2011 has been a great year of success and achievements for us. Thought of starting this year with something cool. Retropress – our first premium at crazy price.

The theme has been released via productivedreams.com. Grab Retropress for just $10 from here.

Features of Retropress

1. Works with wordpress 3.3.1
2. Modern, customizable design
3. Support for Custom Menu
4. Twitter bar showing your latest tweet (with show/hide)
5. Supports post thumbnails
6. Ability to add Portfolio items (Custom post type)
7. Widget ready sidebar and footer
8. Two built-in widgets (Recent Posts/Projects with thumbnails and Social Networks)
9. Dynamically generated sub-menus for sub-pages
10. Recent Projects in the home page
11. Custom text for the 404 page
12. Custom contact page with ability to email, addresses, phone number etc
13. Dynamically updated copyright year
14. Home page slider using CarouselFredSel
15. Coded in HTML5 and CSS3
16. Optimized CSS and images
17. Google webfonts
18. Crossbrowser Compatible (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and degrades gracefully on IE7+)
19. Easy to set up with the Theme Options page
20. Animate Search button
21. Built-in pagination

We Judge a website based on its creativity, innovation, user friendliness and the information it provides us. Internationally this is done by a panel, Awwwards Panel. There are 24 jury members in this panel of which two are Indians. Of the two Indians, one is a Malayalee. Let’s meet Gopal Raju.

As per the latest reports there will be more than one hundred million websites by the end of this year. This means websites are becoming an essential part of our lives. And so website development is a major thing in technology right now.

Interviewer: Website development seemingly is a creative area. So, what is the basic skill set that a web developer should possess?

Gopal: They will have to complete a web designing course which includes Photoshop, HTML, CSS and related software. But the essence is not in just learning things but is in taking up things with passion and going ahead with it, which will make them a successful web developer.

Interviewer: What is the current scope of website development?

Gopal: In our country the importance of website development is being gaining recognition. Until recently, it was not taken very seriously. Everyone wanted to become or have one’s child become a Doctor or an Engineer, professionally.

But as I said, if one has the passion, dedication and commitment, they can become a very successful web designer / developer. Globally as there have been so many new personal devices and gadgets available in the market, the importance of user interface to interact with these devices has become inevitable. Lets say, iPad, iPhone and similar gadgets have user interfaces and related web enabled user interfaces and websites. So the scope of web development is not just limited to PCs nowadays.

Interviewer: I can see that Gopal has two websites yourself, ie; Indofolio.com and Productivedreams.com. How did you come to this point?

Gopal: Indofolio was one of my initial websites as an independent web developer, just to showcase my portfolio.

Interviewer: Was it a kind of experiment you did with Indofolio?

Gopal: Yes, of course. I precisely wanted to try something different. And furthermore, I wanted it to have a pure Indian expression. Normally, we can see most of the websites have a western touch. I have not seen many websites that showcase Indian culture. Hence, I decided on this theme.

Interviewer: Oh! So it goes in a Dhashavadharam style? And about Productivedreams, what is its purpose or target?

Gopal: Productivedreams was started as a blog for the webdesign community, to help designers, to publish useful articles, updates about the latest trends and technologies.

Interviewer: So, Indofolio and Productivedreams brought you fame as an individual, right?

Gopal: Yes.

Interviewer: And so it was this individual fame that took you to this internationally acclaimed Awwwards panel?

Gopal: Yes.

Interviewer: Well, what is the concept of this Awwwards?

Gopal: The concept of Awwwards is that it has an international jury comprising of members from different countries. And I am one of them from India. You will have many websites to be rated on a daily basis and the website with the highest rating will be published as the “site of the day”. And from the “site of the day” websites we choose the “site of the month” and finally from the “site of the month” websites we choose a “site of the year” which gets the award.

Interviewer: Awards and acclaims will definitely show credibility, but how do you get work from international clients?

Gopal: Clients normally correspond through Indofolio and the blog productivedreams.

Interviewer: Who are your international clients?

Gopal: The Mozilla Foundation is one of my major clients with many other international clients.

Interviewer: Obviously, when you have international clients you would need to stay updated with the latest technologies. So what do you think is the current trend?

Gopal: The current trend is to create minimalistic designs. Previously, there was so much of elements, complex designs etc put into a website which in fact was the then concept. But it has changed entirely now.
Interviewer: Less is more??

Gopal: Precisely, yes.

Thecssawards is a gallery featuring the best websites created with CSS. It was there I got to see, review and rate some of the brilliant designs from web designers across the globe.

The book has the best 365 CSS websites around the world. I’m also glad to see Indofolio.com(my portfolio website) on the book, which was chosen as the “site of the day” on February 2nd.

Congrats to all designers whose websites made it to the book and thanks to thecssawards team for sending me a copy of the book.

Initial sketches

We tried many concepts like a convex lens that converges the rays and forms a pencil, and a hour glass attached to a ‘C’ but finally decided to stick with something iconic

Digital versions

After fiddling around for a while with the sketches, the eagle concept was considered to be more appropriate and few digital versions were created based on that idea.

Further Refinement

The options were further refined for the best result and Aller was deemed suitable for the final logo. Aller was modified to match the identity.

Implementation

And the first implementation of the logo was on our business cards

Convax.com is our first public presence as a company. This website itself is a customised version of WordPress which is one of our favorite open source platforms.

This new year is off to a great start and hoping it gets better!