping is essentially reverse engineering of HTML pages. It can also be thought of as parsing out chunks of information from a page. Web pages are coded in HTML, which uses a tree-like structure to represent the information. The actual data is mingled with layout and rendering information and is not readily available to a computer. Scrapers are the programs that "know" how to get the data back from a given HTML page. They work by learning the details of the particular markup and figuring out where the actual data is. For example, in the illustration below the scraper extracts URLs from the del.icio.us page. By applying such a scraper, it is possible to discover what URLs are tagged with any given tag.

Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes - the upcoming scraping technologies

We recently covered Yahoo! Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of the web pages, using a visual interface.
It works by letting the developer define a few sample pages and then helping her denote similar information using a marker. This looks simple, but behind the scenes Dapper uses a non-trivial tree-matching algorithm to accomplish this task. Once the user defines similar pieces of information on the page, Dapper allows the user to make it into a field. By repeating the process with other information on the page, the developer is able to effectively define a query that turns an unstructured page into a set of structured records.

The net effect - Web Sites become Web Services

Here is an illustration of the net effect of apps like Dapper and Teqlo:
So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be queried and remixed.




This sounds great, but is this legal?


Scraping technologies are actually fairly questionable. In a way, they can be perceived as stealing the information owned by a web site. The whole issue is complicated because it is unclear where copy/paste ends and scraping begins. It is okay for people to copy and save the information from web pages, but it might not be legal to have software do this automatically. But scraping of the page and then offering a service that leverages the information without crediting the original source, is unlikely to be legal.
But it does not seem that scraping is going to stop. Just like legal issues with Napster did not stop people from writing peer-to-peer sharing software, or the more recent YouTube lawsuit is not likely to stop people from posting copyrighted videos. Information that seems to be free is perceived as being free.
The opportunities that will come after the web has been turned into a database are just too exciting to pass up. So if conversion is going to take place anyway, would it not be better to rethink how to do this in a consistent way?

Why Web Sites should offer Web Services

There are several good reasons why Web Sites (online retailers in particular), should think about offering an API. The most important reason is control. Having an API will make scrapers unnecessary, but it will also allow tracking of who is using the data - as well as how and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this in a way that fosters affiliates and drives the traffic back to their sites.
The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an API. Having a small fee per API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely to be acceptable, since the cost for any given subscriber of the service is not going to be high. But there is a big opportunity to make money on volume. This is what Amazon is betting on with their Web Services strategy and it is probably a good bet.
posted by Sam @ 1:03 AM   0 comments
About Me
Name: Sam
Home: New Delhi, Delhi, India
About Me: I am a 29 year old Web Analyst from Bihar, INDIA. I started my career as a part time Lab assistant in Webcom Technologies, USA in Pitampura at an age of twenty while in First Year. I am fortunate that my first experience in professional world was in such a friendly and informal environment. I have taken a keen interest in internet technologies since 1999 when I began creating websites for friends and family during my time at school. Using a trial and error method I quickly mastered HTML and using my existing graphics skills and eye for detail I began developing the foundations to my career. from last 5 years, I took the position of Project Manager at V-Angelz Technologies. Since being in this position I have had the chance to further improve on my Usability, Accessibility, SMO and Business Development skills by producing several dynamic websites for the group and taking sole responsibility for the re-building and on-going development of the CMS, ERP and CRM System.
See my complete profile
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