This year America’s Department of Homeland Security reportedly paid more than $11 million to General Dynamics for a system to keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter public posts, as well as comment threads on major news websites. The system watches public social media posts for comments that “adversely reflect” on the government, and for responses to proposed government plans.

Individuals have no problem with other private individuals reading their commentary in online writings and postings in open forums, but may obviously feel a bit of unease knowing the federal government may be doing the same thing.

Although there are clear advantages to monitoring social media to identify possible threats to national security, there are also privacy and civil liberties concerns implicit in this activity. Governments need to be mindful of the rights of the citizens to express themselves online

The Indian government’s recent decision to prosecute social networking sites like Google and Facebook has triggered public anger, with netizens saying the move is tantamount to clamping down on constitutional rights of free speech and individual liberty. The Indian government’s decision to prosecute social networking sites like Google and Facebook has triggered public anger, with netizens saying the move is tantamount to clamping down on constitutional rights of free speech and individual liberty. The truth is that Facebook, Google, Twitter are just means to communicate; they can’t be blindly prosecuted for what people post or say over there. A hearing for the same is scheduled in aa Delhi-based court Mar. 12th

There are various examples of a country’s government taking the issue too far. Take for instance, Paul Chambers, a British man who was fined 385 pounds ($612) and ordered to pay legal costs after he posted a message on his twitter feed saying he would blow up Robin Hood airport in northern England if his flight was delayed.

Chambers argued the tweet sent in January 2010 was obviously a joke aimed at his Twitter followers but the courts decided that the message was menacing and convicted him under legislation that makes it illegal to send menacing or offensive messages. Another extremely grave incident is that of a Saudi journalist accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammed on Twitter. The tweets are nothing but personal opinions but the Saudi government hasn’t taken too kindly to his tweets as they consider it an offense punishable by death! The move came despite concerns from rights groups that he may be persecuted at home.

It is increasingly getting obvious that governments are taking monitoring social networks for security concerns more seriously. The question still remains where one draws the line… with the monitoring or even expressing their opinions for that matter.

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Plan Ahead

Even with websites looks do matter! What matters more of course is its functionality and how it fares in search engines based on the content in it. Before you even look to book a server, domain name or find your HTML tagger you need to chart out a road map for it. This is important both for user experience and for SEO. So, map out and mock up a design for the site what designers call “wire-framing” and more importantly get beta test viewers for your websites who could even be a friend. This is to gauge the point of view of the future visitors to your page.

Crucial Business Information

Most companies end up building the website they want, not necessarily the website they need. Remember to keep text to a minimum when it comes to your mission statement, because you should be writing things so that people can skim. If you’re an e-tailer, you need product images (and they need to be good pictures). Depending on your business, you should have a few things on your website that fall into the realm of “information.”  If you work in the service industry and have a business that relies heavily on customer service and referrals, put some testimonials on your site.

Contact Information & FAQs

The most crucial business detail is contact information– which is why it has its own section. Have a number, email, address and a contact form easily accessible and visible don’t upload this information as part of an image,  the number or address should be able to be clicked on or copied right from the site in order to place the call or send an email conveniently and quickly. Most smart-phones these days have the ability to do “click to call” on the web, so make the process as easy as possible for users. Also, people have a lot of questions. As you hear concerns from customers and receive feedback via email, gather up the most frequently asked questions into a list and offer clear, concise answers.

A Mobile-Ready Version

Smartphones and tablets are driving an increasing amount of web traffic, and the numbers are only going to grow as mobile devices become cheaper and more mainstream. Until two years ago, designing for the web meant designing for a computer, now it means designing for anything with an internet connection

Social Media Integration

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare. There are a lot of social platforms out there, and you should promote your presence on them on your website, because integrating these platforms into your website will help boost your SEO, improve your business’ footprint on the social web and build your following across numerous social platforms.

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Today, a user-friendly UI, fast in speed, plug-in support, security features, etc, are some of the features we look for in a good browser.

The recently released, Mozilla Firefox 10 seems to have most of these qualities. After releasing Firefox 4 in March 2011, Mozilla adopted a rapid release schedule similar to the cycle Google employs with its Chrome browser. Firefox 10 focuses on under-the-hood enhancements and bug fixes, rather than fancy new features or changes to the user interface. If you are a developer than Firefox 10 is pretty much the choice as it includes a tightly-integrated set of CSS, HTML and DOM inspectors!

Chrome is renowned for being fast and secure, and it has been showing high growth and adoption rates. It could well topple Firefox as the most popular alternate browser world-wide.

Opera is still loved a lot, by a select set of users, but again its market share is sadly languishing at a dismal 5%.  Its users are very protective and vociferous about defending it and its features – but no one can offer any reason for its low market share; even after the Browser Screens were introduced.

Safari was never expected to work for Windows, except for the select few. One of the turn-downs for installing this browser, is its large size. It comes with the baggage of Apple Updates too, which makes its download size for Windows really large.

Internet Explorer then made a strong come back with IE9. It is now the primary browser on 36.2% of Windows 7 users and more people make the switch to Windows 7 for the same reason(IE8 is the last browser compatible with Windows XP). It provided for a “modern browser” experience with compatibility with HTML5 apps.

Which of these are you currently using or planning to switch to?

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So as this butterfly effect panned out, executives at Facebook, Google, Orkut (what are people still doing there?!?) and 20 other sites got summoned, to appear in person in a lower court in Delhi on March 13 of this year. The crime: allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content. The objectionable content also includes religious inflammatory posts, made by those few attention- craving people, who apparently find their religious calling on Facebook and other social networking sites. All of which pretty much re-enforces in the minds of the otherwise “reasonable netizens” the belief that the World Wide Web of Maya is not a good environment for the kids to grow up in. And the good dealers, I mean executives, at the afore-mentioned companies obviously know that they can’t (profitably) screen and censor the web. So what they do is challenge the lawsuit in the high court.

“Government control of the Internet will fail because the Web is almost entirely privately owned.” – Vint Cerf (“Father of the Internet”)
With the recent demise of the SOPA and PIPA bills, the web or the majority stake holders in it, so to speak, have clearly made their presence felt to law-makers everywhere. And, for the Indian government to seriously consider a censorship act is a very tall order and to me, they just have 3 options:

1.They can either go the Chinese or North Korean way, where certain sites are blocked directly at the router level. (And we might as well propagate martial law :P)
2.The French way where certain sites are screened and black-listed by the “Reporters Without Borders”, a Parisian NGO that advocates free speech. (but, the harsh reality is that anything with a “free” in its mission statement is definitely not sustainable).
3.Or the Australian way, where the government proposed a $9.8 million plan of action to encourage internet service providers to block all classified-as-obscene-material from users as an optional service. (hmm…so much money involved..it is bound to work in India)

Image courtesy- Wikipedia

Now personally I am for such sites actually taking accountability for the stuff they screen on their sites, the failure of which should lead to a government imposed censorship of the same. But, for some reason given the history of our country I am positive that a compromise can be achieved (And, you know what that means :P ). I would really like to know your views on the same as this, if you go to see, is a decision at a personal level.

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Now in all modesty our talented team of designers & developers have produced absolute works of arts for other projects in the past and even some for Mr. Raj Kundra, but this project definitely needed a whole new outlook.

The website required to be highly interactive as the Fight League would have a reality TV show, extensive audience interaction through social media integration and a highly detailed description of the sport that would need dynamic updates on the page.

Given the fiery nature of the sport the background theme of the site  is given the appearance of raging flames with smoke wisps that seem so real that you will need to check twice if your screen is actually on fire or not!

The website design and development can be attributed to our daily bread, viz. HTML 5, Jquery, CSS 3 and PHP. We have been implementing HTML-5 for all our clients since it was first launched and have pretty much made it an indispensable element in our work. All the really cool looking fonts have been Q-fonts integrated so that you can enjoy its “coolness” no matter what your computer specifications are.

When you visit the website you will be greeted with the fierce images of the athletes in an image ticker/scroller which introduces the fighters apart from a tab explaining the different kind of participants involved and the profiles of a fighter in the sport. Owing to the fact that the designers pretty much make a 3 course meal out of jQuery everyday, the scroller was as good as a walk in the park which, our geniuses could do with once in a while. (It’s as if they are having a staring competition with their screens!).

The different creative elements in the site also include the SFL logo designed by us, which merges the elements of a lion that depicts courage & strength and the wings that depict free-spiritedness.