The Details

Position: Lead Developer

1) Knowledge of HTML/CSS
We don’t need programmers to write html, css directly. But they should be capable of picking the elements correctly and efficiently and know where and how to put code in.

2)Extensive Knowledge of JS/JQuery
We heavily use js to implement the client side validation and complex Ajax call (eg: chat features).

3) Extensive Knowledge of Database/Sql
We are using SqlServer2005. Person should know and have experience with SqlServer2005 (At least SqlServer2000). Know how to write correct and efficient SQL sentences. How to do pagination, indexing. creating tables. etc.

4) Extremely Knowledgeable and Experienced in ASP.NET2/C# Skills
Should know how to develop pages in C#. At least know what is aspx, ascx, generic handler, UserControl, DLL. And to organize all them efficiently to work on our pages.

Optional:
5) Understand WebService
6) Understand how scrape work
7) Understand RegularExpression
8) Understand how to write distributed program
9) Understand how to write windows service
10) Know some other skills: like Jabber, how does it work, how do we interact with them if they don’t provide .NET interface or things like that.
11) Mobile Development Experience

Responsibilities:
This developer will be lead so he’ll be responsible for planning architecture for requested feature, estimating timelines so we can effectively plan around it, manage junior developer and of course, actually implementing. He’ll be meeting often with founder/site architect + the design lead to discuss features and report on progress and carrying out quality assurance tests.

Time:
This is a full-time gig because this person will have their hands fulled with every feature. There’s only 2 developers, many phases, and many features to dev. So, 8hrs a day on a regular day and whenever pressed, overtime.

Kinetic Typography - D-Tronics from Manny Garza on Vimeo.

Opening Titles for AMD Conference 2009 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.

Pan - Kinetic typography from Bjørn Endre Langeland on Vimeo.

Video - Citizen Cope Let the drummer kick it ( After Effects Composition ) from Bogdan Macoviciuc on Vimeo.

Nick the Greek from Ben White on Vimeo.

Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.

Century Schoolbook - Piano 2.0 from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

Gill Sans from Matthieu Dufour on Vimeo.

STOPandTHINK - Talking Head from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

4 from Teenocide on Vimeo.

Superstylin’ - Kinetic Typography from marcoPapale.com on Vimeo.

78RPM - MP3 | 70 Years of Revolutionary Protest Music from Dan Flynn| mmm-design.net on Vimeo.

Typography Landscape from idnworld on Vimeo.

Rockwell from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.

The Cigarette Is Dead from FL2 Interactive on Vimeo.

Consciousness : HD Typography motion graphics from Nicholas Schrunk on Vimeo.

DJ shadow - The Outsider (Typographic animation) from remote on Vimeo.

Typography in Motion from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

The question is, what tool do you use and which is the best? I’ve used and been through quite a few screenshot tools looking for the perfect solution so I’ll attempt to go through the better ones I encountered.

The Jing Project

This was perfect for me when I first found it. Jing has everything one needs, including video recording for up to 1 minute. The video is a great asset because there are times when the phrase “a picture is better than a thousand words” just doesn’t cut it. For still images, it contains the usual type, arrow, box selection and highlight tools - which is great for pointing out errors.

What you’ll love about Jing is that it allows you to upload to screencast.com or your own private server which I preferred. But hands down the best feature about Jing is that it packages all these features for free.

The downside about Jing is that after using it for months, it started hanging my computer using 1.5GB of memory. I guess it’s due to the hundreds of images that I was storing in its database. I couldn’t tolerate this any longer; it was time to move on.

LittleSnapper

There’s a lot of buzz around this one. LittleSnapper is a great tool with some handy features. The first major feature that sets it apart is its built in browser that allows you to browse and snap at your heart’s delight. It has an array of tools like the ones mentioned in Jing but goes further with a blur tool. The highlight tool is also very useful and works better than Jing’s.

LittleSnapper was created to collect inspiration and you can tell this by it’s ability to organize screenshots. You can create collections such as ‘Cool Websites’ or you can simply create folders. They even take it further with a feature called ‘Smart’, which allows you to create a collection based on certain rules you set. That’s very useful.

Now like everything else, LittleSnapper isn’t perfect so I use it occasionally. The main problem I have with it is its inability to re-size text-boxes. Yes, I know, a very basic feature. If I were to type and forget to press ‘return’, LittleSnapper runs the text right across the image and even off it. Even though the browser is a cool feature, I use Firefox so I find its inability to take screenshots on the fly a drawback. In Jing and others, I simply use a shortcut, crop the area I want and I’m golden.

Finetuna.com

This is a Firefox plugin that allows you to take an image or screenshot to their site where you can use their tools to annotate. It’s a very good tool. It’s fast, effective and easy to use.

The drawback on this is that I don’t like my images being made public; but if you’re ok with that, then no problem there. I did give this tool a shot and couldn’t use it because every time I shared the image I just sent to them, I got some other image. I believe it might have been a bug but being in need of a tool fast made me move on.

Skitch

I came across Skitch after asking for some help in my quest for the perfect screenshot tool on the Designers’Couch discussion board.

After coming upon Skitch’s website I quickly left, so it’s fair to say it wasn’t love at first sight. I went back, got it and got hooked. Skitch has some amazing features and is incredibly easy to use, not to mention fast. The most notable feature about Skitch to me is the drag feature which allows me to drag the image from Skitch to Gmail, your desktop or straight to Photoshop. Sharing screenshots gets easier with the ability to upload to ftp or your account on skitch.com.

Skitch has all the annotation tools required like text, highlight, selection, pencil, etc which is more than enough. It even allows you to take a snap photo of yourself using your camera.

I love this tool because it encompasses everything I need - but it’s not perfect. If Skitch can add to their feature set the ability to video record your screen it would be in a better spot to compete with Jing and others. A smaller feature that would improve usability is to automatically copy web urls of the posted image to clipboard.

At the end of the day, the one you choose will depend on your needs and your preferences. What about you? What great tools have you come across? I’d love to hear some of your suggestions because I’m always on the lookout for better tools.

Users from PixelMEDIA on Vimeo.

Semantics of a website from PixelMEDIA on Vimeo.

Website evolution from PixelMEDIA on Vimeo.

White space from PixelMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jan Van Toorn Q&A: Advice for a student designer from D&AD on Vimeo.

Graphic Design and Typography from Brian Miller on Vimeo.

Chris Rockwell: The mind of design from The PEP Talks on Vimeo.

Zeldman on Journalism and The Web from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Basic Information Architecture with Jamie Neely from designbyfront on Vimeo.

Bizcamp 2009: Competitive Advantage & the Web from designbyfront on Vimeo.

Winning Bigger Web Projects - Paul May - Barcamp Belfast from designbyfront on Vimeo.

Paul Boag at BathCamp: 10 things a web designer would never tell you from Mike Ellis on Vimeo.

Graphic Design: The Forgotten Web Standard - Slides in 3 Minutes from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Tony Speaks about his Web Design Company - Netgifted from Tony Silveira on Vimeo.

E Interview at The Next Web Conference 2008 from Renato Valdés Olmos on Vimeo.

Andy Clarke on Web Layout from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Designer Cameron Moll on Natural Mapping from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Interview with Graphic Designer Graham Clifford from Brian Miller on Vimeo.

Interview with Graphic Designer, Charles Nix from Brian Miller on Vimeo.

It started as a group on deviantart.com, the largest art community online, and became the largest design group on the site. Since deviantart.com wasn’t built for groups, the site went dormant because manually managing the group became an overwhelming task. We had to review & submit hundreds of designs being submitted to the deviantART gallery as well as accept members.

The decision was made about 2 years after meeting with a few members who helped managed the group to develop a site for Designers’Couch. This goal was met with various challenges. I tried to put together a volunteer team of developers twice but that initiative failed because of everyone had different and more important priorities. Even I was busy with school afterwords there was work (I still am).

As time passed the idea of Designers’Couch seemed to be drifting further away into the dark, the community growing weaker as each day passes. After finishing my studies and setting up my own home studio (Depthskins), I decided to fund the project with my own income, no investors, no loans, no favors which inevitably meant I had to cut back on certain luxuries.

I did this because I truly believe in Designers’Couch and this does not necessarily mean I know it will succeed. Given I’ve invested so much into it and keep on investing, I don’t see failure as an option because then it would be the biggest fail of my life. But right now, in this moment, there’s an achievement to enjoy because at one point I didn’t think designerscouch.org would ever go live but today, I’m here to present Designers’Couch.

Designers’Couch model is much different from most communities because it is application based meaning applicants must demonstrate a passion and interest for design before being accepted. The site offers an array of features that aims to making designers better through interaction.

The Gallery
The gallery is one of the most important features of Designers’Couch. While it looks like every other gallery, it functions quite differently. It has all the usual features like faving designs, but where it differs is that the gallery works in 2 modes: Published and Unpublished.

Published mode has designs that anyone can see. It means that membership is not required to browse these designs and it’s the design DC community is most proud of. As such, these are our inspirational designs fulfilling one of DC’s missions: to inspire.

Unpublished is the opposite where these designs are seen only by registered members.

There are 2 reasons for these 2 modes:
Showcase & promote purely inspirational work:

This is decided using 2 different methods.

An admin can see a truly remarkable design and publish it instantly.
The community plays a role in what gets published by faving, recommending and critiquing. All these factors come together to decide whether it should be published. So please, fave and/or recommend what you like. Recommendation is there because you may think it can be published but you don’t necessarily want to fave it.

Protect your work
One consistent worry among designers is the fear of their work being ripped. In fact, I know a few people who don’t upload their work period because of this fear and others have left communities that doesn’t do anything about it.

Since the community is one that’s handpicked, there’s a certain trust among members so members can submit their work for review, feedback and showcase internally where only members will see. Another use of unpublished work is that it allows me to submit a work in progress for feedback.

Critique
DC was built to establish a community where the comments are insightful and constructive. You’ll find this a key focus of our community. Our comment system for designs is termed ‘critique’ and it only allows a critique of no less than 140 characters. This idea stemmed from @designcritique on twitter.com which basically critiques a design within 140 characters.

After running @designcritique, I realized that it’s pretty damn hard to critique a design in 140 characters so I figured that it should be the least required at DC.

Experts
I don’t want members to just make a critique with no reward, because I want this place to be competitively fun. So I had the idea the ‘Expert’ feature. It works directly through critiques because when you make a critique, the person receiving it has the ability to rate it as an ‘expert critique’ by clicking a little star icon visible on rollover of the critique.

If the person clicks this star icon, it’s like a ripple effect because it affects quite a few things. For starters, your standing as an expert increases by 1 and you’re positioned on the experts page based on the number of expert critiques you have. The great thing, in my opinion, is that the person who rated your critique gets to review it later under ‘favourite critiques’. I thought this was a great idea because it allows you to later review some of the critiques you got in design so you can later implement in other works.

In addition to that, you can review all your critiques rated as expert critique under ‘activities’ in your account center. Later down the line, DC will reward the monthly top expert to further encourage this activity. Your standing as expert is proudly showcased on your profile and has a further use down the road.

Collaboration
This concept is only 50% developed but it’s functional and usable at this level. What collaboration does is allow you to work with fellow DC members on projects you might have. For example, let’s say you got a client who wants to develop his brand. The client wants logo, business card, website & web development. The problem is that your specialty is brand identity so you’re short on web design requirements of the project. The collaboration board is meant to solve this issue.

It allows you to post the description of the project where fellow members will apply. You can then select whoever you choose to work with via the collaboration post. From that point you can establish contact with the selected applicant and collaborate on the project. We do have plans to improve this feature so expect more.

The Content
We provided the ability to submit articles and events. We will work on our own internal articles but we thought articles should be a portal to the various other articles around the web. As the site evolves, I envision separating external and internal articles so it promotes internal article a little more and improves usability.

Events might not be so important to some but for others it’s helpful to know events in your area. In fact, if you contact us about an event in your area, we’re willing to send you at our expense to represent the community.

Discussions
What’s a community without discussions? This feature function at it’s core, in a very basic manner. The resource didn’t exist for a full-fledged forum but form & function is what matters. The forum allows you to do exactly what it is intended for: conversate.

Discounts
Being a member of Designers’Couch gives you the opportunity to receive special discount from our supporters. For example, the following partners offers:

Subernova: 15% discount on annual subscription (savings of $12)
Sharpshirter: 15% discount on it’s products (includes t-shirts & iPhone skins)
GoMedia Arsenal: 15% discount on anything in their store
AdaptivePath: 15% discount on all physical events
SlideRocket: 15% discount on annual subscriptions

This allows the site to go a little further than just the average community but one giving you more than functions and features but something you can use to grow your freelance company or yourself.
So there it is, a great little story of a big dream I have. Join Designers’Couch, I’d love to see you there..

It’s highly important that you ensure your website has these qualities, but how do we optimize this? I’ve compiled a list of some tools that I’ve come across and many of which I’ve used. These can give insight on how well users interact with your design, and help to make better decisions for your layouts in the future.

Userfly
Userfly is an online tool that allows you to record users’ sessions on your website to study their behaviour. This type of tool is highly useful because you get to see in almost real time how users interact with your design. The tool records mouse-clicks, page scrolls, keystrokes (not passwords and usernames) and navigation to multiple pages.

The great thing about Userfly is that it’s relatively cheap and gives 10 free captures per month. If that’s not enough, the pricing plan is very affordable because the back plan gives 100 captures at just $10 per month. Installation is fairly simple with Userfly because there’s just one line of javascript code and you’re good to go.

Clixpy
Clixpy is a tool very much like Userfly, allowing you to do essentially the same thing: record user sessions on your website such as keystrokes, page scrolls and navigation to multiple pages.

The big difference between the two is that Clixpy is much cheaper than Userfly, as you can get 100 captures for $5. This is exactly what I mean by ‘guerrilla-style testing’, because this tool gives great results on the cheap end. Like Userfly, a single line of javascript code is required to kick things off.

Feedback Army
This site that allows you to submit your site with as many as 6 questions regarding your website you’d like answered. The great thing about this is that you can be specific and use Feedback Army to get answers to these questions. These questions will be answered by 10 different individuals. You can request more but the price goes higher than the default $10.

What I don’t like about Feedback Army is that the reviews aren’t exactly insightful. However, this is something you should expect as it’s really just normal people giving their 2 cents. The site also lacks the ability to focus on the demographics of your website. For example, if the site targets a younger demographic, it wouldn’t be much use if a 45-year old reviews it.

Nonetheless, it’s a great service that allows you to get an idea as to what random people think of your website.

UserTesting
This service is similar to Feedback Army but much more advanced. Basically it allows you to submit your site for review and you can ask as many questions as you like. In fact, you can assign tasks to the reviewer, for example:

1. Add an item to cart
2. Try checking out
3. Where would you go to sign up.

Your site is reviewed in 2 methods: a written summary report and a screencast review. The screencast review is the beautiful part because you watch and listen to them use your site. Each user’s session - mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and spoken comments - is saved as a Flash video for you to watch.

Why I say it’s advanced is because it does what Feedback Army does in allowing you to select the reviewer from a specific demographic that matches your website’s target audience. This means the incoming reviews will definitely be something you want to hear because this is your target audience’s opinion.

The only downside to this service is that it’s the most expensive I’ve used. Each review costs $29 so if you wanted a fairly rounded review of your site, it would cost $290. If the project has the budget for it then this service is definitely worth it. Otherwise, sticking to other tools should suffice.

Feng-GUI
This is a tool that allows you to analyze your design by seeking out the most attention grabbing areas. This artificial intelligence service simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals according to Feng-GUI.

I have no idea how accurate the results in this are, but it’s free so it doesn’t hurt to take a shot at it and see if it can provide you with useful information. If Feng-GUI is right about the hot-spots on your site, it can show you where to place certain elements of your site like a ‘register’ button. The end result will be higher conversion on your website.

Fivesecond
Fivesecond is actually an interesting tool that lets you identify the most prominent elements on your user interfaces. All it requires you to do is submit an image of your design. You can choose to let random users comment on your design, but the real kicker is that it allows you to share it on social networks: Facebook, Twitter or email.

This means you can get friends and family involved or target a specific set of people using emails. I think this is a great concept for feedback on designs because it’s cheap and it’ll give insights from multiple points-of-view of your choosing.

Crazyegg
This does what Feng-GUI does but considering it’s paid for, it’s much more advanced in terms of features and well worth it. It’s like Google Analytics on steroids - taking your data and presenting it visually.

The best part about CrazyEgg is the heatmap which shows the most active or attention grabbing areas of your site through the number of clicks received. Unlike Feng-GUI, we know this works based on your analytics.

My favorite feature is ‘Confetti’, which shows coloured dots representing clicks. On mouse-over, each click shows you the user browser, OS, window size and time to click. All this in a visually pleasing interface.

BrowserShots
The most tedious part of web development is making the design look consistent on most browsers. This would be an incomplete list without including something that tests our interfaces in various browsers.

Browsershots.org does just this by allowing users to see what their website looks like in various browsers. This site has a tremendous list of browsers to test your website in, some of which I didn’t even know exist.

All in all, there are a plethora of tools to help you get the information you need on how well your site functions. Once you choose the one that will fit your needs - and your budget - you can gain much insight on the success of your designs and how well they interact with users.

Don’t pass up the opportunity to make use of at least one of these tools, because they can help you drive more traffic to your site in the long run.

The first place I started this search was in my very own inbox then branched out looking. I’ve looked pretty hard and amazingly, there’s tons of articles on inspirational web designs but very limited on newsletter design.

The following are 14 designs that I find to be one of the following: creative, elegant and or stylish.

I think they are very nice and subtle changes that increases usability on Twitter since user don’t have to navigate to ‘search.twitter.com’.

What’s your favourite TED talk? Doesn’t have to be on design.

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Webdesigner Depot – Every day thousands of people take it to the air… With so many airlines to choose from, branding is extremely important and at its core lies logo design . In this article we’ll take a logo at the logos of over 50 popular airlines . The list is by no means a complete list of all airlines and is just ...

11 Excellent Solutions for Creating Tooltips
Web Design Ledger – Tooltips in web design are becoming more and more commonplace. Even though I don’t think they are appropriate for every type of site, they can be a very useful addition when implemented correctly. If you are planning on using tooltips in your next project, the hardest part may be choosing the right s…

5 Simple Ways to Improve Web Typography
Webdesigner Depot – Type is one of the most-used elements of the web. Think about it. Unless you are YouTube or Flickr, chances are your site visitors are coming for your text content - not the fancy packaging that surrounds it. So why are web designers still treating text like a secondary element? Good typography bring…

70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques
Smashing Magazine – by Noura Yehia As the Web grows and becomes more dynamic, more and more websites have user-generated content and tools that greatly improve the user experience in terms of usability and accessibility. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, upload, auto-complete, image crop…

Return on Design
Seth’s Blog – Return on investment is easy to measure. You put money in, you measure money out, divide and prosper. But return on design? (Design: graphics, system engineering, user interface etc.) Design can take money and time and guts, and what do you get in return? It turns out that the sort of return you’re g…

40 Web Design Artists And 102 Websites Worth Watching
1stwebdesigner - Love In Design – I am continuing Top DeviantArtist worth watching series and now I stopped to the best web designers I could find. I only listed those artists, whom layouts I found to be really unique and inspiring, taking classical web design actually to the next level. These layouts are really artworks with amazing…

Quick Usability Checklist
The UX Booth – Does your site check off all the items mentioned on this Usability Checklist? After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on th…

8 Tips to Design a Charity Website
Webdesigner Depot – A lot of charities rely on voluntary funding. This funding is carefully distributed and there are often more important things ahead of a generous budget for the website. So how does a charity get the most out of its website? It needs to let users find out information about the charity, but the main o…

February UX Roundup
The UX Booth – Over the past month we’ve assembled some great UX related posts. January’s roundup was a hit so we figured we’d do it again! 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design Dmitry Fadeyev of Usability Post writes on Smashing Magazine detailing nine incredible common usability mistakes in web design. The…

Logo Design Trends 2009 - Showcase
1stwebdesigner - Love In Design – As requested I created this article and tried to select the most appropriate logos based on LogoOrange equitable prognosis, which I think is very appropriate. However these are just prognosis and suggestions, where to go and inspire You to new designs, we’ll see however where those logo trends will l…

7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
Freelance Folder | The Blog For Freelancers And Web-Workers – This post is written for designers, developers, or anyone else who has struggled with testing their websites across multiple browsers. As little as one year ago, there were almost no good options for testing cross-browser compatibility of websites. The tools out there usually had significant drawback…

7 Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-clutter Your Interfaces
Webdesigner Depot – What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being natural, plain and easy to understand. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in devices and software. Yes, some people find joy in figuring out how some…

15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts
Smashing Magazine – Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you d…

Beautiful and inspiring Designers Quotes
DesignWorkPlan – Recently I came accross various websites filled with quotes from designers & artists from around the world, insiprational quotes to get you thinking. In this article I have selected various top design quotes that apply to my experience and gives me power to be creative and think foward. I have also a…

Test your Website: A 57-Point Checklist for Maximum Usability
Virtual Hosting Blog – So you’ve got a website, but do you know whether it’s usable or not? The answer to this question can make the difference between a successful site and one that’s just ignored. Go through this checklist to make sure your site is up to snuff. Do you answer your user’s questions? : Users visit a site be…

Design 101 - for programmers
UX Magazine Articles – Programming is an underappreciated art form. It is there, in the background, invisible to but a few people who usually are looking to fix it, copy it or simply understand it. A successful human interface can make the most complex functionality work at the click of a button which in turn keeps the c…

The Layers of Design: the style layer
UX Magazine Articles – Designing for the Web, as I see it, is a multi-layered process. It’s a process in which each layer addresses specific design needs related to client aims, brand characteristics and site user habits and expectations. Sadly, the last of these layers to be applied in the process, the application of styl…