#as if the author had based everyone on the most basic pop culture image of themselves

[oldtvandcomics]

How the HELL am I reading a comic where they are putting King Arthur against DRACULA of all people, AND IT IS STILL THE EXACT SAME OLD STORY?!

People should be banned from using the Grail Quest and the Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere love triangle in their stories until, I don’t know, they have completed a quiz proving that they actually know other parts of the mythos too, or something.

[xtruss]

The Other Afghan Women

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

— By Anand Gopal | September 6, 2021 | The New Yorker

More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.Photograph by Stephen Dupont / Contact Press Images

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls’ education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. “I’ve never met a foreigner before,” she said shyly. “Well, a foreigner without a gun.”

Shakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. “Of course, we women knew electricity was fine,” she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. “Is it true?” she asked a friend who’d accompanied her to the safe house. “Could it be?”

Shakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour, passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.

The violence in the countryside continued to spread. Early one morning when Shakira was five, her aunt awakened her in a great hurry. The children were led by the adults of the village to a mountain cave, where they huddled for hours. At night, Shakira watched artillery streak the sky. When the family returned to Pan Killay, the wheat fields were charred, and crisscrossed with the tread marks of Soviet tanks. The cows had been mowed down with machine guns. Everywhere she looked, she saw neighbors—men she used to call “uncle”—lying bloodied. Her grandfather hadn’t hidden with her, and she couldn’t find him in the village. When she was older, she learned that he’d gone to a different cave, and had been caught and executed by the Soviets.

Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. “We would look for Russian helicopters,” she said. “It was like spotting strange birds.” Sometimes, those birds swooped low, the earth exploded, and the children rushed to the site to forage for iron, which could be sold for a good price. Occasionally she gathered metal shards so that she could build a doll house. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photograph of a plastic doll that exhibited the female form; her mother snatched it away, calling it inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks.

When she was eleven, she stopped going outside. Her world shrank to the three rooms of her house and the courtyard, where she learned to sew, bake bread in a tandoor, and milk cows. One day, passing jets rattled the house, and she took sanctuary in a closet. Underneath a pile of clothes, she discovered a child’s alphabet book that had belonged to her grandfather—the last person in the family to attend school. During the afternoons, while her parents napped, she began matching the Pashto words to pictures. She recalled, “I had a plan to teach myself a little every day.”

In 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the pounding of mortars outside the house’s mud walls. Competing mujahideen factions were now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pan Killay were lucrative targets: there were farmers to tax, rusted Soviet tanks to salvage, opium to export. Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, “We didn’t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.”

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents’ front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village “as if he were the President.” Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets’ defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado’s men went from door to door, demanding a “tax” and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family’s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she’d been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

By the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He’d recently married a young woman, Sana, who’d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called “the land where women have freedom”—but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.

Shakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado’s men surrounded her with guns. “Where’s your uncle?” one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house—followed by Sana’s spurned fiancé. “She’s the one!” he said. The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira’s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana’s husband turned himself in to Dado’s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman’s religious court and sentenced to death.

Not long afterward, the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders—who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding—issued a decree declaring that “women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.” Women were likewise banned from “walking gracefully or with pride.” Religious police began roaming the city’s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres.

Yet the new mujahideen government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war. At night in Pan Killay, Shakira heard gunfire and, sometimes, the shouts of men. In the morning, while tending the cows, she’d see neighbors carrying wrapped bodies. Her family gathered in the courtyard and discussed, in low voices, how they might escape. But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakira’s father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.

The family, penned between Amir Dado to the north and the Ninety-third Division to the south, was growing desperate. Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: “The Taliban are here!” She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. Shakira hadn’t ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students she’d seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen’s banner but quit after the Soviets’ withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as they’d descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dado’s positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. “He’s gone,” Shakira’s brother kept saying. “He really is.” The Taliban soon dissolved Dado’s religious court—freeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting execution—and eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.

When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.

Shakira recounted to me a newfound serenity: quiet mornings with steaming green tea and naan bread, summer evenings on the rooftop. Mothers and aunts and grandmothers began to discreetly inquire about her eligibility; in the village, marriage was a bond uniting two families. She was soon betrothed to a distant relative whose father had vanished, presumably at the hands of the Soviets. The first time she laid eyes on her fiancé was on their wedding day: he was sitting sheepishly, surrounded by women of the village, who were ribbing him about his plans for the wedding night. “Oh, he was a fool!” Shakira recalled, laughing. “He was so embarrassed, he tried to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back.”

Like many enterprising young men in the valley, he was employed in opium trafficking, and Shakira liked the glint of determination in his eyes. Yet she started to worry that grit alone might not be enough. As Taliban rule established itself, a conscription campaign was launched. Young men were taken to northern Afghanistan, to help fight against a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira watched a helicopter alight in a field and unload the bodies of fallen conscripts. Men in the valley began hiding in friends’ houses, moving from village to village, terrified of being called up. Impoverished tenant farmers were the most at risk—the rich could buy their way out of service. “This was the true injustice of the Taliban,” Shakira told me. She grew to loathe the sight of roving Taliban patrols.

In 2000, Helmand Province experienced punishing drought. The watermelon fields lay ruined, and the bloated corpses of draft animals littered the roads. In a flash of cruelty, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, chose that moment to ban opium cultivation. The valley’s economy collapsed. Pazaro recalled, “We had nothing to eat, the land gave us nothing, and our men couldn’t provide for our children. The children were crying, they were screaming, and we felt like we’d failed.” Shakira, who was pregnant, dipped squares of stale naan into green tea to feed her nieces and nephews. Her husband left for Pakistan, to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira was stricken by the thought that her baby would emerge lifeless, that her husband would never return, that she would be alone. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.

One day, an announcer on the radio said that there had been an attack in America. Suddenly, there was talk that soldiers from the richest country on earth were coming to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira’s heart stirred with hope.

One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she’d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.

The U.S. had swiftly toppled the Taliban following its invasion, installing in Kabul the government of Hamid Karzai. Dado, who had befriended American Special Forces, became the chief of intelligence for Helmand Province. One of his brothers was the governor of the Sangin district, and another brother became Sangin’s chief of police. In Helmand, the first year of the American occupation had been peaceful, and the fields once again burst with poppies. Shakira now had two small children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband had returned from Pakistan and found work ferrying bags of opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.” They were now patrolling together, and soon after the attack the joint operation searched Shakira’s village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers did not stay at her home long, but she could not get the sight of the rifle muzzles out of her mind. The next morning, she removed the rugs and scrubbed the boot marks away.

Shakira’s friends and neighbors were too terrified to speak out, but the United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was “far from being a Jeffersonian Democrat” his form of rough justice was “the time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.”

Shakira’s husband stopped leaving the house as Helmandis continued to be taken away on flimsy pretexts. A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guantánamo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. “We were so happy with the Americans,” he said later, at a military tribunal. “I didn’t know eventually I would come to Cuba.”

Nasrullah ultimately returned home, but some detainees never made it back. Abdul Wahid, of Gereshk, was arrested by the Ninety-third Division and beaten severely; he was delivered to U.S. custody and left in a cage, where he died. U.S. military personnel noted burns on his chest and stomach, and bruising to his hips and groin. According to a declassified investigation, Special Forces soldiers reported that Wahid’s wounds were consistent with “a normal interview/interrogation method” used by the Ninety-third Division. A sergeant stated that he “could provide photographs of prior detainees with similar injuries.” Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division—a violation of the Leahy Law, which bars American personnel from knowingly backing units that commit flagrant human-rights abuses.

In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A Ninety-third commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a “private-security company” under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the Division’s fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the Ninety-third’s leader engineered a hit that killed fifteen policemen, and then recovered the contract.) The remaining third of the Division, finding themselves subjected to extortion threats from their former colleagues, absconded with their weapons and joined the Taliban.

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

It was now 2005, four years after the American invasion, and Shakira had a third child on the way. Her domestic duties consumed her—“morning to night, I was working and sweating”—but when she paused from stoking the tandoor or pruning the peach trees she realized that she’d lost the sense of promise she’d once felt. Nearly every week, she heard of another young man being spirited away by the Americans or the militias. Her husband was unemployed, and recently he’d begun smoking opium. Their marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house, matching the village’s grim mood.

So when a Taliban convoy rolled into Pan Killay, with black-turbanned men hoisting tall white flags, she considered the visitors with interest, even forgiveness. This time, she thought, things might be different.

In 2006, the U.K. joined a growing contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to quell the rebellion in Sangin. Soon, Shakira recalled, “hell began.” The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on combat outposts, and set up roadblocks. On a hilltop in Pan Killay, the Americans commandeered a drug lord’s house, transforming it into a compound of sandbags and watchtowers and concertina wire. Before most battles, young Talibs visited houses, warning residents to leave immediately. Then the Taliban would launch their assault, the coalition would respond, and the earth would shudder.

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

Not since childhood had Shakira known anyone who’d died by air strike. She was now twenty-seven, and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she’d need to run for cover. One night, she awoke to a screeching noise so loud that she wondered if the house was being torn apart. Her husband was still snoring away, and she cursed him under her breath. She tiptoed to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles were passing by, trundling over scrap metal strewn out front. She roused the family. It was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She thrust the children into recessed windows—a desperate attempt to protect them in case a strike caused the roof to collapse—and covered them with heavy blankets.

Returning to the front yard, Shakira spotted one of the foreigners’ vehicles sitting motionless. A pair of antennas projected skyward. They’re going to kill us, she thought. She climbed onto the roof, and saw that the vehicle was empty: the soldiers had parked it and left on foot. She watched them march over the footbridge and disappear into the reeds.

A few fields away, the Taliban and the foreigners began firing. For hours, the family huddled indoors. The walls shook, and the children cried. Shakira brought out her cloth dolls, rocked Ahmed against her chest, and whispered stories. When the guns fell silent, around dawn, Shakira went out for another look. The vehicle remained there, unattended. She was shaking in anger. All year, roughly once a month, she had been subjected to this terror. The Taliban had launched the attack, but most of her rage was directed at the interlopers. Why did she, and her children, have to suffer?

A wild thought flashed through her head. She rushed into the house and spoke with her mother-in-law. The soldiers were still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law grabbed a jerrican of diesel fuel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the jerrican and understood, hurrying back with a second jug. Shakira’s mother-in-law doused a tire, then popped the hood and soaked the engine. Shakira struck a match, and dropped it onto the tire.

From the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze. Before long, they heard the whirring of a helicopter, approaching from the south. “It’s coming for us!” her mother-in-law shouted. Shakira’s brother-in-law, who was staying with them, frantically gathered the children, but Shakira knew that it was too late. If we’re going to die, let’s die at home, she thought.

They threw themselves into a shallow trench in the back yard, the adults on top of the children. The earth shook violently, then the helicopter flew off. When they emerged, Shakira saw that the foreigners had targeted the burning vehicle, so that none of its parts would fall into enemy hands.

The women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, “a hero.” But she had difficulty mustering any pride, only relief. “I was thinking that they would not come here anymore,” she said. “And we would have peace.”

In 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers. Britain’s forces were beleaguered—a third of its casualties in Afghanistan would occur in Sangin, leading some soldiers to dub the mission “Sangingrad.” Nilofar, now eight, could intuit the rhythms of wartime. She would ask Shakira, “When are we going to Auntie Farzana’s house?” Farzana lived in the desert.

But the chaos wasn’t always predictable: one afternoon, the foreigners again appeared before anyone could flee, and the family rushed into the back-yard trench. A few doors down, the wife and children of the late Abdul Salam did the same, but a mortar killed his fifteen-year-old daughter, Bor Jana.

Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

In this way, Shakira’s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. “That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”

Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.

Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.

Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.

Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.

Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.

Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.

Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.” The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as “unfavorable,” with villagers warning that, if the coalition “did not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.”

In response, the coalition shifted to the hearts-and-minds strategy of counter-insurgency. But the foreigners’ efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. “They were coming by force, without getting permission from us,” Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. “They sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.” Marzia, a woman from Pan Killay, recalled, “The Taliban would fire a few shots, but the Americans would respond with mortars.” One mortar slammed into her mother-in-law’s house. She survived, Marzia said, but had since “lost control of herself”—always “shouting at things we can’t see, at ghosts.”

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

The Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control. The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds—leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only “rubble and dirt.” The Sangin market had been obliterated in this way. When Shakira first saw the ruined shops, she told her husband, “They left nothing for us.”

Still, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay. Shakira’s husband slaughtered a sheep to celebrate the end of the war, and the family discussed renovating the garden. Her mother-in-law spoke of the days before the Russians and the Americans, when families picnicked along the canal, men stretched out in the shade of peach trees, and women dozed on rooftops under the stars.

But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.

On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

The Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability. As the Afghan government crumbled this summer, I travelled through Helmand Province—the Emirate’s de-facto capital—to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.

I departed from Lashkar Gah, which remained under government control. At the outskirts stood a squat cement building with an Afghan-government flag—beyond this checkpoint, Kabul’s authority vanished. A pickup idled nearby; piled into the cargo bed were half a dozen members of the sangorian, a feared militia in the pay of the Afghan intelligence agency, which was backed by the C.I.A. Two of the fighters appeared no older than twelve.

I was with two locals in a beat-up Corolla, and we slipped past the checkpoint without notice. Soon, we were in a treeless horizon of baked earth, with virtually no road beneath us. We passed abandoned outposts of the Afghan Army and Police that had been built by the Americans and the Brits. Beyond them loomed a series of circular mud fortifications, with a lone Taliban sniper splayed on his stomach. White flags fluttered behind him, announcing the gateway to the Islamic Emirate.

The most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we’d left behind was the dearth of gunmen. In Afghanistan, I’d grown accustomed to kohl-eyed policemen in baggy trousers, militiamen in balaclavas, intelligence agents inspecting cars. Yet we rarely crossed a Taliban checkpoint, and when we did the fighters desultorily examined the car. “Everyone is afraid of the Taliban,” my driver said, laughing. “The checkpoints are in our hearts.”

If people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them. Here and there, groups of villagers sat under roadside trellises, sipping tea with Talibs. The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin. In the canal, boys were having swimming races; village men and Taliban were dipping their feet into the turquoise water. We passed green cropland and canopies of fruit trees. Groups of women walked along a market road, and two girls skipped in rumpled frocks.

We approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. The Taliban had launched an assault, and the thuds of artillery resounded across the plain. A stream of families, their donkeys laboring under the weight of giant bundles, were escaping what they said were air strikes. By the roadside, a woman in a powder-blue burqa stood with a wheelbarrow; inside was a wrapped body. Some Taliban were gathered on a hilltop, lowering a fallen comrade into a grave.

I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.

At the house of the Taliban district governor, a group of Talibs sat eating okra and naan, donated by the village. I asked them about their plans for when the war was over. Most said that they’d return to farming, or pursue religious education. I’d flown to Afghanistan from Iraq, a fact that impressed Hamid, a young commander. He said that he dreamed of seeing the Babylonian ruins, and asked, “Do you think, when this is over, they’ll give me a visa?”

It was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next. During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate. Politically minded Talibs who have lived abroad and maintain homes in Doha or Pakistan told me—perhaps with calculation—that they had a more cosmopolitan outlook than before. A scholar who’d spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, “There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn’t know about human rights, education, politics—we just took everything by power. But now we understand.” In the scholar’s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work “shoulder to shoulder” with men.

Yet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Taliban’s march to Kabul, a city he’d never seen. He guessed that he’d arrive there in mid-August.

On the most sensitive question in village life—women’s rights—men like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, “They haven’t changed at all.”

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

This grim calculus hovered over every conversation I had with villagers. In the hamlet of Yakh Chal, I came upon the ruins of an Afghan Army outpost that had recently been overrun by the Taliban. All that remained were mounds of scrap metal, cords, hot plates, gravel. The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell. Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that “even Kalashnikovs could fire on it.” But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. “There were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning,” another witness said. “Many small children.” According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.

Later, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, “I asked the crew why they did this, and they said, ‘We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion’ ”—a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans—“ ‘gave orders to kill them all.’ ” As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, “When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.” The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, “We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.”

General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army’s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

In the course of a few hours in 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son. Three years later, they killed the warlord himself—who by then had joined parliament—in a roadside blast. The orchestrator of the assassination hailed from Pan Killay. In one light, the attack is the mark of a fundamentalist insurgency battling an internationally recognized government; in another, a campaign of revenge by impoverished villagers against their former tormentor; or a salvo in a long-simmering tribal war; or a hit by a drug cartel against a rival enterprise. All these readings are probably true, simultaneously. What’s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.

It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August—just as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans’ frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life. “Bro, you’ve got to help me,” the helicopter pilot I’d spoken with earlier pleaded over the phone. At the time, he was fighting crowds to get within sight of the airport gate; when the wheels of the last U.S. aircraft pulled off the runway, he was left behind. His boss, Sami Sadat, reportedly escaped to the U.K.

Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War—and have now lost—are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. “I’ve worked too hard to get here,” she told me. “I studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life’s dream.” She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

The women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble—they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. “Women and men aren’t equal,” Shakira told me. “They are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn’t have.” More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. “Too much freedom is dangerous, because people won’t know the limits,” she said.

All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun—and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. “The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,” Pazaro told me. “As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.” I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. “It’s the culture in the village, not Islam,” he said. “The people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.” Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.

Though Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself. Through the decades of war, she continued to teach herself to read, and she is now working her way through a Pashto translation of the Quran, one sura at a time. “It gives me great comfort,” she said. She is teaching her youngest daughter the alphabet, and has a bold ambition: to gather her friends and demand that the men erect a girls’ school.

Even as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past. The village, she told me, has a cemetery that spreads across a few hilltops. There are no plaques, no flags, just piles of stones that glow red and pink in the evening sun. A pair of blank flagstones project from each grave, one marking the head, one the feet.

Shakira’s family visits every week, and she points to the mounds where her grandfather lies, where her cousins lie, because she doesn’t want her children to forget. They tie scarves on tree branches to attract blessings, and pray to those departed. They spend hours amid a sacred geography of stones, shrubs, and streams, and Shakira feels renewed.

Shortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban’s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself. She told me that she won’t mind the missing kitchen, or the gaping hole where the pantry once stood. Instead, she chooses to see a village in rebirth. Shakira is sure that a freshly paved road will soon run past the house, the macadam sizzling hot on summer days. The only birds in the sky will be the kind with feathers. Nilofar will be married, and her children will walk along the canal to school. The girls will have plastic dolls, with hair that they can brush. Shakira will own a machine that can wash clothes. Her husband will get clean, he will acknowledge his failings, he will tell his family that he loves them more than anything. They will visit Kabul, and stand in the shadow of giant glass buildings. “I have to believe,” she said. “Otherwise, what was it all for?” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the September 13, 2021, issue.

— Anand Gopal, the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” is writing a book on the Arab revolutions.

[iftekharsanom]

Top 7 Teen Movies

When you grow up, your heart dies - or so they say. Here's the proof: Heathers Juno, critic of The Guardian and Observer select the 10 best movies for teenagers.  Blackboard Jungle

Under the name "Evan Hunter", also known as a crime writer Ed McBain - Blackboard Jungle the early age of the labeled teen offender - it was based on his own experience as a teacher in the Bronx. In London movie Brooks attracted crowds of Stuffed Boys, cut theater seats, danced in the aisles and actually started a riot. The reason for this so shocking behavior was not so much the content of the film, which is now a sober 12 rating, but achieved due to the use of Bill Haley and the early rock'n'roll comets, Rock Around the Clock, who played in polarization . Today is the least shocking aspect of a crime-thrusting film with a knife, drugs and even rape in the state school system, but at the time it was a touchstone for disgruntled young people, regardless of whether Haley was a white musician traveler in Its 30 years and the music has already been a year old. Almost 60 years later, he still has a hit, with Richard Dadier Glenn Ford (first called to enable students to call the Jive to talk to him "Daddy-O") struggle to control his students in the North fiction manual school. Others try and fail, such as the unfortunate Mr. Edwards, whose valuable 78s are crushed by his class consists of an act of symbolic and even disturbing rebellion, but I hope that as African Americans Gregory Miller, what eventually patriotic authority Dadier replied. But for all its war morality, Vic Morrow, the evil Artie West, is the true anti-hero of the film, dressed in leather and meets the logical heir Wild One, Marlon Brando, two years before. Superbad

With certified hits The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow Express was already rolling at full speed when Superbad, directed a comedy in the younger audience, appeared on the movie screens. Co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (designated the main characters to be), and produced by Apatow, he liked this movie more with a hoarse Partycrowd. The image is dominated by three young actors who were not then the stars they are now. Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill) and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are high school graduates getting ready for a final party before college. Evan and Seth no longer see each other when the first outing to the prestigious Dartmouth while the latter attended a public university; Seth Groll scattered around the action, but now he's eyeing sex. If he offers through the object of his alcohol affection to a party held so the numbers he is sleeping with her. This is where the drippy Fogell enters: having a fake identity secured mis-adapted under the pseudonym of McLovin, is the key is to plan Seth. With its notes and 24-hour melancholy, the film takes a similar American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused terrain, but is distinguished by a Post-Porky Sensitivity Hallows celebrates simultaneously pre-PC smuttiness. Much of the humor derives from the assessments of the chauvinistic Sex by inexperienced hero. (Adult, I no longer sophisticated. A Rogen police admits that police work is nothing like the serious coroner CSI procedural having been carried out, can be expected. "When I joined the force," he laments, "I semen believed oftentimes "). Goodwill mocking the experts, the details of the accompaniment and direction of Greg Mottola exuberant makes the image almost irresistible, although the pace of broad-fashion and humor is as sexist as a hope for the production of Apatow Kids

No kids at school wisecracking here. In fact there is no mention of the school. Not that many jokes, either come to think of it. Instead, Larry Clark's raw, Drama bracing reminds us securely and artificially that most movies are teenagers. The boys were dangerous: an open honest representation of what modern teenagers actually do (those who grew up in New York, anyway). It was a heavy blow to the chops of a complacent society, who thought she had made all the rebels in the 1950s, and was convicted by demonstrators and politicians. But as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, the film showed a terrible chasm between generations of young and old. The last only demographic number in history. While they work, their children are drunk, they are stoned, fun, fight, steal them and more sex than they did, yet clumsy, insecure and people who do not particularly like. Worse than all this danger sign, but the general lack of concern or compassion for the characters, especially Leo Fitzpatrick's anti-hero is Telly's terrible reckless pursuit of "de-virginise" younger girls and neglected joint has its successes. With the spectrum of AIDS lurking in the shadows, a happy ending is even more in the distance. But there is nothing particularly sensational about the way children have gone through these adolescent lives. The treatment is more like a documentary: on the wall with the camera (which incidentally by the indecent sometimes), the actual sites of the road, unstructured scenes and dialogue really conversation - the latter in Harmony Korine, largely through Of the internal work of a writing, as he was 19 years old. That's the thing, do not get the kids credit for the season: it's done. It is a work of fiction, but the benefits are so little is known, is not included as an "actor", although many of the players followed the decent career, such as Fitzpatrick, Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and Korine. In short, the will of a job done a little too well. 10 Things I Hate About You

The philosophy behind this lively teen comedy looks like the Shrew the Clueless made Emma do. That is, take the skeleton of a literary classic and dressed in the threads of high school. Although the film Clueless is not, still quite blinding Bobby. Shakespeare's transplant into a youthful atmosphere of the United States in recent times is the least successful part of it: It is not something that a strident touch in the plot, in which a young man told his father that he would not allow graduation date, until the Abrasive ground older sister Kat (Julia Stiles). This sets up a system of younger brother suitors born of a legal soil, Patrick (Heath Ledger), is paid uncontrollably seduce Kat. But that's a small detail. To which we respond in 10 things are visual and verbal, energetic rhythm and charismatic performances: Stiles and the last Ledger may be known for more intense films, but it is doubtful that we do not always get more on the screen than I do here. Writer Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, keeping things bright will not character for a long time without toxic replica or a sharp zinger their lips anymore. If someone has hit a dry spot, there is always a language to see. "I know you can be overwhelmed and dominated" reflects a girl, "but can it alone" overwhelmed "? Everyone here is united and evoked by their idiosyncratic vocabulary, and the viewer is also enriched by phrases such as" (The brain area where the images are saved as desirable partner for stimulants) or a new definition for the word "backup." For the cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and as the father of the Kat, the magnificent Larry Miller (who was an early contender for George Costanza's game at Seinfeld.) If the rhythm flags, still pick-me-ups like the wonderful accounting show karaoke with the zeal of Steve's early start Martin is held. Juno

Written by an ex-stripper and the issue of student pregnancy approaching - the downfall of all middle-class parents - Jason Reitman's film is a hilarious comedy, played well, that a star made night Ellen Page as the title character. Much if talked about its pro-life nuances in its release, but in reality the situation is Juno is something of a MacGuffin, a premise that a smart, wise to the world and its future can look 16 years. Juno begins with his heroine to realize that a baby will have, the result of a loose ball with his best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera, in his own weediest). Instead of finishing, Juno decides the child for adoption to give attributes to the Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a couple who seem to be in tune - especially participate their love for indie rock and horror movies (although their tastes are quite Early, even by today's standards). The latter is twee and well marked, but what Juno is refreshing, without dismantling the smart edge. In the end, she is certainly older and wiser, but what Juno learns more, do, prepare for disappointment: the adult world not Disney World of complexity is what he seems to think. The use of indie rock still dark have hampered its potential as a mainstream success, but now that only its charm is given lo-fi and in a sense, it is probably useful because Juno really is not aligned world, only those who think Who knew everything grew and learned the hard way that even if they know everything, nobody likes a smartass. Clueless

"As if!" — "I totally paused!" — "Minor ducats…" — "Let's do a lap before we commit to a location!" — "I was surfing the crimson wave!" — "Did my hair get flat?"If Clueless was published in 1995, it was not just sensational and intelligent fun - carefree, the opposite of its title was. Insinuating indirect, clever and funny: writers director Amy Heckerling and seemed to have invented a new culture of the teen-pop language. It was as vivid and colorful as his remarkable movie heroine-keeper: funnier and more romantic than any romcom. In the nineties, it was the hot topics issue. This film was a disgrace to all who, a funny and gracious tribute to Emma Jane Austen with nod to Shakespeare and Wilde. In Clueless, 19, Alicia Silverstone was the role of her life, unique style and comedy display ability, but never found after the race that everything seemed to promise. She plays Cher, the pampered, but basically good-hearted Princess: rich, popular, obsessed with fashion, but lonely and looking for love. Silverstone finds laughter as a teacher, and his voice in a sort of pitchy yodel pause in perplexing tones or complaint. Cher is best friend Dionne (Stacey Trace), but somewhat aggressive with his ex-strident Josh, whose mother was married to Cher's ferocious defender Mel, played by Dan Hedaya. However, could there be a spark between these two? Josh is a college student in liberal causes and Roar Mode "Rock Complaint". It is played by 26-year-old Paul Rudd, who immediately became a brand in Hollywood and sniper. Rudd's character began to mature and youthful Clueless. Get Cher decides what bad grades you have to do with getting your teachers in love, to sneakily two of them fall to each other, and if the east coast dorky girl named Tai appears, Cher makes a personal change "project ". Tai is very well played by Brittany Murphy, an up-and-comer talent who was bleak due to complications of dying in 2009 after an overdose of prescription drugs. The teen movie references to contemporary youth culture is always complicated with irony and melancholy if you look after almost 20 years. The terrible fate of Brittany Murphy is the saddest part of it. Clueless is strange to think that once the social networks. These people are ready and ready for the Internet and the digital revolution. There is a splendid view of the gag on Cher and Dionne talking uncomfortable on his large mobile phone. The recent film by Sofia Coppola, The Ring Bling is Clueless next generation. The difference is that the lean teenager Coppola really are clueless, white and selfish. There is a nice quality and idealistic Clueless comic that makes it so appealing. Cher and Dionne are the queens at their school, but not unpleasant, and according to their lights, they always want to do the right thing. Clueless is not characterized by a sign of "Bully" noticing a comeuppance ter. Mean Girls, the 2004 satirical film written by Tina Fey and Lindsay Lohan is very different. There's nothing new about bullying, of course, but I think it's interesting that Clueless appeared briefly to introduce snarky sites and reality farce at the center of pop culture. Clueless is a true classic: handsome, innocent fun. I envy people I have not yet seen. Pretty In Pink 

The amazing ability to take advantage of John Hughes' teenage thrill, and then inexorably, pack it in a commercial way, has never been better employed here. This is empathy for his films, but also the most outrageous Eighties-tastic. A universal heart-tugger and retro bible style. It's a win-win. There is an old story - the poor Cinderella rich Prince Charming meets, and agonize all the way to the climatic ball, sorry, dance - but the full spectrum of teen angst is here: worry about what your colleagues think; Believing secretly tell your best friend and courage; They worry that you are very poor; Concern for parents; Worry that the sleeve of your vintage tuxedo has not rolled high enough. Hughes takes everything seriously and it takes time to build his characters. Andie knows where Molly Ringwald is coming from. We have to see him at home, and how embarrassing it is, we hung in his room, we saw the status of his single father (playing Harry Dean Stanton). This does not want to take the Ringwald natural wonderful power. Their blend of forward and fragility is the compelling effort. If you apply your lipstick or calls snobbery Andrew McCarthy, we are all the way with it. And Duckie John Cryer is the strangest of the male characters: the friendly and friendly clown who does not stay with the girl, although a better and better dressed society. The latter (especially the requirements of the modified screening tests) feels a bit like a cop-out, but could be read as a commentary on the bittersweet novel against pragmatism. If the story you do not start with Pretty in Pink, style it be. The film is worth looking at the costume changes alone, the respective boss Ringwald, Annie Potts, who travels from the fetish-punk in the 50's hive, Madonna-like material girl Debbie Harry New Wave. Serious art direction now makes the film look like a time capsule intentionally, filled with so many fashions, posters, records and decorative objects as they thought they could escape. And do not forget the soundtrack: Psychedelic Furs, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, The Smiths, uh, a cover by Nik Kershaw. Was each teen movie better?

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[tractionmagazine]

141. Elly Thomas

Elly Thomas, ‘Czar’, 2017. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

Elly Thomas is an emerging artist who uses sculptural forms to navigate how childhood play can inform adult creative processes. Creating a series of forms, which are then combined into various improvised assemblages, Thomas uses these impermanent structures to explore animism and autonomy of objects. Having completed a PhD in 2013 at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where her thesis was titled ‘Play as Evolving Process in the Work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Philip Guston and Tony Oursler’, Elly is now a leading mind on Paolozzi and Guston’s practices and will soon be releasing a book with Routledge discussing their processes and output. Here, Thomas talks with Charlotte Barnard for Traction.

You create sculpture and drawings, which use childhood play as set of paradigms to inform adult creative practice. How did you come to be so interested in this line of enquiry?

It was while I was enjoying working with children on an art project that I began noticing parallels between the way the children spoke about their work and my own ongoing concerns. Namely, at its most basic, we were concerned with transforming matter into something that seemed animate, that seemed to have a life of its own beyond one’s control, much as the way one would think about one’s toys as a child. So not representing something, but inventing - regarding a drawing or sculpture almost as a living thing, as a thing in itself.

I thought perhaps this space for play continued into adult life. I didn’t need to pretend to be a child again. How could I? It would only produce some sort of faux naivety. Instead I wondered whether I could learn from the children in a way that could be applicable to my own ongoing concerns, through a focus on animism and its expression through play methods, processes and objectives (rather than aesthetics).

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. A collection of sculptures and found objects used as a kit of forms with which to improvise and experiment during a solo show at ASC Gallery. Mid-show the installation was dismantled and reconfigured. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

You create 'kits' of forms, which can then be assembled freely into a multitude of further configurations. What is it about this performative and non-static form of object creation that is so important to you?

This follows on directly from an animistic engagement with material. This particular form of engagement with matter had suggested that the landscape of play continues to age, evolve and develop throughout adult life. From here I asked ‘How can one treat sculpture and drawing as if they’re ‘toys’ as much as ‘art?’ So getting away from thinking in terms of a finished object or working towards a pre-visualised image, but instead finding a range of ways to experiment with these objects to see what they do, rather than the making existing as an end itself. So for me, making objects is just stage one. After this they become toys that are allowed to ‘live’ through endless reconfiguration. 

The objects you make take on biomorphic forms, and seem to me to be suggestive of the domestic. Does this reading of them ring true?

It’s less about the domestic and more about the world of mass production set against the biological world. I’m interested in confusions between the two realms. This exists in childhood (after all what is a toy if not a man-made object that is confused with the living world), and in fact the pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget asserted that children are often unable to distinguish between the mechanical and the biological – for children where there is movement there is life.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

I explore this confusion through parallels between the biological and manmade that centre on the functional – on engineering, living systems and potentially infinite structures comprised of a simple series of building blocks. This focuses on repetition and symmetry in the world of mass production as opposed to organic repetition (where no repeated form is identical) and organic asymmetry (anything that grows will inevitably be asymmetric). 

However, I think you have hit on something about the domestic and the biomorphic, because both my parents are biologists and on the walls of my childhood home there were many reproductions of images from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book ‘On Growth and Form’. The landscape of childhood would seem to be re-emerging again! So, as is often the case, other people are able to see what you’re doing more clearly than you are yourself! 

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

What is your approach when initially coming to make these forms? How much do traditional considerations of form, material, texture and colour influence the outcome?

Everything comes from collecting. I collect images, objects and junk with no idea how things are going to come together (play is by definition open-ended). I’m also continually sketching, but allow myself to forget the source material the images are based on. This drift allows the forms to gain an independent identity, rather than be left locked in the world of representation. When it comes to moving the forms beyond the sketchbook and into sculpture I choose materials that will force time and change to be built into the process. I want the resulting forms to have ‘grown’ through a response to gravity and changing conditions. The sculptures then exist in physical time - time as layering, stacking and etching.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

You have written extensively about the  practices of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. You have a forthcoming book for Routledge titled, 'Play and the Artist’s Creative Process: The Work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Philip Guston'. What is it about their individual practices that so interests you? How much influence has your research into their working methods had on your own?

I was initially drawn to their work through their particular relationship with popular culture. Both artists seemed to have engaged with pop culture in a way that didn’t seem to fit into existing art historical labels (even if Eduardo Paolozzi is often described as the Father of British Pop Art, an epithet he first courted and then dismissed). 

I began making comparisons between the cultural landscape of their individual childhoods and the work they made during artistic maturity. In the case of Paolozzi one could see a striking connection to toys that would have been available to him as a child, with Guston there is obviously a connection to the comic strips he loved as a boy. But more significantly, as I dug deeper I began to discover that both artists had a recurrent interest in animism and a need for the unexpected outcome. 

From here I began to explore their studio methods and processes through the lens of play. Both artists have made a big impact on my work in terms of expanding the possibilities for play within a studio environment. Paolozzi and Guston were endlessly experimenting; they offer artists a vast tool kit of methods that allow one to reconnect with the landscape of play.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

Your sculptural work has recently been transformed into a 2D, static image for London Arts Board. It is an unexpected and intriguing departure for this facet of your output, transposing its normal mutability into something fixed, especially considering drawing seems to be such an integral element of your practice. How did this come about?

The London Arts Board is an innovative public arts project founded and run by Liberty Rowley on a notice board on Peckham Road. In the current climate with drastic cuts to arts funding and creativity and play pushed to the margins of the school curriculum, public art seems more important than ever. I think in many ways the ‘where’ is the most urgent political question for art – how one makes space to assure that access to the arts is available for everyone.

As to the static nature of my new work – I don’t see the piece as finalised, in a sense it’s on pause until the sculpture elements are reconfigured. In fact I’ve already been playing with different combinations of the elements in my studio. Philip Guston described his paintings as ‘pauses’ and imagined all his paintings as one work. I find that a very potent idea.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

What have you got coming up?

In mid-February an Eduardo Paolozzi retrospective opens at The Whitechapel Gallery. I’ve been working on the catalogue both as a contributing author and researcher. I’ll also appear in a short film discussing Paolozzi’s print suite General Dynamic F.U.N.  

Interview by Charlotte Barnard.

You can see Elly’s work for London Arts Board online at http://londonartsboard.blogspot.co.uk/

You can also see it in person at the corner of Peckham Road and Vestry Road, Camberwell, London.

To see more of Elly’s work and to keep updated with her upcoming events, please follow http://www.ellythomas.com

[biofunmy]

‘Retail Mayhem’: The Fight for Barneys Goes to Court

It’s D-Day for Barneys New York — and, potentially, the entire high fashion retail world.

On Thursday, a bankruptcy court judge in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is expected to rule on the fate of the famed retailer. It’s a decision that could have repercussions far from the corner of 61st and Madison in Manhattan — and not just because Barneys’ flagship store may well disappear if Authentic Brands Group, which last week announced its bid had been accepted, is officially anointed the new owner.

Authentic Brands’ plan involves potentially untying the intellectual property of Barneys — its name and brands — from its assets. That means the Barneys name would be licensed to Saks Fifth Avenue and the retailer’s inventory would be handed over to B. Riley, the financial firm with a robust liquidation business. All of its stores could close.

If the $271 million bid from Authentic Brands and B. Riley is approved on Thursday, the result could be eye-popping liquidation sales of luxury goods like handbags and dresses at all seven Barneys locations, perhaps starting as soon as this weekend. That would put a surfeit of discounted merchandise in the major fashion markets of New York and Los Angeles just as the holiday shopping season arrives — and long before other stores and brands put similar goods on sale.

“It will affect everyone, even online; Net-a-Porter, Saks, Neiman Marcus,” said Robert Burke, founder of a luxury consultancy and former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. “It’s potential retail mayhem. The only other time we have seen a major liquidation outside of the regular sale season was after 9/11, when no one was shopping and people panicked. It was really a disaster, because the customer never really forgets. And trying to retrain them can take years.”

Whether that comes to pass depends on any selection of an alternate bidder, and the possibility that new bidders or information cause the judge to wait to make a decision.

The potential rival to Authentic Brands who has been most public about his intentions is Sam Ben-Avraham, the retail and trade show entrepreneur. He assembled a consortium of investors to offer an alternative to Authentic Brands’ plan. With a nostalgia-driven “Save Barneys” campaign and a plan to maintain the flagship stores — and jobs — in New York and Beverly Hills, the investor in Kith and creator of a number of trade shows had been trying to position himself as the creative and entrepreneurial alternative to Jamie Salter, the founder and chief executive of Authentic Brands. He had not submitted a qualified bid for Barneys as of Wednesday.

Indeed, the Barneys drama increasingly seemed like the tale of two men: on the one hand, the financial engineer, on the other, the merchant-impresario. (This week, David Jackson of the investment firm Solitaire Partners and former chief executive of Istithmar World, the Dubai-based group that owned Barneys from 2007 to 2012, said he was also planning to bid; his backers include the Saudi company Arabian Oud.)

Online and through press interviews, Mr. Ben-Avraham, 53, had cast Mr. Salter, 56, and Authentic Brands as villains looking to demolish Barneys as a cultural institution. In a petition online, Mr. Ben-Avraham said that turning Barneys into an intellectual property license operation would vanquish the store’s “unique identity, its point of view, its cutting edge agenda.”

The criticism has put a spotlight on Authentic Brands, which Mr. Salter founded in 2010, and its practice of buying the intellectual property of flailing or bankrupt brands. After a purchase, Authentic’s goal is to strike licensing deals with other companies that may want to use the brand name in new products, international collections and elsewhere. That translates to licensing fees and royalty payments for Authentic, which is typically removed from issues tied to stores, employees and inventory.

“Sam really is a merchant,” said Mr. Burke, albeit one who goes to Burning Man and works out of a SoHo loft. “He and his team are not corporate, not bankers, not strategists.”

Still, there are those who found his strategy — including a “Save Barneys” Instagram account filled with vintage ads and Barneys appearances in shows like “Sex and the City” — more romantic than realistic.

Authentic Brands says that its dozens of brands, which include Frederick’s of Hollywood, Nine West and the rights tied to celebrity names like Muhammad Ali, generate nearly $10 billion in annual retail sales. It also recently expanded into media, with the surprising acquisition of Sports Illustrated. (It licensed the publication’s operations to a separate company that cut jobs and sought to shift coverage to a network of bloggers.) The company, which is private, does not disclose how much it receives in sales or income.

“Jamie is incredibly smart, incredibly aggressive, and he rarely loses,” said Gerald L. Storch, chief executive of Storch Advisors.

Mr. Salter is from Toronto, where he still lives. He is married and has four sons, all of whom work in different roles at Authentic Brands. He started his retail career in sporting goods sales and marketing in the 1980s.

Mr. Salter earned his reputation for resurrecting brands after helping found Hilco Consumer in 2006 and serving as its chief executive. It was a division of the financial firm Hilco, which has a robust liquidation business.

Hilco Consumer aggressively bought up the intellectual property of brands like Sharper Image, Linens ‘n Things and Polaroid through bankruptcy proceedings. New products bearing the brand names, like Sharper Image garment steamers, started appearing at retailers and new websites were introduced.

Mr. Salter views himself as a brand licensing expert, according to a 2009 interview with The New York Times — one who had learned how to receive royalties for merchandise while bypassing costs like store staff and rent. The strategy has thrived in the churning retail landscape of the past 15 years.

Mr. Salter has his critics, but he also has friends in the fashion industry, including Tommy Hilfiger. Mr. Hilfiger praised the executive’s “magic” touch with brands at a conference last year, saying that when Mr. Salter bought something, “the brand basically explodes.”

“He licenses it to many different categories, he doesn’t own any inventory — he’s like the Uber of the brand business today,” Mr. Hilfiger said during a panel discussion, seated next to Mr. Salter.

One of Authentic Brands’ earliest coups was the acquisition of exclusive rights tied to Marilyn Monroe, whose likeness drew the interest of everyone from Dolce & Gabbana to Walmart. In 2013, Mr. Salter, as part of a long-running lawsuit around use of the starlet’s likeness, described his company’s success in expanding Ms. Monroe’s brand while staying true to her “DNA” through its partnerships.

“What’s really good is Marilyn Monroe is looking down from somewhere seeing that her brand is being exploited properly, to what she wanted,” Mr. Salter said in a deposition transcript.

Whether everyone will be happy with his plans to exploit the Barneys brand is another question. “The silver lining is Saks,” Mr. Burke said. “I am sure they care,” about the potential dangers of liquidation, he said.

As for Barneys stores, even if Authentic Brands keeps some of them open, the inventory will be liquidated, leading to major discounts on luxury goods, according to a person familiar with the plan who was not authorized to speak publicly. Some of the retailer’s biggest unsecured creditors include the Row, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and Prada.

Mr. Storch said a liquidation sale before the holidays “would definitely have an impact on the market,” even if it’s only short term.

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[aurelliocheek]

Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales

Folklore, apps, Pomeranian – Golden Orb’s way of storytelling in the digital age.

This is where our journey as ­Golden Orb started: Our basic idea was to ­create ­story-driven games with a fresh take on traditional tales by combining folklore with modern-day media. By the time we came up with this plan, we had both been working as professional game developers for several years and for the most part as members of the same team. Therefore, we already knew that we work well together and that our skill sets complement each other ideally. We liked the company we were working for but had both reached a point in our careers where we wanted more than an employed position could offer: Full authority over creative and business model decisions.

We wrote down our business idea, ­calculated all sorts of scenarios, took out a bank loan, and tackled the intimidating amount of paperwork involved with founding a company. The incredible part of the whole process was that once you dare to actively pursue your dream, despite all the risks involved, and share your idea with others, you meet a lot of helpful people and opportunities that you had not even imagined. One of these chance meetings eventually led to us obtaining the Mediengründerzentrum NRW scholarship, which was a big help in our first year of business.

In the tailor shop of Siebenstreich you can find a lot of pop culture references.

Why a Pomeranian? Right from the start, we knew that we wanted to rewrite traditional tales with a modern perspective. It has been a while since they were originally written and a lot has changed in this world since then. In addition to slightly modernizing the tales, we decided that we would like to gently nudge our players towards thinking outside the box, which is why we deliberately break common stereotypes in our stories.

The first tale we picked was the well-known Cinderella story. We decided to re­create it as the digital game equivalent of a picture book. To capture this atmosphere, it features screen-filling, hand-drawn artwork reminiscent of its book counterpart with the addition that the displayed world is fully explorable. The images are not static decoration. You can even leave footprints in the snow or create ripples in the pond. To make it suitable for a very young audience, we omitted any written text and added comprehensive voice over instead. Staying true to our goal of challenging common stereotypes, our Cinderella is not your standard princess material, the castle’s watchdog is a Pomeranian rather than an all-teeth-and-muscles-breed and cross-dressing for the royal wedding is definitely an option.

Playing with clishés: Cinderella

Despite our limited funds, we decided to invest in professional voice acting. As we wanted to recreate the enchanted atmosphere of a radio play or a narrated bedtime story in our game, excellent voice acting was essential. To stay in budget, we created the sound effects ourselves using our imagination paired with our voices and whatever we could find in our homes to generate sound. We then applied our limited audio post-production skills to alter those takes to sound like the effect we were going for. Or as close to that as we could get. Judging from the gleeful squeals of our young playtesters, at the very least we have managed to produce decent animal sounds.

The idea evolves Despite the unconventional watchdog, our adjustments to the Cinderella story were still rather tame. It essentially is an interactive children’s book, and we tried to stay close to the original tale to pass it on to future generations. We just changed some parts to overcome outdated views and tried to fill at least some of the logical gaps of the Cinderella story.

For our upcoming series of adventure games, we take this idea even further. Each title will be based on traditional lore in one way or another, but we will make more liberties in reinterpreting the stories, its characters, and the world they live in. This way, we can incorporate issues and topics that are on people’s minds today, thus creating 21st-century fairytales reminiscent of their literary ancestors. And this makes it a new story even to those familiar with its fairytale blueprint.

So, now we had the idea of what kind of stories we wanted to tell and how we wanted to tell them in our own, unique way. The artistic side covered, we moved on to the business side of things: The exciting endeavor of how to sell fairytale indie games.

Playing against clishés: Siebenstreich

‘The challenge of distribution Of course, almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and most people use it to play games. Also, distribution is straightforward, even in the international field. It is just one more checkbox you have to click, and the game is available in Russia, too. So theoretically you can reach a vast mass of people with the mobile platform without really needing a publisher. That sounded great in the first place and very easy to do. So, we did.

It’s “just” digital Yet a mobile app or game is “just” ­something digital and nothing you can hold in your hands and make it a present. And that was one of our problems. The target group we wanted to reach was the parents and grandparents of small children who want to give their children “a little something.” After all, we had developed an equivalent to a bedtime book, which you discover in the shelf while strolling by and then take it with you spontaneously because it only costs a few Euros and is nicely illustrated. Just a sweet little souvenir for the kids.

Spending a few Euros on a book is standard for most people. But as soon as it is offered in an app store, the price is too high. It does not matter whether the book is read by a top-class actor and is also interactive and animated. It seems like the value of a digital app is not comparable to that of a book. It is similar to magazines and journals: At the shop, one quickly buys a copy for 2€, but almost for the same articles online, the price barrier feels too high for many ­people. The attitude to digital goods seems completely different than to physical products. Even though there is at least as much work in it if not much more, just like in our case.

From mobile fairytales with minigames to a full adventure on Switch and PC.

Long-time, no see There is, of course, also the problem of ­mobile app plethora. Since the distribution is so simple, the market is flooded with products. Even as a niche product with comparatively little competition, we simply did not stand out in the crowd. Because we sell our product for a fixed price, we are usually filtered out right from the start. So, we realized that the target group we wanted to address could not be reached this way. High-quality premium apps are hard to sell. The market thrives on disposable products that finance themselves through mini-payments and advertising.

We have seen children at the age of 2 who were already skilled in waiting for 5 seconds to let the advertising finish up and then clicking on the x to continue the game. Also, we have met parents who believe blindly that the advertising content will be appropriate for the little ones if it is shown in a children’s app. A lot of parents do not care about ads. They do not want to spend money on apps.

But it’s a safe start! Those parents, who want to give their children high-quality, ad-free entertainment, often do not even look for games or apps in the app stores. Probably those are also the parents who prefer not to give their children a device so early whatsoever. And we can fully understand that. That was exactly what we wanted to change with our apps. We still believe that it would be a better way to introduce new media to children without ads and mini-payment options. We love to offer a safe place for young children to experience the first contact with ­mobile devices. There will be a time anyway when they make their first steps with this type of media. So, why not together with their parents with the help of ad-free and ­suitable content?

Besides all the struggle, we still seem to reach a handful of customers who ­appreciate our offer and buy our game. For a premium game in the niche segment, Cinderella does sell somehow. And it still does even a year after its release and without us ever having it advertised. ­Nevertheless, it became clear to us that there had to be better possibilities then scratching money together from the app stores.

Off to new ports Half a year after our mobile release, we ported the game to the Nintendo Switch just for the experience and also to expand our portfolio. We did not hope for much, because we did not necessarily see our target group on a console. Also, our game was not designed as a console game either. But that does not keep others away from the eShop, so why us? And surprisingly we managed to sell Cinderella on the Switch within two weeks more often than on iOS and Android combined in half a year. Of course, we were happy at first, but we also knew that these numbers would decrease significantly after the first peak. Well, they did fall, but much more gently than we had feared. Switch is still our most potent sales platform.

Why is that? That is what we asked ourselves, too. Are there significantly more parents on the Switch than we thought? If you look at the statistics, you will find young players between 7 and 12 and then mostly older ­players over 30. The Switch is an optimal ­family console that is played by both ­parents and children. Also, the price of our game on the console is now suddenly a bargain. The same game at the same ­price on a different platform is rated entirely different by the buyers. 4,99€ in the app stores hardly anyone is willing to pay. But 4,99€ on the Switch? Cheap!

This is amazing, so we made a self-test, and it turned out that we also belong to those people who feel that all games under 15€ on the Switch are cheap and worth “just trying.” If it was a bad buy, then it did not cost that much. We asked ourselves: Would we spend 15€ on an app? Even if it was recommended to us quite often, had a 5-stars rating, we read a lot of positive reviews and watched videos about it? No. We would not. But a switch game without ratings and reviews in the eStore? Sure! It is just crazy.

Who is playing my game? We received some fan mails from Switch players telling us how excited they were about our game. Some of them were parents who bought it for their children, and others were adults who just played it for themselves. So, our porting attempt ­showed us that the Switch is interesting as a platform for fairy tale games regardless of the age group. With this experience, we decided us to entirely focus on this console and leave the mobile market behind us.

Cinderella was primarily designed for small children and mobile devices, now we develop directly for console and want to reach out to adults. This does not mean that we no longer develop games suitable for children, on the contrary. Our fairy tale games are and will be ideal for all children, no matter how old. Our games also will continue to address ethical and social ­topics entertainingly. We continue to ­rethink the content of fairy tales and adapt it to our times, probably way more intensive than we did in Cinderella and with a lot more humor. We want to go a few steps further, inspire and bring joy to as many people as possible. We are on our way to ­making a complex adventure with our current game “Siebenstreich” which will hopefully be even more attractive on the Nintendo Switch.

The future is crowded We wish that the possibility for a visible game release on a family console will persist for some time. More and more developers are discovering the platform for themselves, and it will not be long before this market is flooded as well. There is still the hurdle that devkits have to be purchased. But they are not so expensive, and there are a lot of providers who port games. We will see how the market will develop. But for now, the chances to be visible after ­release are much better than in the mobile market or on Steam. And as long as this market remains a premium market, we ­believe it to be a good alternative for small premium indie games.

Katharina Kühn & Sonja Hawranke Katharina Kühn and Sonja Hawranke are the founders of the indie ­studio Golden Orb. They are working together since 2008. Katharina is the team’s artist and Sonja is their software engineer. They share the role of royal scribe, creating the game design, story, and dialogs as a team.

The post Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales appeared first on Making Games.

Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[pauldeckerus]

Photography: AI Everywhere

There are two major trends in photography today. The first is the ever-increasing numbers of photos being made. I can’t even be bothered to look up how many billions of photos are being uploaded to Instickrbook every minute or every day or every year. It’s a lot. This is usually talked about in terms of how many photos there are, and how we are drowning in them.

This isn’t quite right. Unless you’re an Instagram addict, most of the pictures you see in a day are still mass media: ads, news, entertainment. You see maybe a few hundred of those billions of snapshots. A picture of a movie star might be seen by a billion people, whereas your picture of your cat, or even of that pretty model, might only be seen by ten. The billions don’t affect us much on the consumption side.

The billions are a reflection of how many people are now picture-makers. 50 years ago, maybe 1-2 percent of the world’s population was a picture maker. Now, it’s more like 20-80 percent and rising. Is it reasonable now to say that basically every person on earth has had their picture taken? Has almost every object, every car, every hill, every waterfall, every beach has been photographed? If not yet, soon.

It’s not really so many photographs! It’s so many photographers!

A selfie styled using an AI, duplicated by cloning

Hold that thought while we take a look at the second trend: AI, neural networks.

All the top-end phone cameras use neural networks for something, be it Apple’s Portrait Mode, or Google’s low-light photography. We’re changing from a world in which you pull pixels off the sensor and manipulate them in-place, leaving them fixed in their rigid rectangular grid except maybe for a little bit of cloning (usually). In the new world we will dump one or more grids of pixels (frames, exposures) into a neural network, and what pops out is something new.

Perhaps soon we’ll see sensors designed to be handled this way.

Perhaps sensors will have some big photosites for high sensitivity, and some small ones for detail (noisy). Perhaps the Bayer array will be replaced by something else. Perhaps it would be reasonable to skip demosaicing and let the AI sort that out. Take a couple of exposures with this crazy mass of different sized pixels, some noisy, some not, some overexposed, some underexposed, some colored, some not. Throw the whole mess into the AI that’s been trained to turn these into pictures. At no point before the AI starts working is there anything that even remotely looks like a picture, it’s twice as raw as RAW. Maybe.

But whether sensors go this way or not, AI/neural networks are with us to stay.

As a simple experiment, I used one of the online AI photo tools to uprez a photograph of some fruit, which I had first downrezzed to 100×80 pixels. The tool gave me back a 400×320 pixel picture which it created.

It looks a bit soft, but it’s not bad, and it’s much much better than the 100 pixel mess I gave it to work with. Here is the original, downrezzed to a matching 400×320 picture:

We can see that the AI was able to re-paint convincing-looking edges on the fruit, which were formerly jaggies from the downrezzing. The AI did not put the detail in the surface of the fruit back, obviously. How could it? While this is a pretty simple system, it is essentially painting a new picture based on the input (jagged) picture, and its “knowledge” of how the real world looks. Most of the little defects and splotches on the fruit are pretty much gone in the reconstructed one.

So, here’s the key point: The uprezzed picture looks pretty real, but it’s not. It’s not what the fruit looked like.

There are really two areas where AIs can do things we don’t want, and they’re really simple. One is “what if they work wrong?” and the other is “what if they work right?”

Wrong is easy, everything gets rendered as a huge pile of eyes or kittens or whatever. It’s amusing, maybe, but just wrong. What if the AI takes in a blurry picture of a toy gun, and repaints it as a real gun based on what it “knows” about guns? It’s funny, or irrelevant, right up to the moment the picture turns up in a courtroom.

What about when it’s working right? What happens when your phone’s camera insists on making women’s eyes a little bigger and their lips a little fuller and their skin a little smoother, and you can’t turn it off because the sensor literally won’t work without the neural network? Is this good or bad? It depends, right?

Apparently “Snapchat body dysmorphia” is already a thing, with people finding dissatisfaction with their own bodies arising from their self-image as seen through Snapchat. Retail portraiture often renders the subjects as a sort of plastic with worryingly intense eyes, but imagine what happens when you can’t even obtain a straight photograph of yourself unless you know someone with an old camera.

Now put these two trends together.

Five years from now, maybe, pretty much every camera will have some kind of neural network/AI technology in it. Maybe to make it work at all, maybe just for a handful of shooting modes, maybe something we haven’t even thought of. This means pretty much every picture that gets taken is going to be something that an AI painted for us, based on some inputs.

This means that in 5 years, maybe 10, not only will everything and everyone be photographed, but also every one of those photographs will be subtly distorted, wrong, untruthful. Whether we want them to be or not. Every picture of a woman or a girl will be subtly beautified by the standards of some programmer in Palo Alto. Every landscape will be a little cleaned up, a little more colorful. Every night photograph will be an interpolation based on a bunch of very noisy pixels, an interpolation that looks very very realistic, but which shows a bunch of stuff in the shadows that is just flat out made up by the AI.

We’re going to have billions of cameras, from a dozen vendors, each with a dozen software versions in the wild. If there is a plausible scenario for something that could go wrong, at this kind of scale you can be pretty sure that somewhere, sometime, it’s going to go wrong. Sometimes the AI will simply behave badly, and at other times it will behave exactly as designed, with lousy outcomes anyways.

The thing that makes a photograph a photo and not a painting is that it’s drawn, with light, from the world itself. Yes, it’s just one point of view. Yes, it’s a crop. Yes, some parts are blurry. Yes, it might have been cloned and airbrushed. But with those caveats, in its own limited way, it’s truthful. The new world, coming with the speed of a freight train, is about to throw that away. Things that look like photographs will not be, they will be photo-realistic paintings made by neural networks that look a lot like what was in front of the lens.

They’ll be close enough that we’ll tend to trust them because the programmers will make sure of that. That’s what a photograph is, right? It’s trustable, with limits. But these things won’t be trustworthy. Not quite.

These magical automatic painting machines will be trained by the young, the white, the male, the American, by whomever, for use by the old, the non-white, the global. Even if you object to “political correctness,” you will someday be using a camera that was trained to paint its pictures by someone who isn’t much very like you.

There will be consequences: social, ethical, cultural, legal. We just don’t know entirely what they will be.

About the author: Andrew Molitor writes software by day and takes pictures by night. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Molitor is based in Norfolk, Virginia, and does his best to obsess over gear, specs, or sharpness. You can find more of his writing on his blog. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo based on illustration by Mike MacKenzie via www.vpnsrus.com and licensed under CC BY 2.0

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/12/05/photography-ai-everywhere/

[latestnews2018-blog]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/for-igtv-instagram-needs-slow-to-mean-steady/

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.’”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. It could have had its own carousel like Stories or been integrated into Explore until it was ready for primetime.

Instead, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of the home screen spotlight like Instagram Stories. Blow past that one orange button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, TechCrunch researcher Matt Navarra found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,’” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,’” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttp://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

[technicalsolutions88]

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2o9VBgD ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[sheminecrafts]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2o9VBgD via IFTTT

[theinvinciblenoob]

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. It could have had its own carousel like Stories or been integrated into Explore until it was ready for primetime.

Instead, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of the home screen spotlight like Instagram Stories. Blow past that one orange button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, TechCrunch researcher Matt Navarra found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

Via Josh Constine https://techcrunch.com

[makeupartistinmumbai-blog]

Real Estate Website Designing

Real Estate Website Designing

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

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 optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all.[1] The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines. Web design books in a store Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However, web design can also be seen from a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background, and music. In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.[2] In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould.[3] The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability."[4] This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process.

Install WordPress and Off You Go

Finally you can install WordPress on to your page and then you can build your website using this platform.

It is reported that 27.9% of all websites on the internet were built using WordPress.

WordPress is probably the easiest platform available today for a complete beginner to build your own website from scratch, and it is totally FREE!

But don't let the fact that it's free fool you into thinking it's not very good...

Because you would be very wrong, WordPress is used by everyone from webmasters, bloggers, developers and one man marketers to large businesses.

It is great for building anything from small one page sites to large eye-catching business sites.

And because it has been around for a while now it has built up a very large community of people who have designed all manor of plugins, themes and templates (many of them free) that you can use to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Responsive website designs are adaptive to portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc.,along with desktop devices. They provide fluid-like flexible grids and designs which are scalable to fit any screen size and orientation. The launch of frameworks concept has put an end to the necessity to write the code from the scratch. Frameworks offer a simplified way to web designers with built-in functionalities and methods to reuse the code without redoing from the beginning

HTML5 , CSS and JS documents are included in frameworks to create exceptional website design and development responsive applications. Frameworks are classified into front-end and back-end.

Few Popular Frameworks

Semantic UI : Semantic UI can be integrated in other frameworks easily and it allows the use of third-party tools. It is one of the popular front-end frameworks for responsive websites. The extremely feature-rich options of this framework include: sophisticated modules, forms, breadcrumbs, buttons, pop-ups, drop-downs, and sticky bones.

Bootstrap : The latest version of this most popular framework is Bootstrap 3 version. Some of the unmatched features are: it can build websites with less technical knowledge, a structured grid format, seamless navigation integration and create fixed and fluid width layout. A website designed by bootstrap is easily adaptable to mobile devices. An ideal website design and development company chooses Bootstrap to design adaptable resolution and content display mechanisms.

Skeleton : A small responsive website design framework used in rapid web development of web design regardless of their sizes. Skeleton uses 960 grid base for developing websites for all communication portable devices like mobile, tablets etc., Some of the UI elements include: well-organized file structure, forms buttons and tabs.

Foundation 3 : Foundation 3 is an advanced front-end framework built with a powerful CSS pre-processor Saas and allows you to customize with new tools. It is the easiest framework to learn and can be seamlessly used by a new user to create exceptional websites. This framework consists of components and an exclusive set of plug-ins where web designers can choose one.

Montage : It is an HTML framework, it is a great tool for developing modern web applications. The set of elements in Montage can help to build scalable and feature-rich websites. One great advantage of Montage is to have reusable components with HTML templates.

Pure : Pure can be used in any kind of web-based projects. It provides a small set of CSS modules which help developers to create various styles to develop the best responsive website designs.

Siimple : Siimple has a minimal CSS framework to create flat and clean web pages. It is a front-end framework with flexible and concise CSS framework to create user-friendly websites. Being to have minimal lines of code, it can be zipped down to 6KB in overall total size. Web designing newbies can experiment freely with this framework to start their career with.

Cascade : The grid layout offered by Cascade are both semantic and non-semantic with table designs and navigational templates. Many designers find it to be an easy framework because of its universal approach. Cascade can create high-performance webpages for cross-platform browsers.

Gumby : Gumby’s list of remarkable features include: well defined UI kit, switches, toggles and flexible grids to create user-centric websites.

Small triangles, especially when the widest area is at the top, are found in pre-Islamic representations of female figures. That the small triangles found in the wall paintings in ‘Asir are called banat may be a cultural remnant of a long-forgotten past.”[40] "Courtyards and upper pillared porticoes are principal features of the best Nadjdi architecture, in addition to the fine incised plaster wood (jiss) and painted window shutters, which decorate the reception rooms. Good examples of plasterwork can often be seen in the gaping ruins of torn-down buildings- the effect is light, delicate and airy. It is usually around the majlis, around the coffee hearth and along the walls above where guests sat on rugs, against cushions. Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. 

CSS Hover Effects Background

Previously, JavaScript laid the foundation of hover effects and Javascript or Jquery isn't light weight as compare you CSS. However, the latest technology calls in CSS3 into use. It is light weight and allows to create any type of animations that previously Jquery or Javascript do. It also supports widget range of browsers. But much to our disappointment there is few older version of browsers that do not support images hover effects, hence you need to have the ones that are capable of catering it. You can also add the fallback to get support for older version of browsers.

The CSS from CSS Image Hover Effects stands for Cascading Style Sheets; which is a programming sheet language that basically represents a document that has been coded in a markup language. This is not only a very simple technique, but its prim and precise nature are always engrossed programmers effectively.

Types of Hover Effects

Since the main focus of this article is on hover effects; let’s see some of them and how they are useful in CSS image hover effects:

1: SUBTLE HOVER EFFECTS

Subtle are effects that can make the site look more exclusive. A photo can suffice, along with a simple grid. Styles, attires, and colors are of your choice and even the other effects are up to you.

2: CAPTION HOVER EFFECTS

The caption is even simpler and there is no rocket science associated with this image hover effects. The title of the picture as well as the link that it connects to can be shown by the grid figures; all this comprises of the caption.

4: DIRECTION-AWARE HOVER EFFECTS Direction aware utilizes Jquery in addition to CSS. A small overlay slide is inserted over your original image from where you can direct the next step of the link.

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5: ZOOM IN HOVER EFFECTS

Zoom is as easy as ABC. The image clicked upon shall be zoomed in to reveal what’s hiding behind it. Here's a code to show you what it's like.

In conclusion, we can say that image hover effects if utilized effectively can provide your website intricate yet simple designs that are not only eye-candy but can help lure users to your site. It's trended thing and very popular nowadays web design.

Image source: pixabay.com by markusspiske under Creative Commons License

There are various reasons why you may want your own website...

If you are thinking of starting an online business one of the first things you will need to do is get yourself a website in place.

If you have an existing business you may want to have your own piece of the internet for your customers to visit 'out of hours'.

Maybe you just want your own personal website for a different purpose.

Whatever the reasons for wanting a website, it can be a daunting prospect if you have never tackled anything like this before

You may think you need to hire a company of programmers or web designers to get your website up and running. You could do this, but the cost of doing so can be a little more than you are prepared to spend.

Besides if you go down this route and you do hire one of these companies then what happens when you want to change something on your web page? Even if its just one sentence, changing the colour scheme or changing a picture, it could take time and cost you money.

Wouldn't it be easier, not to have to worry about these issues and simply change things yourself?

You may be thinking that you don't know how to write code...

Or you don't have the necessary IT skills to do that sort of thing...

Or it's just too much of a complicated thing for you to tackle...

You may even be thinking that you wouldn't know where to start...

Well you are not alone, a lot of people have these reservations when faced with the same prospect.

The good news is nowadays building your own website is not that difficult, in fact you could have your own website up and running from scratch in just one single afternoon.

You don't need to know coding...

You don't need any IT skills...

and it really isn't as difficult as you may think.

As for where to start...

That's what I'm about to tell you!

You may be thinking the simple way is to head off to wix or Weebly and put together a free drag and drop website and while this is true if you just want your website as a bit of fun or for non business purposes, If you want to be taken seriously as a business then you will need your own website with your own web address.

All we need to do is point your domain name provider to the place on the internet where your website is being hosted.

This is called 'Setting your domain name servers'

Despite what you think this process is really very easy and just involves supplying your domain name provider with the location of your websites hosting address.

It is just a simple act of copying the information sent to you in your important email and pasting it to the relevant section on your domain name providers website.

If you did happen to purchase your domain name AND your Hosting from the same company then you don't even need to do this.

Factors to follow while choosing a framework:

Easy to use and understand.

Seamless integration with database.

Long-term support

Browser compatibility

Clean and precise code.

Conclusion:

Scale-up the screen resolution and content adjustment of your websites with the help of the best available responsive framework designs. The frameworks which are listed above are perfectly used to design beautiful websites. Choose an ideal web design and development company for your professional websites.

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

Creativity

Creativity is the power of thinking out of the box and creating what amaze others. A successful designer always tries to create unconventional things while following the rule book. Such designers wield infinitive ideas from their past experiences and have a propensity for thinking to build innovative designs. Possessing a variety of ideas is important as different industries have different needs and audience types. The designer who has the inventiveness of concepts and ideas becomes a successful website or graphic designer. 

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous". Bill Moyers

Technical Skills

Knowledge of different software and technical skills is a crucial attribute of a designer. A successful designer has a deep knowledge of designing tools like Photoshop, Coral Draw, etc. Apart from the knowledge, the tempo of using such tools is also important, which is an upshot of regular practice. A passionate designer invests a huge amount of time on designing tools to have a deep functional knowledge of their usage. If you are a designer then spend as much time as you could on design software to understand each and every function and their manipulation.

Visualisation

It is crucial for a designer to visualise the outcomes before he even commences the designing work, or else, he’ll waste his entire time in attaining a result different from the expected. A great designer creates graphic initially in his mind and then engraves it on his computer. Visualising the output in prior requires a lot of experience and a line of thought with a composed mind.

Business Sense

A designer who has worked for numerous industries and understands the audience associated can do miracles in his designs as he perceives disparate businesses requirements and their preferences. If you have not designed for any particular industry before, then taking advice from the one who has is no harm and will save you from dawdling. You can also seek help from numerous online forums where professionals discuss and share their experiences and resolutions to technical glitches.

Hard Shell

Every designer faces critics in different styles. Sometimes clients don’t agree with the designs and sometimes the bosses or colleagues. A good designer listens to everyone and even proactively asks for feedbacks to understand different perspectives towards his design and do the amendments accordingly to deliver impeccable work. If the designer does not agree with suggestions, he should explain his reasons behind the design to convince the back-seat drivers. But a great designer is someone who remains calm and understands everyone’s point without getting displeased even if he has to make infinite changes to the design. That is the reason one of the attributes of a successful designer is that he should have a hard shell.

Logical Thinking

Wine is good with everything except water. Likewise, using the fonts, colours, themes, background and other designing elements into a design depends on the adjacent components and logical thinking of the designer pertaining to the graphic he is creating for a particular industry type. The designer who thinks logically and keeps in mind the various factors like industry type, audience type, client’s requirements and other pre-told aspects, is considered as a great designer.

Communication

Communication is another important attribute of a successful designer. One who keeps in touch with his clients to note down their feedbacks, work accordingly and respond quickly with the revised design, comes under a ‘good designer’ category. Communication is important as it also helps in rapport building as the clients perceive the seriousness of the designer towards his work. This helps in attaining more work and respect from clients.

Problem Solving

A good designer has a problem-solving instinct. Designers have acquaintance with multiple problems during their work. Leaving the problem unsolved and move forward is never a good designer’s convention. Alongside, the time taken by a designer to fix any designing problem is directly proportional to his experience. Designers with ample of experience know how to deal with a particular complication they have come across a few times earlier and take less time to resolve it. On the contrary, designers with less experience and practical knowledge take more time to solve any designing snag.

Researching

A successful designer always gets indulged in excessive research during the work and otherwise. Knowing the market trend, software updates, tools utilisation, etc. include a lot of research and development. A designer who keeps researching for updates in the industry is known to be a successful designer. If you are about to commence a design for an industry who have no idea about, spend a good amount of time on research before you soak your brush and start painting the canvas.

Confidence

Last but not the least, confidence is a very important attribute of a successful designer. After creating a design, a designer might face numerous objections and challenges from onlookers. A successful designer knows the reason behind every step he concluded to create a design but others might just have speculations about it. A successful designer will always present a logical explanation behind the design he created and can turn his critics into his admirers with his utter confidence. You know why you have done that, so say out loud confidently!

The approach of getting orders on PSD to WordPress conversion may differ from companies to companies. However, there are definite steps that every company follows for successful deliveries.

PSD to WordPress conversion is probably the most sought after practice that is offered by the companies providing web design and development services. It’s true that companies follow their own approach to accomplish the related projects; however, the steps are already defined and every organization sticks to these steps.

Before we deep dive into the steps, here is a short explanation of the conversion process that has become the most common now. Because of the rising number of users wishing to get conversion services the number of service providers has also flooded in to offer the services. As these companies are getting bigger in number, there are some exceptional PSD to WordPress conversion service providers available there in the market to offer the services. These companies have been following the steps as stated below. Here is a short explanation of these services.

The review or the analysis of the projects

As soon as the companies receive the orders, the first and the foremost task is to review the details that are required by the clients. Here the requirement from the clients may vary depending upon the specific need to be fulfilled by the clients. A deep analysis of the projects gives enough ideas to the developers to start the projects on the particular specifications.

The development phase

It is the most important of all phases for every company that is offering the PSD to WordPress conversion service. In this phase, the details that have been summarized in the first phase are executed for real and the project is accomplished. For developing the specifications required by the users, every detail is analyzed properly prior to it is created in real.

The testing of the projects

Testing matters the most as it is an imperative step to correct the flaws if anyhow exist in the projects. After the project is done successfully, the testing begins. For companies, the phase of testing the projects is the most important as no client is going to accept the flaws. Thus, to make a great impression on the users, the testing is done carefully.

Delivering the project

Companies working in the web development arena aim to make the projects’ delivery before the stipulated time frame so that clients could be impressed with the services. Delivering the project well before the time holds prominence for the users also as they get fruitful results well before the expected time frame.

The series of the services that have been listed here are performed in the right sequence by the PSD to WordPress conversion companies. The ultimate goal of all these establishments lies in exceeding the list of their existing clients. Â

All these steps are concluded under expert guidance by the professionals who are versed in the technicalities involved in the task. Different companies have their definite styles of working but all of them have teams that look after only a specific concern. As such the job of the testing team starts only after the project crosses the delivery phase.

In order to be specific enough in their approach, every company tries to customize the requirements as per the demands of the clients. The nature of clients’ business differs from one to another that compels these companies to offer the services as per the need of the business. It also inspires the clients to contact the same company if services are pleasing. Therefore, being specific with their services is always a benefit for the PSD to WordPress conversion companies.

Website designing and development give a proper shape to the website and in order to sustain and enhance the shape, you must undergo web maintenance occasionally. It is not sufficient to get a premium website designed, program it and host it and leave! There must be continued maintenance to keep the site upgraded and free form glitches, performing at top level. However, one must not be mistaken that website maintenance means redesigning of your website. It is something more relevant to ongoing support to change the images, content or update the information.

Additionally, the activities that fall under site maintenance also include correction of broken links, page titles, adding new web pages, wrongly spelled texts, checking whether pages, add-ons, and programs are working perfectly. Without having Website maintenance services, the websites tend to malfunction regularly and thus, affecting its credibility and ranking. For example, transaction-oriented websites such as online shopping, e-commerce stores, ticket booking sites must perform accurately all the time, and this is impossible without any maintenance support.

Now if we take example of human body in respect to website. Just like human body requires you to take it to doctor for regular checkups and keep yourself away from diseases. In the same manner, websites too are used on daily basis and technology keeps changings. This means that they also need to be taken care of and provided with maintenance on day to day basis. However, most of the companies fail to recognize this fact and believe that once they have got the website developed, there is no need to take a second look over it. Just because your website is running fine and getting traffic does not indicates that it will be fine in future as well. And as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure!

Most of the big companies own an in-house web maintenance teams. However, for small to medium businesses, it is not a possible option to afford a team. It might also divert their attention from the core of their business. For these businessmen, it is a good idea to outsource the website maintenance tasks to those services that specialize in such services.

There are plenty of website maintenance services that can do a lot in your interest and provide satisfactory web performance. However, you must evaluate that these companies as little negligence and incompetent maintenance can lead to multiple problems. A regular chain of communication must be opened while one signs up with website maintenance services. It is not merely enough that the team should monitor and maintain and that's it! The website owner too, must check if the work is being done properly or not.

The various benefits through website maintenance

•A good maintenance service provides monitored uptime. This helps to eliminate the down problems of the website.

•The convenience of getting fresh updates is available in unlimited form and updates can include graphics, maps, new page additions, forums etc.

•They provide with monthly statistics reports that help you know the performance of the website which is crucial to the growth of the business. This, in turn, devises the business plans and strategies.

•Domain renewal process is also done automatically by the maintenance services. Most of the companies do not ask for surplus expenses at the time of renewal. One needs not to worry about losing the web domain.

•Excellent hosting options are also looked after. A web application development company will gain a thousand benefits with good web maintenance services.

•Your uptime of website and dead page redirection is crucial for the customers and visitors and all these aspects will be under your control with the help of these service providers.

•This is enough to understand the worth and need of maintenance for your website. Don't delay it.

Hopefully you must have understand now what mistakes you need to avoid and to make a best website design is not a big deal now!

In the modern world we live in, pretty much all business is now conducted digitally, and the key succession of most businesses is online brand awareness. Whether you intend to trade goods, or you just want to promote the services your business provides, either way, you need a website that fully functional, interactive, responsive on all devices (of course, this isn’t mandatory but is definitely recommended), and also customer friendly to consolidate all clientele.

There are so many different types of websites to choose from these days, so you might want to do your research before making any sudden decisions, but it’s worth doing as the website not only needs to suit your business requirements but also needs to meet the needs of your visitors/customers.

Open Source technology comes in a range of different solutions but is usually one of the most utilized platforms when it comes to web design. You can have your pick of Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Open Cart, Presta Shop, Sugar CRM and so much more open source technologies, each one with its particular benefits.

DRUPAL WEB DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS

Drupal is one of the most popular open source web design platforms that have a built-in Content Management System (CMS). It’s chosen by many businesses thanks to its powerful tools and functional platform. It’s a favorable choice out of the other open source technologies because of its user efficiency, meaning you don’t have to be equipped with technical skills in order to actually design the solution how you want. Other features include high website performance due to its built-in caching and scalability (it can be used on multiple servers). It also features easy integration with 3rd party applications, it's search engine friendly, it has supreme security functionality, it provides commercial support through training and education, and it allows management of content by the end user (i.e. you).

Primarily used as a back- end system, Drupal supports a range of website types from personal blogs to government informational sites, and it is built on a PHP language which provides the main database through MySQL. Â

As mentioned previously you don’t have to be of a technical background to be able to use Drupal effectively, although if you haven’t got the time to go through the development process, it might be worth enlisting the help of an expert who has experience in Drupal web design solutions. These experts will be able to support you from the start to the end of the project leaving you stress and hassle free.

Okay, so you’ve established your online presence, and your website is up and running, so what happens next?

DIGITAL MARKETING

Another thing to consider once your website is fully functioning is online marketing techniques, commonly known as Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing uses different techniques to build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content marketing and also Email and Newsletter marketing. Using these methods you can shout about your business and build a bigger customer outreach so that people know that your organization exists.

With regular website maintenance, and online marketing you can truly allow all that design and development work to truly flourish.

The hover effects and especially CSS image hover effects are a fashionable yet fairly easy way of adding a touch of creativity to your website, all the while enabling user friendliness and interactivity. Before technology reached this stage, a cursor was deemed enough to let the user know that a picture could be clicked upon to reveal further facts and figures. But everything has its age, and the age of cursors is over. To attract users, and make the website trendier we now have Image Hover Effects. These transitions hover over an image with some sort of icon on them to let the users know that more information is at hand when you click. The hover effects CSS can, in turn, reveal a magnified version of the image, or perhaps some text that has relevance to what you’re looking for on the site.

Nowadays, We can see a lot of website on the internet have used clean typography and nice effects. This is really a beautiful trend in web designing. It makes the design cleaner and easy to readable. It allows the site visitor to stay more time on the website. To create such hover effects, There are many different ways and techniques can be used to create nice looking effects. You can use CSS, Javascript or Jquery to developed modern effects. But, the best and easy way to create is usually CSS, and especially the additions of CSS3 make them handy. These effects can be applied on Images, buttons, logos and as well as on links.

However, there are certain things that a client needs to work on, for getting clarity of the exact requirements of web designing. This involves creation of a sitemap by the client. A sitemap is like a rough estimate of the pages and links that are to be included in the website. This can be better understood with the reference of a company's website, which includes different pages like- company's profile, products and services offered, contact us page etc. The client can create a brief of company's background including the pictures of company, its products etc. In order to have a better understanding of your preferences and for the website designer to know your taste, creating a list of sites that you like is of utmost importance.

• Professionalism- Another important factor to be considered while choosing a website designer is his professional attitude. He should be able to stand to his commitments and must deliver the project timely. Delay in work is not a good sign!

• Affordability- The cost involved in the process of website designing should be in accordance with the standard and fair prices set for this task. It's a long term investment, so spend wisely!

We hope the above information helps you in future projects.

If you're thinking about having a website built, it's important for you to have a clear idea of the process before you begin. Your website could be a profitable business venture for you, but only if you've really done your research ahead of time. Many people begin investing in their new websites before they've really thought out each step and end up wasting money on sites that never see fruition. However, with some simple planning and research, you can set yourself on the right track toward developing a successful website. Here are seven tips for web design and promotion to get you started.

1. Survey the Market and Research Your Competitors

Before you get ahead of yourself and begin hiring a web designer, take some time to survey the market and research your competitors. Look at what other types of websites are out there and see if anyone is doing something similar to your plan. Consider how many people are running similar websites, as well as how professional their websites look. This will help you to determine whether or not it's worth setting up your own site, before you've invested too much in it.

To help ensure the success of your website, you should begin finding a niche market that you can target. You may be tempted to attract any and all customers that you can but you'll actually have greater success targeting a very specific demographic. Think extensively about who your potential audience members are and what they would be most interested in. Then, you can begin to develop your website around these ideas.

2. Brainstorm Design Ideas and Figure Out What You Like

Once you've thought a little more about your site's purpose, you should now think about your ideas for the design. You'll need to consider the best way to present your message or to feature your products to audience members. Keep in mind that people tend to skim websites looking for something interesting or eye-catching, so make sure that the most important elements of your site are featured prominently.

7. Allow Time and Money for Search Engine Optimisation

Google AdWords is a great way to help you get started but it's also important to use search engine optimisation, or SEO, to build organic traffic to your site. While AdWords will automatically place you at the top of search engine rankings with an advert you will have to continue doing that for ever. SEO can help you get to the first page of rankings naturally and eventually you will receive lots of traffic for free. This is important to increasing your traffic and building your site's legitimacy and authority on your subject.

Be sure to budget the time and money for SEO. It's not cheap and it can take 6-12 months to get your page to the first page of rankings for a number of keywords but it will generate a great amount of free traffic when you get there. It may cost about £300-£600 per month but SEO is truly the best way to start bringing in consistent traffic. Over time, your SEO efforts can help you build a reliable customer base and increase your sales. You're website will now be a true competitor in your niche market and well on it's way to success.

In this digital world of the internet, mobiles, laptops, computers and tablets, online presence has become very important. If you want to grow your business, you need to promote it. Using social media platforms to get the attention is just one step towards your goal.

To be honest, we cannot deny the fact that we don't trust an organization if it doesn't have a website of its own. What is the first thing that we do when we want to know more about a specific company? We browse about it on the internet. Don't we?

A website is the mirror image of your company's status and reputation, it is a place where everything is in one place, sorted and organized.

How to create a website?  Follow these steps to create your own website.

Domain name  · The first step is creating your unique domain name.

· A domain name appears like "xyz.com" and you need to visit a registrar to pay for the name you chose.

· They are easy for people to register in their brains.

· Others like Yahoo, Firefox and Bing are also some great options.

· These search engines are absolutely free and therefore the task of promoting your website becomes very easy.

· Other ways to get your site noticed are conventional methods like word of mouth, newspapers, cold calling etc.

Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. The rosette, the star, the triangle and the stepped pinnacle pattern of dadoes are all ancient patterns, and can be found all over the Middle East of antiquity. Al-Qassim Province seems to be the home of this art, and there it is normally worked in hard white plaster (though what you see is usually begrimed by the smoke of the coffee hearth). In Riyadh, examples can be seen in unadorned clay.

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404, B-70, Nitin Shanti Nagar Building,

Sector-1, Near Mira Road Station, 

Opp. TMT Bus Stop, 

Thane – 401107

NGO Website Designing 

Troika Tech Services

WordPress Development Company in Mumbai

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Real Estate Website Designing

Real Estate Website Designing

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

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 optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all.[1] The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines. Web design books in a store Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However, web design can also be seen from a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background, and music. In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.[2] In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould.[3] The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability."[4] This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process.

Install WordPress and Off You Go

Finally you can install WordPress on to your page and then you can build your website using this platform.

It is reported that 27.9% of all websites on the internet were built using WordPress.

WordPress is probably the easiest platform available today for a complete beginner to build your own website from scratch, and it is totally FREE!

But don't let the fact that it's free fool you into thinking it's not very good...

Because you would be very wrong, WordPress is used by everyone from webmasters, bloggers, developers and one man marketers to large businesses.

It is great for building anything from small one page sites to large eye-catching business sites.

And because it has been around for a while now it has built up a very large community of people who have designed all manor of plugins, themes and templates (many of them free) that you can use to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Responsive website designs are adaptive to portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc.,along with desktop devices. They provide fluid-like flexible grids and designs which are scalable to fit any screen size and orientation. The launch of frameworks concept has put an end to the necessity to write the code from the scratch. Frameworks offer a simplified way to web designers with built-in functionalities and methods to reuse the code without redoing from the beginning

HTML5 , CSS and JS documents are included in frameworks to create exceptional website design and development responsive applications. Frameworks are classified into front-end and back-end.

Few Popular Frameworks

Semantic UI : Semantic UI can be integrated in other frameworks easily and it allows the use of third-party tools. It is one of the popular front-end frameworks for responsive websites. The extremely feature-rich options of this framework include: sophisticated modules, forms, breadcrumbs, buttons, pop-ups, drop-downs, and sticky bones.

Bootstrap : The latest version of this most popular framework is Bootstrap 3 version. Some of the unmatched features are: it can build websites with less technical knowledge, a structured grid format, seamless navigation integration and create fixed and fluid width layout. A website designed by bootstrap is easily adaptable to mobile devices. An ideal website design and development company chooses Bootstrap to design adaptable resolution and content display mechanisms.

Skeleton : A small responsive website design framework used in rapid web development of web design regardless of their sizes. Skeleton uses 960 grid base for developing websites for all communication portable devices like mobile, tablets etc., Some of the UI elements include: well-organized file structure, forms buttons and tabs.

Foundation 3 : Foundation 3 is an advanced front-end framework built with a powerful CSS pre-processor Saas and allows you to customize with new tools. It is the easiest framework to learn and can be seamlessly used by a new user to create exceptional websites. This framework consists of components and an exclusive set of plug-ins where web designers can choose one.

Montage : It is an HTML framework, it is a great tool for developing modern web applications. The set of elements in Montage can help to build scalable and feature-rich websites. One great advantage of Montage is to have reusable components with HTML templates.

Pure : Pure can be used in any kind of web-based projects. It provides a small set of CSS modules which help developers to create various styles to develop the best responsive website designs.

Siimple : Siimple has a minimal CSS framework to create flat and clean web pages. It is a front-end framework with flexible and concise CSS framework to create user-friendly websites. Being to have minimal lines of code, it can be zipped down to 6KB in overall total size. Web designing newbies can experiment freely with this framework to start their career with.

Cascade : The grid layout offered by Cascade are both semantic and non-semantic with table designs and navigational templates. Many designers find it to be an easy framework because of its universal approach. Cascade can create high-performance webpages for cross-platform browsers.

Gumby : Gumby’s list of remarkable features include: well defined UI kit, switches, toggles and flexible grids to create user-centric websites.

Small triangles, especially when the widest area is at the top, are found in pre-Islamic representations of female figures. That the small triangles found in the wall paintings in ‘Asir are called banat may be a cultural remnant of a long-forgotten past.”[40] "Courtyards and upper pillared porticoes are principal features of the best Nadjdi architecture, in addition to the fine incised plaster wood (jiss) and painted window shutters, which decorate the reception rooms. Good examples of plasterwork can often be seen in the gaping ruins of torn-down buildings- the effect is light, delicate and airy. It is usually around the majlis, around the coffee hearth and along the walls above where guests sat on rugs, against cushions. Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. 

CSS Hover Effects Background

Previously, JavaScript laid the foundation of hover effects and Javascript or Jquery isn't light weight as compare you CSS. However, the latest technology calls in CSS3 into use. It is light weight and allows to create any type of animations that previously Jquery or Javascript do. It also supports widget range of browsers. But much to our disappointment there is few older version of browsers that do not support images hover effects, hence you need to have the ones that are capable of catering it. You can also add the fallback to get support for older version of browsers.

The CSS from CSS Image Hover Effects stands for Cascading Style Sheets; which is a programming sheet language that basically represents a document that has been coded in a markup language. This is not only a very simple technique, but its prim and precise nature are always engrossed programmers effectively.

Types of Hover Effects

Since the main focus of this article is on hover effects; let’s see some of them and how they are useful in CSS image hover effects:

1: SUBTLE HOVER EFFECTS

Subtle are effects that can make the site look more exclusive. A photo can suffice, along with a simple grid. Styles, attires, and colors are of your choice and even the other effects are up to you.

2: CAPTION HOVER EFFECTS

The caption is even simpler and there is no rocket science associated with this image hover effects. The title of the picture as well as the link that it connects to can be shown by the grid figures; all this comprises of the caption.

4: DIRECTION-AWARE HOVER EFFECTS Direction aware utilizes Jquery in addition to CSS. A small overlay slide is inserted over your original image from where you can direct the next step of the link.

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5: ZOOM IN HOVER EFFECTS

Zoom is as easy as ABC. The image clicked upon shall be zoomed in to reveal what’s hiding behind it. Here's a code to show you what it's like.

In conclusion, we can say that image hover effects if utilized effectively can provide your website intricate yet simple designs that are not only eye-candy but can help lure users to your site. It's trended thing and very popular nowadays web design.

Image source: pixabay.com by markusspiske under Creative Commons License

There are various reasons why you may want your own website...

If you are thinking of starting an online business one of the first things you will need to do is get yourself a website in place.

If you have an existing business you may want to have your own piece of the internet for your customers to visit 'out of hours'.

Maybe you just want your own personal website for a different purpose.

Whatever the reasons for wanting a website, it can be a daunting prospect if you have never tackled anything like this before

You may think you need to hire a company of programmers or web designers to get your website up and running. You could do this, but the cost of doing so can be a little more than you are prepared to spend.

Besides if you go down this route and you do hire one of these companies then what happens when you want to change something on your web page? Even if its just one sentence, changing the colour scheme or changing a picture, it could take time and cost you money.

Wouldn't it be easier, not to have to worry about these issues and simply change things yourself?

You may be thinking that you don't know how to write code...

Or you don't have the necessary IT skills to do that sort of thing...

Or it's just too much of a complicated thing for you to tackle...

You may even be thinking that you wouldn't know where to start...

Well you are not alone, a lot of people have these reservations when faced with the same prospect.

The good news is nowadays building your own website is not that difficult, in fact you could have your own website up and running from scratch in just one single afternoon.

You don't need to know coding...

You don't need any IT skills...

and it really isn't as difficult as you may think.

As for where to start...

That's what I'm about to tell you!

You may be thinking the simple way is to head off to wix or Weebly and put together a free drag and drop website and while this is true if you just want your website as a bit of fun or for non business purposes, If you want to be taken seriously as a business then you will need your own website with your own web address.

All we need to do is point your domain name provider to the place on the internet where your website is being hosted.

This is called 'Setting your domain name servers'

Despite what you think this process is really very easy and just involves supplying your domain name provider with the location of your websites hosting address.

It is just a simple act of copying the information sent to you in your important email and pasting it to the relevant section on your domain name providers website.

If you did happen to purchase your domain name AND your Hosting from the same company then you don't even need to do this.

Factors to follow while choosing a framework:

Easy to use and understand.

Seamless integration with database.

Long-term support

Browser compatibility

Clean and precise code.

Conclusion:

Scale-up the screen resolution and content adjustment of your websites with the help of the best available responsive framework designs. The frameworks which are listed above are perfectly used to design beautiful websites. Choose an ideal web design and development company for your professional websites.

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

Creativity

Creativity is the power of thinking out of the box and creating what amaze others. A successful designer always tries to create unconventional things while following the rule book. Such designers wield infinitive ideas from their past experiences and have a propensity for thinking to build innovative designs. Possessing a variety of ideas is important as different industries have different needs and audience types. The designer who has the inventiveness of concepts and ideas becomes a successful website or graphic designer. 

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous". Bill Moyers

Technical Skills

Knowledge of different software and technical skills is a crucial attribute of a designer. A successful designer has a deep knowledge of designing tools like Photoshop, Coral Draw, etc. Apart from the knowledge, the tempo of using such tools is also important, which is an upshot of regular practice. A passionate designer invests a huge amount of time on designing tools to have a deep functional knowledge of their usage. If you are a designer then spend as much time as you could on design software to understand each and every function and their manipulation.

Visualisation

It is crucial for a designer to visualise the outcomes before he even commences the designing work, or else, he’ll waste his entire time in attaining a result different from the expected. A great designer creates graphic initially in his mind and then engraves it on his computer. Visualising the output in prior requires a lot of experience and a line of thought with a composed mind.

Business Sense

A designer who has worked for numerous industries and understands the audience associated can do miracles in his designs as he perceives disparate businesses requirements and their preferences. If you have not designed for any particular industry before, then taking advice from the one who has is no harm and will save you from dawdling. You can also seek help from numerous online forums where professionals discuss and share their experiences and resolutions to technical glitches.

Hard Shell

Every designer faces critics in different styles. Sometimes clients don’t agree with the designs and sometimes the bosses or colleagues. A good designer listens to everyone and even proactively asks for feedbacks to understand different perspectives towards his design and do the amendments accordingly to deliver impeccable work. If the designer does not agree with suggestions, he should explain his reasons behind the design to convince the back-seat drivers. But a great designer is someone who remains calm and understands everyone’s point without getting displeased even if he has to make infinite changes to the design. That is the reason one of the attributes of a successful designer is that he should have a hard shell.

Logical Thinking

Wine is good with everything except water. Likewise, using the fonts, colours, themes, background and other designing elements into a design depends on the adjacent components and logical thinking of the designer pertaining to the graphic he is creating for a particular industry type. The designer who thinks logically and keeps in mind the various factors like industry type, audience type, client’s requirements and other pre-told aspects, is considered as a great designer.

Communication

Communication is another important attribute of a successful designer. One who keeps in touch with his clients to note down their feedbacks, work accordingly and respond quickly with the revised design, comes under a ‘good designer’ category. Communication is important as it also helps in rapport building as the clients perceive the seriousness of the designer towards his work. This helps in attaining more work and respect from clients.

Problem Solving

A good designer has a problem-solving instinct. Designers have acquaintance with multiple problems during their work. Leaving the problem unsolved and move forward is never a good designer’s convention. Alongside, the time taken by a designer to fix any designing problem is directly proportional to his experience. Designers with ample of experience know how to deal with a particular complication they have come across a few times earlier and take less time to resolve it. On the contrary, designers with less experience and practical knowledge take more time to solve any designing snag.

Researching

A successful designer always gets indulged in excessive research during the work and otherwise. Knowing the market trend, software updates, tools utilisation, etc. include a lot of research and development. A designer who keeps researching for updates in the industry is known to be a successful designer. If you are about to commence a design for an industry who have no idea about, spend a good amount of time on research before you soak your brush and start painting the canvas.

Confidence

Last but not the least, confidence is a very important attribute of a successful designer. After creating a design, a designer might face numerous objections and challenges from onlookers. A successful designer knows the reason behind every step he concluded to create a design but others might just have speculations about it. A successful designer will always present a logical explanation behind the design he created and can turn his critics into his admirers with his utter confidence. You know why you have done that, so say out loud confidently!

The approach of getting orders on PSD to WordPress conversion may differ from companies to companies. However, there are definite steps that every company follows for successful deliveries.

PSD to WordPress conversion is probably the most sought after practice that is offered by the companies providing web design and development services. It’s true that companies follow their own approach to accomplish the related projects; however, the steps are already defined and every organization sticks to these steps.

Before we deep dive into the steps, here is a short explanation of the conversion process that has become the most common now. Because of the rising number of users wishing to get conversion services the number of service providers has also flooded in to offer the services. As these companies are getting bigger in number, there are some exceptional PSD to WordPress conversion service providers available there in the market to offer the services. These companies have been following the steps as stated below. Here is a short explanation of these services.

The review or the analysis of the projects

As soon as the companies receive the orders, the first and the foremost task is to review the details that are required by the clients. Here the requirement from the clients may vary depending upon the specific need to be fulfilled by the clients. A deep analysis of the projects gives enough ideas to the developers to start the projects on the particular specifications.

The development phase

It is the most important of all phases for every company that is offering the PSD to WordPress conversion service. In this phase, the details that have been summarized in the first phase are executed for real and the project is accomplished. For developing the specifications required by the users, every detail is analyzed properly prior to it is created in real.

The testing of the projects

Testing matters the most as it is an imperative step to correct the flaws if anyhow exist in the projects. After the project is done successfully, the testing begins. For companies, the phase of testing the projects is the most important as no client is going to accept the flaws. Thus, to make a great impression on the users, the testing is done carefully.

Delivering the project

Companies working in the web development arena aim to make the projects’ delivery before the stipulated time frame so that clients could be impressed with the services. Delivering the project well before the time holds prominence for the users also as they get fruitful results well before the expected time frame.

The series of the services that have been listed here are performed in the right sequence by the PSD to WordPress conversion companies. The ultimate goal of all these establishments lies in exceeding the list of their existing clients. Â

All these steps are concluded under expert guidance by the professionals who are versed in the technicalities involved in the task. Different companies have their definite styles of working but all of them have teams that look after only a specific concern. As such the job of the testing team starts only after the project crosses the delivery phase.

In order to be specific enough in their approach, every company tries to customize the requirements as per the demands of the clients. The nature of clients’ business differs from one to another that compels these companies to offer the services as per the need of the business. It also inspires the clients to contact the same company if services are pleasing. Therefore, being specific with their services is always a benefit for the PSD to WordPress conversion companies.

Website designing and development give a proper shape to the website and in order to sustain and enhance the shape, you must undergo web maintenance occasionally. It is not sufficient to get a premium website designed, program it and host it and leave! There must be continued maintenance to keep the site upgraded and free form glitches, performing at top level. However, one must not be mistaken that website maintenance means redesigning of your website. It is something more relevant to ongoing support to change the images, content or update the information.

Additionally, the activities that fall under site maintenance also include correction of broken links, page titles, adding new web pages, wrongly spelled texts, checking whether pages, add-ons, and programs are working perfectly. Without having Website maintenance services, the websites tend to malfunction regularly and thus, affecting its credibility and ranking. For example, transaction-oriented websites such as online shopping, e-commerce stores, ticket booking sites must perform accurately all the time, and this is impossible without any maintenance support.

Now if we take example of human body in respect to website. Just like human body requires you to take it to doctor for regular checkups and keep yourself away from diseases. In the same manner, websites too are used on daily basis and technology keeps changings. This means that they also need to be taken care of and provided with maintenance on day to day basis. However, most of the companies fail to recognize this fact and believe that once they have got the website developed, there is no need to take a second look over it. Just because your website is running fine and getting traffic does not indicates that it will be fine in future as well. And as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure!

Most of the big companies own an in-house web maintenance teams. However, for small to medium businesses, it is not a possible option to afford a team. It might also divert their attention from the core of their business. For these businessmen, it is a good idea to outsource the website maintenance tasks to those services that specialize in such services.

There are plenty of website maintenance services that can do a lot in your interest and provide satisfactory web performance. However, you must evaluate that these companies as little negligence and incompetent maintenance can lead to multiple problems. A regular chain of communication must be opened while one signs up with website maintenance services. It is not merely enough that the team should monitor and maintain and that's it! The website owner too, must check if the work is being done properly or not.

The various benefits through website maintenance

•A good maintenance service provides monitored uptime. This helps to eliminate the down problems of the website.

•The convenience of getting fresh updates is available in unlimited form and updates can include graphics, maps, new page additions, forums etc.

•They provide with monthly statistics reports that help you know the performance of the website which is crucial to the growth of the business. This, in turn, devises the business plans and strategies.

•Domain renewal process is also done automatically by the maintenance services. Most of the companies do not ask for surplus expenses at the time of renewal. One needs not to worry about losing the web domain.

•Excellent hosting options are also looked after. A web application development company will gain a thousand benefits with good web maintenance services.

•Your uptime of website and dead page redirection is crucial for the customers and visitors and all these aspects will be under your control with the help of these service providers.

•This is enough to understand the worth and need of maintenance for your website. Don't delay it.

Hopefully you must have understand now what mistakes you need to avoid and to make a best website design is not a big deal now!

In the modern world we live in, pretty much all business is now conducted digitally, and the key succession of most businesses is online brand awareness. Whether you intend to trade goods, or you just want to promote the services your business provides, either way, you need a website that fully functional, interactive, responsive on all devices (of course, this isn’t mandatory but is definitely recommended), and also customer friendly to consolidate all clientele.

There are so many different types of websites to choose from these days, so you might want to do your research before making any sudden decisions, but it’s worth doing as the website not only needs to suit your business requirements but also needs to meet the needs of your visitors/customers.

Open Source technology comes in a range of different solutions but is usually one of the most utilized platforms when it comes to web design. You can have your pick of Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Open Cart, Presta Shop, Sugar CRM and so much more open source technologies, each one with its particular benefits.

DRUPAL WEB DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS

Drupal is one of the most popular open source web design platforms that have a built-in Content Management System (CMS). It’s chosen by many businesses thanks to its powerful tools and functional platform. It’s a favorable choice out of the other open source technologies because of its user efficiency, meaning you don’t have to be equipped with technical skills in order to actually design the solution how you want. Other features include high website performance due to its built-in caching and scalability (it can be used on multiple servers). It also features easy integration with 3rd party applications, it's search engine friendly, it has supreme security functionality, it provides commercial support through training and education, and it allows management of content by the end user (i.e. you).

Primarily used as a back- end system, Drupal supports a range of website types from personal blogs to government informational sites, and it is built on a PHP language which provides the main database through MySQL. Â

As mentioned previously you don’t have to be of a technical background to be able to use Drupal effectively, although if you haven’t got the time to go through the development process, it might be worth enlisting the help of an expert who has experience in Drupal web design solutions. These experts will be able to support you from the start to the end of the project leaving you stress and hassle free.

Okay, so you’ve established your online presence, and your website is up and running, so what happens next?

DIGITAL MARKETING

Another thing to consider once your website is fully functioning is online marketing techniques, commonly known as Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing uses different techniques to build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content marketing and also Email and Newsletter marketing. Using these methods you can shout about your business and build a bigger customer outreach so that people know that your organization exists.

With regular website maintenance, and online marketing you can truly allow all that design and development work to truly flourish.

The hover effects and especially CSS image hover effects are a fashionable yet fairly easy way of adding a touch of creativity to your website, all the while enabling user friendliness and interactivity. Before technology reached this stage, a cursor was deemed enough to let the user know that a picture could be clicked upon to reveal further facts and figures. But everything has its age, and the age of cursors is over. To attract users, and make the website trendier we now have Image Hover Effects. These transitions hover over an image with some sort of icon on them to let the users know that more information is at hand when you click. The hover effects CSS can, in turn, reveal a magnified version of the image, or perhaps some text that has relevance to what you’re looking for on the site.

Nowadays, We can see a lot of website on the internet have used clean typography and nice effects. This is really a beautiful trend in web designing. It makes the design cleaner and easy to readable. It allows the site visitor to stay more time on the website. To create such hover effects, There are many different ways and techniques can be used to create nice looking effects. You can use CSS, Javascript or Jquery to developed modern effects. But, the best and easy way to create is usually CSS, and especially the additions of CSS3 make them handy. These effects can be applied on Images, buttons, logos and as well as on links.

However, there are certain things that a client needs to work on, for getting clarity of the exact requirements of web designing. This involves creation of a sitemap by the client. A sitemap is like a rough estimate of the pages and links that are to be included in the website. This can be better understood with the reference of a company's website, which includes different pages like- company's profile, products and services offered, contact us page etc. The client can create a brief of company's background including the pictures of company, its products etc. In order to have a better understanding of your preferences and for the website designer to know your taste, creating a list of sites that you like is of utmost importance.

• Professionalism- Another important factor to be considered while choosing a website designer is his professional attitude. He should be able to stand to his commitments and must deliver the project timely. Delay in work is not a good sign!

• Affordability- The cost involved in the process of website designing should be in accordance with the standard and fair prices set for this task. It's a long term investment, so spend wisely!

We hope the above information helps you in future projects.

If you're thinking about having a website built, it's important for you to have a clear idea of the process before you begin. Your website could be a profitable business venture for you, but only if you've really done your research ahead of time. Many people begin investing in their new websites before they've really thought out each step and end up wasting money on sites that never see fruition. However, with some simple planning and research, you can set yourself on the right track toward developing a successful website. Here are seven tips for web design and promotion to get you started.

1. Survey the Market and Research Your Competitors

Before you get ahead of yourself and begin hiring a web designer, take some time to survey the market and research your competitors. Look at what other types of websites are out there and see if anyone is doing something similar to your plan. Consider how many people are running similar websites, as well as how professional their websites look. This will help you to determine whether or not it's worth setting up your own site, before you've invested too much in it.

To help ensure the success of your website, you should begin finding a niche market that you can target. You may be tempted to attract any and all customers that you can but you'll actually have greater success targeting a very specific demographic. Think extensively about who your potential audience members are and what they would be most interested in. Then, you can begin to develop your website around these ideas.

2. Brainstorm Design Ideas and Figure Out What You Like

Once you've thought a little more about your site's purpose, you should now think about your ideas for the design. You'll need to consider the best way to present your message or to feature your products to audience members. Keep in mind that people tend to skim websites looking for something interesting or eye-catching, so make sure that the most important elements of your site are featured prominently.

7. Allow Time and Money for Search Engine Optimisation

Google AdWords is a great way to help you get started but it's also important to use search engine optimisation, or SEO, to build organic traffic to your site. While AdWords will automatically place you at the top of search engine rankings with an advert you will have to continue doing that for ever. SEO can help you get to the first page of rankings naturally and eventually you will receive lots of traffic for free. This is important to increasing your traffic and building your site's legitimacy and authority on your subject.

Be sure to budget the time and money for SEO. It's not cheap and it can take 6-12 months to get your page to the first page of rankings for a number of keywords but it will generate a great amount of free traffic when you get there. It may cost about £300-£600 per month but SEO is truly the best way to start bringing in consistent traffic. Over time, your SEO efforts can help you build a reliable customer base and increase your sales. You're website will now be a true competitor in your niche market and well on it's way to success.

In this digital world of the internet, mobiles, laptops, computers and tablets, online presence has become very important. If you want to grow your business, you need to promote it. Using social media platforms to get the attention is just one step towards your goal.

To be honest, we cannot deny the fact that we don't trust an organization if it doesn't have a website of its own. What is the first thing that we do when we want to know more about a specific company? We browse about it on the internet. Don't we?

A website is the mirror image of your company's status and reputation, it is a place where everything is in one place, sorted and organized.

How to create a website?  Follow these steps to create your own website.

Domain name  · The first step is creating your unique domain name.

· A domain name appears like "xyz.com" and you need to visit a registrar to pay for the name you chose.

· They are easy for people to register in their brains.

· Others like Yahoo, Firefox and Bing are also some great options.

· These search engines are absolutely free and therefore the task of promoting your website becomes very easy.

· Other ways to get your site noticed are conventional methods like word of mouth, newspapers, cold calling etc.

Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. The rosette, the star, the triangle and the stepped pinnacle pattern of dadoes are all ancient patterns, and can be found all over the Middle East of antiquity. Al-Qassim Province seems to be the home of this art, and there it is normally worked in hard white plaster (though what you see is usually begrimed by the smoke of the coffee hearth). In Riyadh, examples can be seen in unadorned clay.

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404, B-70, Nitin Shanti Nagar Building,

Sector-1, Near Mira Road Station, 

Opp. TMT Bus Stop, 

Thane – 401107

NGO Website Designing 

Troika Tech Services

WordPress Development Company in Mumbai

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Real Estate Website Designing

Real Estate Website Designing

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

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 optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all.[1] The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines. Web design books in a store Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However, web design can also be seen from a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background, and music. In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.[2] In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould.[3] The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability."[4] This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process.

Install WordPress and Off You Go

Finally you can install WordPress on to your page and then you can build your website using this platform.

It is reported that 27.9% of all websites on the internet were built using WordPress.

WordPress is probably the easiest platform available today for a complete beginner to build your own website from scratch, and it is totally FREE!

But don't let the fact that it's free fool you into thinking it's not very good...

Because you would be very wrong, WordPress is used by everyone from webmasters, bloggers, developers and one man marketers to large businesses.

It is great for building anything from small one page sites to large eye-catching business sites.

And because it has been around for a while now it has built up a very large community of people who have designed all manor of plugins, themes and templates (many of them free) that you can use to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Responsive website designs are adaptive to portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc.,along with desktop devices. They provide fluid-like flexible grids and designs which are scalable to fit any screen size and orientation. The launch of frameworks concept has put an end to the necessity to write the code from the scratch. Frameworks offer a simplified way to web designers with built-in functionalities and methods to reuse the code without redoing from the beginning

HTML5 , CSS and JS documents are included in frameworks to create exceptional website design and development responsive applications. Frameworks are classified into front-end and back-end.

Few Popular Frameworks

Semantic UI : Semantic UI can be integrated in other frameworks easily and it allows the use of third-party tools. It is one of the popular front-end frameworks for responsive websites. The extremely feature-rich options of this framework include: sophisticated modules, forms, breadcrumbs, buttons, pop-ups, drop-downs, and sticky bones.

Bootstrap : The latest version of this most popular framework is Bootstrap 3 version. Some of the unmatched features are: it can build websites with less technical knowledge, a structured grid format, seamless navigation integration and create fixed and fluid width layout. A website designed by bootstrap is easily adaptable to mobile devices. An ideal website design and development company chooses Bootstrap to design adaptable resolution and content display mechanisms.

Skeleton : A small responsive website design framework used in rapid web development of web design regardless of their sizes. Skeleton uses 960 grid base for developing websites for all communication portable devices like mobile, tablets etc., Some of the UI elements include: well-organized file structure, forms buttons and tabs.

Foundation 3 : Foundation 3 is an advanced front-end framework built with a powerful CSS pre-processor Saas and allows you to customize with new tools. It is the easiest framework to learn and can be seamlessly used by a new user to create exceptional websites. This framework consists of components and an exclusive set of plug-ins where web designers can choose one.

Montage : It is an HTML framework, it is a great tool for developing modern web applications. The set of elements in Montage can help to build scalable and feature-rich websites. One great advantage of Montage is to have reusable components with HTML templates.

Pure : Pure can be used in any kind of web-based projects. It provides a small set of CSS modules which help developers to create various styles to develop the best responsive website designs.

Siimple : Siimple has a minimal CSS framework to create flat and clean web pages. It is a front-end framework with flexible and concise CSS framework to create user-friendly websites. Being to have minimal lines of code, it can be zipped down to 6KB in overall total size. Web designing newbies can experiment freely with this framework to start their career with.

Cascade : The grid layout offered by Cascade are both semantic and non-semantic with table designs and navigational templates. Many designers find it to be an easy framework because of its universal approach. Cascade can create high-performance webpages for cross-platform browsers.

Gumby : Gumby’s list of remarkable features include: well defined UI kit, switches, toggles and flexible grids to create user-centric websites.

Small triangles, especially when the widest area is at the top, are found in pre-Islamic representations of female figures. That the small triangles found in the wall paintings in ‘Asir are called banat may be a cultural remnant of a long-forgotten past.”[40] "Courtyards and upper pillared porticoes are principal features of the best Nadjdi architecture, in addition to the fine incised plaster wood (jiss) and painted window shutters, which decorate the reception rooms. Good examples of plasterwork can often be seen in the gaping ruins of torn-down buildings- the effect is light, delicate and airy. It is usually around the majlis, around the coffee hearth and along the walls above where guests sat on rugs, against cushions. Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. 

CSS Hover Effects Background

Previously, JavaScript laid the foundation of hover effects and Javascript or Jquery isn't light weight as compare you CSS. However, the latest technology calls in CSS3 into use. It is light weight and allows to create any type of animations that previously Jquery or Javascript do. It also supports widget range of browsers. But much to our disappointment there is few older version of browsers that do not support images hover effects, hence you need to have the ones that are capable of catering it. You can also add the fallback to get support for older version of browsers.

The CSS from CSS Image Hover Effects stands for Cascading Style Sheets; which is a programming sheet language that basically represents a document that has been coded in a markup language. This is not only a very simple technique, but its prim and precise nature are always engrossed programmers effectively.

Types of Hover Effects

Since the main focus of this article is on hover effects; let’s see some of them and how they are useful in CSS image hover effects:

1: SUBTLE HOVER EFFECTS

Subtle are effects that can make the site look more exclusive. A photo can suffice, along with a simple grid. Styles, attires, and colors are of your choice and even the other effects are up to you.

2: CAPTION HOVER EFFECTS

The caption is even simpler and there is no rocket science associated with this image hover effects. The title of the picture as well as the link that it connects to can be shown by the grid figures; all this comprises of the caption.

4: DIRECTION-AWARE HOVER EFFECTS Direction aware utilizes Jquery in addition to CSS. A small overlay slide is inserted over your original image from where you can direct the next step of the link.

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5: ZOOM IN HOVER EFFECTS

Zoom is as easy as ABC. The image clicked upon shall be zoomed in to reveal what’s hiding behind it. Here's a code to show you what it's like.

In conclusion, we can say that image hover effects if utilized effectively can provide your website intricate yet simple designs that are not only eye-candy but can help lure users to your site. It's trended thing and very popular nowadays web design.

Image source: pixabay.com by markusspiske under Creative Commons License

There are various reasons why you may want your own website...

If you are thinking of starting an online business one of the first things you will need to do is get yourself a website in place.

If you have an existing business you may want to have your own piece of the internet for your customers to visit 'out of hours'.

Maybe you just want your own personal website for a different purpose.

Whatever the reasons for wanting a website, it can be a daunting prospect if you have never tackled anything like this before

You may think you need to hire a company of programmers or web designers to get your website up and running. You could do this, but the cost of doing so can be a little more than you are prepared to spend.

Besides if you go down this route and you do hire one of these companies then what happens when you want to change something on your web page? Even if its just one sentence, changing the colour scheme or changing a picture, it could take time and cost you money.

Wouldn't it be easier, not to have to worry about these issues and simply change things yourself?

You may be thinking that you don't know how to write code...

Or you don't have the necessary IT skills to do that sort of thing...

Or it's just too much of a complicated thing for you to tackle...

You may even be thinking that you wouldn't know where to start...

Well you are not alone, a lot of people have these reservations when faced with the same prospect.

The good news is nowadays building your own website is not that difficult, in fact you could have your own website up and running from scratch in just one single afternoon.

You don't need to know coding...

You don't need any IT skills...

and it really isn't as difficult as you may think.

As for where to start...

That's what I'm about to tell you!

You may be thinking the simple way is to head off to wix or Weebly and put together a free drag and drop website and while this is true if you just want your website as a bit of fun or for non business purposes, If you want to be taken seriously as a business then you will need your own website with your own web address.

All we need to do is point your domain name provider to the place on the internet where your website is being hosted.

This is called 'Setting your domain name servers'

Despite what you think this process is really very easy and just involves supplying your domain name provider with the location of your websites hosting address.

It is just a simple act of copying the information sent to you in your important email and pasting it to the relevant section on your domain name providers website.

If you did happen to purchase your domain name AND your Hosting from the same company then you don't even need to do this.

Factors to follow while choosing a framework:

Easy to use and understand.

Seamless integration with database.

Long-term support

Browser compatibility

Clean and precise code.

Conclusion:

Scale-up the screen resolution and content adjustment of your websites with the help of the best available responsive framework designs. The frameworks which are listed above are perfectly used to design beautiful websites. Choose an ideal web design and development company for your professional websites.

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

Creativity

Creativity is the power of thinking out of the box and creating what amaze others. A successful designer always tries to create unconventional things while following the rule book. Such designers wield infinitive ideas from their past experiences and have a propensity for thinking to build innovative designs. Possessing a variety of ideas is important as different industries have different needs and audience types. The designer who has the inventiveness of concepts and ideas becomes a successful website or graphic designer. 

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous". Bill Moyers

Technical Skills

Knowledge of different software and technical skills is a crucial attribute of a designer. A successful designer has a deep knowledge of designing tools like Photoshop, Coral Draw, etc. Apart from the knowledge, the tempo of using such tools is also important, which is an upshot of regular practice. A passionate designer invests a huge amount of time on designing tools to have a deep functional knowledge of their usage. If you are a designer then spend as much time as you could on design software to understand each and every function and their manipulation.

Visualisation

It is crucial for a designer to visualise the outcomes before he even commences the designing work, or else, he’ll waste his entire time in attaining a result different from the expected. A great designer creates graphic initially in his mind and then engraves it on his computer. Visualising the output in prior requires a lot of experience and a line of thought with a composed mind.

Business Sense

A designer who has worked for numerous industries and understands the audience associated can do miracles in his designs as he perceives disparate businesses requirements and their preferences. If you have not designed for any particular industry before, then taking advice from the one who has is no harm and will save you from dawdling. You can also seek help from numerous online forums where professionals discuss and share their experiences and resolutions to technical glitches.

Hard Shell

Every designer faces critics in different styles. Sometimes clients don’t agree with the designs and sometimes the bosses or colleagues. A good designer listens to everyone and even proactively asks for feedbacks to understand different perspectives towards his design and do the amendments accordingly to deliver impeccable work. If the designer does not agree with suggestions, he should explain his reasons behind the design to convince the back-seat drivers. But a great designer is someone who remains calm and understands everyone’s point without getting displeased even if he has to make infinite changes to the design. That is the reason one of the attributes of a successful designer is that he should have a hard shell.

Logical Thinking

Wine is good with everything except water. Likewise, using the fonts, colours, themes, background and other designing elements into a design depends on the adjacent components and logical thinking of the designer pertaining to the graphic he is creating for a particular industry type. The designer who thinks logically and keeps in mind the various factors like industry type, audience type, client’s requirements and other pre-told aspects, is considered as a great designer.

Communication

Communication is another important attribute of a successful designer. One who keeps in touch with his clients to note down their feedbacks, work accordingly and respond quickly with the revised design, comes under a ‘good designer’ category. Communication is important as it also helps in rapport building as the clients perceive the seriousness of the designer towards his work. This helps in attaining more work and respect from clients.

Problem Solving

A good designer has a problem-solving instinct. Designers have acquaintance with multiple problems during their work. Leaving the problem unsolved and move forward is never a good designer’s convention. Alongside, the time taken by a designer to fix any designing problem is directly proportional to his experience. Designers with ample of experience know how to deal with a particular complication they have come across a few times earlier and take less time to resolve it. On the contrary, designers with less experience and practical knowledge take more time to solve any designing snag.

Researching

A successful designer always gets indulged in excessive research during the work and otherwise. Knowing the market trend, software updates, tools utilisation, etc. include a lot of research and development. A designer who keeps researching for updates in the industry is known to be a successful designer. If you are about to commence a design for an industry who have no idea about, spend a good amount of time on research before you soak your brush and start painting the canvas.

Confidence

Last but not the least, confidence is a very important attribute of a successful designer. After creating a design, a designer might face numerous objections and challenges from onlookers. A successful designer knows the reason behind every step he concluded to create a design but others might just have speculations about it. A successful designer will always present a logical explanation behind the design he created and can turn his critics into his admirers with his utter confidence. You know why you have done that, so say out loud confidently!

The approach of getting orders on PSD to WordPress conversion may differ from companies to companies. However, there are definite steps that every company follows for successful deliveries.

PSD to WordPress conversion is probably the most sought after practice that is offered by the companies providing web design and development services. It’s true that companies follow their own approach to accomplish the related projects; however, the steps are already defined and every organization sticks to these steps.

Before we deep dive into the steps, here is a short explanation of the conversion process that has become the most common now. Because of the rising number of users wishing to get conversion services the number of service providers has also flooded in to offer the services. As these companies are getting bigger in number, there are some exceptional PSD to WordPress conversion service providers available there in the market to offer the services. These companies have been following the steps as stated below. Here is a short explanation of these services.

The review or the analysis of the projects

As soon as the companies receive the orders, the first and the foremost task is to review the details that are required by the clients. Here the requirement from the clients may vary depending upon the specific need to be fulfilled by the clients. A deep analysis of the projects gives enough ideas to the developers to start the projects on the particular specifications.

The development phase

It is the most important of all phases for every company that is offering the PSD to WordPress conversion service. In this phase, the details that have been summarized in the first phase are executed for real and the project is accomplished. For developing the specifications required by the users, every detail is analyzed properly prior to it is created in real.

The testing of the projects

Testing matters the most as it is an imperative step to correct the flaws if anyhow exist in the projects. After the project is done successfully, the testing begins. For companies, the phase of testing the projects is the most important as no client is going to accept the flaws. Thus, to make a great impression on the users, the testing is done carefully.

Delivering the project

Companies working in the web development arena aim to make the projects’ delivery before the stipulated time frame so that clients could be impressed with the services. Delivering the project well before the time holds prominence for the users also as they get fruitful results well before the expected time frame.

The series of the services that have been listed here are performed in the right sequence by the PSD to WordPress conversion companies. The ultimate goal of all these establishments lies in exceeding the list of their existing clients. Â

All these steps are concluded under expert guidance by the professionals who are versed in the technicalities involved in the task. Different companies have their definite styles of working but all of them have teams that look after only a specific concern. As such the job of the testing team starts only after the project crosses the delivery phase.

In order to be specific enough in their approach, every company tries to customize the requirements as per the demands of the clients. The nature of clients’ business differs from one to another that compels these companies to offer the services as per the need of the business. It also inspires the clients to contact the same company if services are pleasing. Therefore, being specific with their services is always a benefit for the PSD to WordPress conversion companies.

Website designing and development give a proper shape to the website and in order to sustain and enhance the shape, you must undergo web maintenance occasionally. It is not sufficient to get a premium website designed, program it and host it and leave! There must be continued maintenance to keep the site upgraded and free form glitches, performing at top level. However, one must not be mistaken that website maintenance means redesigning of your website. It is something more relevant to ongoing support to change the images, content or update the information.

Additionally, the activities that fall under site maintenance also include correction of broken links, page titles, adding new web pages, wrongly spelled texts, checking whether pages, add-ons, and programs are working perfectly. Without having Website maintenance services, the websites tend to malfunction regularly and thus, affecting its credibility and ranking. For example, transaction-oriented websites such as online shopping, e-commerce stores, ticket booking sites must perform accurately all the time, and this is impossible without any maintenance support.

Now if we take example of human body in respect to website. Just like human body requires you to take it to doctor for regular checkups and keep yourself away from diseases. In the same manner, websites too are used on daily basis and technology keeps changings. This means that they also need to be taken care of and provided with maintenance on day to day basis. However, most of the companies fail to recognize this fact and believe that once they have got the website developed, there is no need to take a second look over it. Just because your website is running fine and getting traffic does not indicates that it will be fine in future as well. And as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure!

Most of the big companies own an in-house web maintenance teams. However, for small to medium businesses, it is not a possible option to afford a team. It might also divert their attention from the core of their business. For these businessmen, it is a good idea to outsource the website maintenance tasks to those services that specialize in such services.

There are plenty of website maintenance services that can do a lot in your interest and provide satisfactory web performance. However, you must evaluate that these companies as little negligence and incompetent maintenance can lead to multiple problems. A regular chain of communication must be opened while one signs up with website maintenance services. It is not merely enough that the team should monitor and maintain and that's it! The website owner too, must check if the work is being done properly or not.

The various benefits through website maintenance

•A good maintenance service provides monitored uptime. This helps to eliminate the down problems of the website.

•The convenience of getting fresh updates is available in unlimited form and updates can include graphics, maps, new page additions, forums etc.

•They provide with monthly statistics reports that help you know the performance of the website which is crucial to the growth of the business. This, in turn, devises the business plans and strategies.

•Domain renewal process is also done automatically by the maintenance services. Most of the companies do not ask for surplus expenses at the time of renewal. One needs not to worry about losing the web domain.

•Excellent hosting options are also looked after. A web application development company will gain a thousand benefits with good web maintenance services.

•Your uptime of website and dead page redirection is crucial for the customers and visitors and all these aspects will be under your control with the help of these service providers.

•This is enough to understand the worth and need of maintenance for your website. Don't delay it.

Hopefully you must have understand now what mistakes you need to avoid and to make a best website design is not a big deal now!

In the modern world we live in, pretty much all business is now conducted digitally, and the key succession of most businesses is online brand awareness. Whether you intend to trade goods, or you just want to promote the services your business provides, either way, you need a website that fully functional, interactive, responsive on all devices (of course, this isn’t mandatory but is definitely recommended), and also customer friendly to consolidate all clientele.

There are so many different types of websites to choose from these days, so you might want to do your research before making any sudden decisions, but it’s worth doing as the website not only needs to suit your business requirements but also needs to meet the needs of your visitors/customers.

Open Source technology comes in a range of different solutions but is usually one of the most utilized platforms when it comes to web design. You can have your pick of Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Open Cart, Presta Shop, Sugar CRM and so much more open source technologies, each one with its particular benefits.

DRUPAL WEB DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS

Drupal is one of the most popular open source web design platforms that have a built-in Content Management System (CMS). It’s chosen by many businesses thanks to its powerful tools and functional platform. It’s a favorable choice out of the other open source technologies because of its user efficiency, meaning you don’t have to be equipped with technical skills in order to actually design the solution how you want. Other features include high website performance due to its built-in caching and scalability (it can be used on multiple servers). It also features easy integration with 3rd party applications, it's search engine friendly, it has supreme security functionality, it provides commercial support through training and education, and it allows management of content by the end user (i.e. you).

Primarily used as a back- end system, Drupal supports a range of website types from personal blogs to government informational sites, and it is built on a PHP language which provides the main database through MySQL. Â

As mentioned previously you don’t have to be of a technical background to be able to use Drupal effectively, although if you haven’t got the time to go through the development process, it might be worth enlisting the help of an expert who has experience in Drupal web design solutions. These experts will be able to support you from the start to the end of the project leaving you stress and hassle free.

Okay, so you’ve established your online presence, and your website is up and running, so what happens next?

DIGITAL MARKETING

Another thing to consider once your website is fully functioning is online marketing techniques, commonly known as Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing uses different techniques to build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content marketing and also Email and Newsletter marketing. Using these methods you can shout about your business and build a bigger customer outreach so that people know that your organization exists.

With regular website maintenance, and online marketing you can truly allow all that design and development work to truly flourish.

The hover effects and especially CSS image hover effects are a fashionable yet fairly easy way of adding a touch of creativity to your website, all the while enabling user friendliness and interactivity. Before technology reached this stage, a cursor was deemed enough to let the user know that a picture could be clicked upon to reveal further facts and figures. But everything has its age, and the age of cursors is over. To attract users, and make the website trendier we now have Image Hover Effects. These transitions hover over an image with some sort of icon on them to let the users know that more information is at hand when you click. The hover effects CSS can, in turn, reveal a magnified version of the image, or perhaps some text that has relevance to what you’re looking for on the site.

Nowadays, We can see a lot of website on the internet have used clean typography and nice effects. This is really a beautiful trend in web designing. It makes the design cleaner and easy to readable. It allows the site visitor to stay more time on the website. To create such hover effects, There are many different ways and techniques can be used to create nice looking effects. You can use CSS, Javascript or Jquery to developed modern effects. But, the best and easy way to create is usually CSS, and especially the additions of CSS3 make them handy. These effects can be applied on Images, buttons, logos and as well as on links.

However, there are certain things that a client needs to work on, for getting clarity of the exact requirements of web designing. This involves creation of a sitemap by the client. A sitemap is like a rough estimate of the pages and links that are to be included in the website. This can be better understood with the reference of a company's website, which includes different pages like- company's profile, products and services offered, contact us page etc. The client can create a brief of company's background including the pictures of company, its products etc. In order to have a better understanding of your preferences and for the website designer to know your taste, creating a list of sites that you like is of utmost importance.

• Professionalism- Another important factor to be considered while choosing a website designer is his professional attitude. He should be able to stand to his commitments and must deliver the project timely. Delay in work is not a good sign!

• Affordability- The cost involved in the process of website designing should be in accordance with the standard and fair prices set for this task. It's a long term investment, so spend wisely!

We hope the above information helps you in future projects.

If you're thinking about having a website built, it's important for you to have a clear idea of the process before you begin. Your website could be a profitable business venture for you, but only if you've really done your research ahead of time. Many people begin investing in their new websites before they've really thought out each step and end up wasting money on sites that never see fruition. However, with some simple planning and research, you can set yourself on the right track toward developing a successful website. Here are seven tips for web design and promotion to get you started.

1. Survey the Market and Research Your Competitors

Before you get ahead of yourself and begin hiring a web designer, take some time to survey the market and research your competitors. Look at what other types of websites are out there and see if anyone is doing something similar to your plan. Consider how many people are running similar websites, as well as how professional their websites look. This will help you to determine whether or not it's worth setting up your own site, before you've invested too much in it.

To help ensure the success of your website, you should begin finding a niche market that you can target. You may be tempted to attract any and all customers that you can but you'll actually have greater success targeting a very specific demographic. Think extensively about who your potential audience members are and what they would be most interested in. Then, you can begin to develop your website around these ideas.

2. Brainstorm Design Ideas and Figure Out What You Like

Once you've thought a little more about your site's purpose, you should now think about your ideas for the design. You'll need to consider the best way to present your message or to feature your products to audience members. Keep in mind that people tend to skim websites looking for something interesting or eye-catching, so make sure that the most important elements of your site are featured prominently.

7. Allow Time and Money for Search Engine Optimisation

Google AdWords is a great way to help you get started but it's also important to use search engine optimisation, or SEO, to build organic traffic to your site. While AdWords will automatically place you at the top of search engine rankings with an advert you will have to continue doing that for ever. SEO can help you get to the first page of rankings naturally and eventually you will receive lots of traffic for free. This is important to increasing your traffic and building your site's legitimacy and authority on your subject.

Be sure to budget the time and money for SEO. It's not cheap and it can take 6-12 months to get your page to the first page of rankings for a number of keywords but it will generate a great amount of free traffic when you get there. It may cost about £300-£600 per month but SEO is truly the best way to start bringing in consistent traffic. Over time, your SEO efforts can help you build a reliable customer base and increase your sales. You're website will now be a true competitor in your niche market and well on it's way to success.

In this digital world of the internet, mobiles, laptops, computers and tablets, online presence has become very important. If you want to grow your business, you need to promote it. Using social media platforms to get the attention is just one step towards your goal.

To be honest, we cannot deny the fact that we don't trust an organization if it doesn't have a website of its own. What is the first thing that we do when we want to know more about a specific company? We browse about it on the internet. Don't we?

A website is the mirror image of your company's status and reputation, it is a place where everything is in one place, sorted and organized.

How to create a website?  Follow these steps to create your own website.

Domain name  · The first step is creating your unique domain name.

· A domain name appears like "xyz.com" and you need to visit a registrar to pay for the name you chose.

· They are easy for people to register in their brains.

· Others like Yahoo, Firefox and Bing are also some great options.

· These search engines are absolutely free and therefore the task of promoting your website becomes very easy.

· Other ways to get your site noticed are conventional methods like word of mouth, newspapers, cold calling etc.

Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. The rosette, the star, the triangle and the stepped pinnacle pattern of dadoes are all ancient patterns, and can be found all over the Middle East of antiquity. Al-Qassim Province seems to be the home of this art, and there it is normally worked in hard white plaster (though what you see is usually begrimed by the smoke of the coffee hearth). In Riyadh, examples can be seen in unadorned clay.

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404, B-70, Nitin Shanti Nagar Building,

Sector-1, Near Mira Road Station, 

Opp. TMT Bus Stop, 

Thane – 401107

NGO Website Designing 

Troika Tech Services

WordPress Development Company in Mumbai

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Real Estate Website Designing

Real Estate Website Designing

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

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 optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all.[1] The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines. Web design books in a store Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However, web design can also be seen from a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background, and music. In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.[2] In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould.[3] The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability."[4] This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process.

Install WordPress and Off You Go

Finally you can install WordPress on to your page and then you can build your website using this platform.

It is reported that 27.9% of all websites on the internet were built using WordPress.

WordPress is probably the easiest platform available today for a complete beginner to build your own website from scratch, and it is totally FREE!

But don't let the fact that it's free fool you into thinking it's not very good...

Because you would be very wrong, WordPress is used by everyone from webmasters, bloggers, developers and one man marketers to large businesses.

It is great for building anything from small one page sites to large eye-catching business sites.

And because it has been around for a while now it has built up a very large community of people who have designed all manor of plugins, themes and templates (many of them free) that you can use to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Responsive website designs are adaptive to portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc.,along with desktop devices. They provide fluid-like flexible grids and designs which are scalable to fit any screen size and orientation. The launch of frameworks concept has put an end to the necessity to write the code from the scratch. Frameworks offer a simplified way to web designers with built-in functionalities and methods to reuse the code without redoing from the beginning

HTML5 , CSS and JS documents are included in frameworks to create exceptional website design and development responsive applications. Frameworks are classified into front-end and back-end.

Few Popular Frameworks

Semantic UI : Semantic UI can be integrated in other frameworks easily and it allows the use of third-party tools. It is one of the popular front-end frameworks for responsive websites. The extremely feature-rich options of this framework include: sophisticated modules, forms, breadcrumbs, buttons, pop-ups, drop-downs, and sticky bones.

Bootstrap : The latest version of this most popular framework is Bootstrap 3 version. Some of the unmatched features are: it can build websites with less technical knowledge, a structured grid format, seamless navigation integration and create fixed and fluid width layout. A website designed by bootstrap is easily adaptable to mobile devices. An ideal website design and development company chooses Bootstrap to design adaptable resolution and content display mechanisms.

Skeleton : A small responsive website design framework used in rapid web development of web design regardless of their sizes. Skeleton uses 960 grid base for developing websites for all communication portable devices like mobile, tablets etc., Some of the UI elements include: well-organized file structure, forms buttons and tabs.

Foundation 3 : Foundation 3 is an advanced front-end framework built with a powerful CSS pre-processor Saas and allows you to customize with new tools. It is the easiest framework to learn and can be seamlessly used by a new user to create exceptional websites. This framework consists of components and an exclusive set of plug-ins where web designers can choose one.

Montage : It is an HTML framework, it is a great tool for developing modern web applications. The set of elements in Montage can help to build scalable and feature-rich websites. One great advantage of Montage is to have reusable components with HTML templates.

Pure : Pure can be used in any kind of web-based projects. It provides a small set of CSS modules which help developers to create various styles to develop the best responsive website designs.

Siimple : Siimple has a minimal CSS framework to create flat and clean web pages. It is a front-end framework with flexible and concise CSS framework to create user-friendly websites. Being to have minimal lines of code, it can be zipped down to 6KB in overall total size. Web designing newbies can experiment freely with this framework to start their career with.

Cascade : The grid layout offered by Cascade are both semantic and non-semantic with table designs and navigational templates. Many designers find it to be an easy framework because of its universal approach. Cascade can create high-performance webpages for cross-platform browsers.

Gumby : Gumby’s list of remarkable features include: well defined UI kit, switches, toggles and flexible grids to create user-centric websites.

Small triangles, especially when the widest area is at the top, are found in pre-Islamic representations of female figures. That the small triangles found in the wall paintings in ‘Asir are called banat may be a cultural remnant of a long-forgotten past.”[40] "Courtyards and upper pillared porticoes are principal features of the best Nadjdi architecture, in addition to the fine incised plaster wood (jiss) and painted window shutters, which decorate the reception rooms. Good examples of plasterwork can often be seen in the gaping ruins of torn-down buildings- the effect is light, delicate and airy. It is usually around the majlis, around the coffee hearth and along the walls above where guests sat on rugs, against cushions. Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. 

CSS Hover Effects Background

Previously, JavaScript laid the foundation of hover effects and Javascript or Jquery isn't light weight as compare you CSS. However, the latest technology calls in CSS3 into use. It is light weight and allows to create any type of animations that previously Jquery or Javascript do. It also supports widget range of browsers. But much to our disappointment there is few older version of browsers that do not support images hover effects, hence you need to have the ones that are capable of catering it. You can also add the fallback to get support for older version of browsers.

The CSS from CSS Image Hover Effects stands for Cascading Style Sheets; which is a programming sheet language that basically represents a document that has been coded in a markup language. This is not only a very simple technique, but its prim and precise nature are always engrossed programmers effectively.

Types of Hover Effects

Since the main focus of this article is on hover effects; let’s see some of them and how they are useful in CSS image hover effects:

1: SUBTLE HOVER EFFECTS

Subtle are effects that can make the site look more exclusive. A photo can suffice, along with a simple grid. Styles, attires, and colors are of your choice and even the other effects are up to you.

2: CAPTION HOVER EFFECTS

The caption is even simpler and there is no rocket science associated with this image hover effects. The title of the picture as well as the link that it connects to can be shown by the grid figures; all this comprises of the caption.

4: DIRECTION-AWARE HOVER EFFECTS Direction aware utilizes Jquery in addition to CSS. A small overlay slide is inserted over your original image from where you can direct the next step of the link.

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5: ZOOM IN HOVER EFFECTS

Zoom is as easy as ABC. The image clicked upon shall be zoomed in to reveal what’s hiding behind it. Here's a code to show you what it's like.

In conclusion, we can say that image hover effects if utilized effectively can provide your website intricate yet simple designs that are not only eye-candy but can help lure users to your site. It's trended thing and very popular nowadays web design.

Image source: pixabay.com by markusspiske under Creative Commons License

There are various reasons why you may want your own website...

If you are thinking of starting an online business one of the first things you will need to do is get yourself a website in place.

If you have an existing business you may want to have your own piece of the internet for your customers to visit 'out of hours'.

Maybe you just want your own personal website for a different purpose.

Whatever the reasons for wanting a website, it can be a daunting prospect if you have never tackled anything like this before

You may think you need to hire a company of programmers or web designers to get your website up and running. You could do this, but the cost of doing so can be a little more than you are prepared to spend.

Besides if you go down this route and you do hire one of these companies then what happens when you want to change something on your web page? Even if its just one sentence, changing the colour scheme or changing a picture, it could take time and cost you money.

Wouldn't it be easier, not to have to worry about these issues and simply change things yourself?

You may be thinking that you don't know how to write code...

Or you don't have the necessary IT skills to do that sort of thing...

Or it's just too much of a complicated thing for you to tackle...

You may even be thinking that you wouldn't know where to start...

Well you are not alone, a lot of people have these reservations when faced with the same prospect.

The good news is nowadays building your own website is not that difficult, in fact you could have your own website up and running from scratch in just one single afternoon.

You don't need to know coding...

You don't need any IT skills...

and it really isn't as difficult as you may think.

As for where to start...

That's what I'm about to tell you!

You may be thinking the simple way is to head off to wix or Weebly and put together a free drag and drop website and while this is true if you just want your website as a bit of fun or for non business purposes, If you want to be taken seriously as a business then you will need your own website with your own web address.

All we need to do is point your domain name provider to the place on the internet where your website is being hosted.

This is called 'Setting your domain name servers'

Despite what you think this process is really very easy and just involves supplying your domain name provider with the location of your websites hosting address.

It is just a simple act of copying the information sent to you in your important email and pasting it to the relevant section on your domain name providers website.

If you did happen to purchase your domain name AND your Hosting from the same company then you don't even need to do this.

Factors to follow while choosing a framework:

Easy to use and understand.

Seamless integration with database.

Long-term support

Browser compatibility

Clean and precise code.

Conclusion:

Scale-up the screen resolution and content adjustment of your websites with the help of the best available responsive framework designs. The frameworks which are listed above are perfectly used to design beautiful websites. Choose an ideal web design and development company for your professional websites.

The website design industry has become more prominent during the last decade since every business type has acknowledged the importance of building and maintaining a business website. Due to a tremendous increase in the online traffic lately, businesses are focused more towards their online appearance rather than an outdoor advertisement of their products and services. This is the reason, web industry demands highly trained professionals responsible for creating and operating websites for a flawless customer engagement and maximal revenue generation. However, these dexterous professionals are not at all easy to find as not all of them have adequate experience and unbeaten qualities which are essential for being the very best of a web design company. Let’s check out the attributes of successful designers.

Creativity

Creativity is the power of thinking out of the box and creating what amaze others. A successful designer always tries to create unconventional things while following the rule book. Such designers wield infinitive ideas from their past experiences and have a propensity for thinking to build innovative designs. Possessing a variety of ideas is important as different industries have different needs and audience types. The designer who has the inventiveness of concepts and ideas becomes a successful website or graphic designer. 

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous". Bill Moyers

Technical Skills

Knowledge of different software and technical skills is a crucial attribute of a designer. A successful designer has a deep knowledge of designing tools like Photoshop, Coral Draw, etc. Apart from the knowledge, the tempo of using such tools is also important, which is an upshot of regular practice. A passionate designer invests a huge amount of time on designing tools to have a deep functional knowledge of their usage. If you are a designer then spend as much time as you could on design software to understand each and every function and their manipulation.

Visualisation

It is crucial for a designer to visualise the outcomes before he even commences the designing work, or else, he’ll waste his entire time in attaining a result different from the expected. A great designer creates graphic initially in his mind and then engraves it on his computer. Visualising the output in prior requires a lot of experience and a line of thought with a composed mind.

Business Sense

A designer who has worked for numerous industries and understands the audience associated can do miracles in his designs as he perceives disparate businesses requirements and their preferences. If you have not designed for any particular industry before, then taking advice from the one who has is no harm and will save you from dawdling. You can also seek help from numerous online forums where professionals discuss and share their experiences and resolutions to technical glitches.

Hard Shell

Every designer faces critics in different styles. Sometimes clients don’t agree with the designs and sometimes the bosses or colleagues. A good designer listens to everyone and even proactively asks for feedbacks to understand different perspectives towards his design and do the amendments accordingly to deliver impeccable work. If the designer does not agree with suggestions, he should explain his reasons behind the design to convince the back-seat drivers. But a great designer is someone who remains calm and understands everyone’s point without getting displeased even if he has to make infinite changes to the design. That is the reason one of the attributes of a successful designer is that he should have a hard shell.

Logical Thinking

Wine is good with everything except water. Likewise, using the fonts, colours, themes, background and other designing elements into a design depends on the adjacent components and logical thinking of the designer pertaining to the graphic he is creating for a particular industry type. The designer who thinks logically and keeps in mind the various factors like industry type, audience type, client’s requirements and other pre-told aspects, is considered as a great designer.

Communication

Communication is another important attribute of a successful designer. One who keeps in touch with his clients to note down their feedbacks, work accordingly and respond quickly with the revised design, comes under a ‘good designer’ category. Communication is important as it also helps in rapport building as the clients perceive the seriousness of the designer towards his work. This helps in attaining more work and respect from clients.

Problem Solving

A good designer has a problem-solving instinct. Designers have acquaintance with multiple problems during their work. Leaving the problem unsolved and move forward is never a good designer’s convention. Alongside, the time taken by a designer to fix any designing problem is directly proportional to his experience. Designers with ample of experience know how to deal with a particular complication they have come across a few times earlier and take less time to resolve it. On the contrary, designers with less experience and practical knowledge take more time to solve any designing snag.

Researching

A successful designer always gets indulged in excessive research during the work and otherwise. Knowing the market trend, software updates, tools utilisation, etc. include a lot of research and development. A designer who keeps researching for updates in the industry is known to be a successful designer. If you are about to commence a design for an industry who have no idea about, spend a good amount of time on research before you soak your brush and start painting the canvas.

Confidence

Last but not the least, confidence is a very important attribute of a successful designer. After creating a design, a designer might face numerous objections and challenges from onlookers. A successful designer knows the reason behind every step he concluded to create a design but others might just have speculations about it. A successful designer will always present a logical explanation behind the design he created and can turn his critics into his admirers with his utter confidence. You know why you have done that, so say out loud confidently!

The approach of getting orders on PSD to WordPress conversion may differ from companies to companies. However, there are definite steps that every company follows for successful deliveries.

PSD to WordPress conversion is probably the most sought after practice that is offered by the companies providing web design and development services. It’s true that companies follow their own approach to accomplish the related projects; however, the steps are already defined and every organization sticks to these steps.

Before we deep dive into the steps, here is a short explanation of the conversion process that has become the most common now. Because of the rising number of users wishing to get conversion services the number of service providers has also flooded in to offer the services. As these companies are getting bigger in number, there are some exceptional PSD to WordPress conversion service providers available there in the market to offer the services. These companies have been following the steps as stated below. Here is a short explanation of these services.

The review or the analysis of the projects

As soon as the companies receive the orders, the first and the foremost task is to review the details that are required by the clients. Here the requirement from the clients may vary depending upon the specific need to be fulfilled by the clients. A deep analysis of the projects gives enough ideas to the developers to start the projects on the particular specifications.

The development phase

It is the most important of all phases for every company that is offering the PSD to WordPress conversion service. In this phase, the details that have been summarized in the first phase are executed for real and the project is accomplished. For developing the specifications required by the users, every detail is analyzed properly prior to it is created in real.

The testing of the projects

Testing matters the most as it is an imperative step to correct the flaws if anyhow exist in the projects. After the project is done successfully, the testing begins. For companies, the phase of testing the projects is the most important as no client is going to accept the flaws. Thus, to make a great impression on the users, the testing is done carefully.

Delivering the project

Companies working in the web development arena aim to make the projects’ delivery before the stipulated time frame so that clients could be impressed with the services. Delivering the project well before the time holds prominence for the users also as they get fruitful results well before the expected time frame.

The series of the services that have been listed here are performed in the right sequence by the PSD to WordPress conversion companies. The ultimate goal of all these establishments lies in exceeding the list of their existing clients. Â

All these steps are concluded under expert guidance by the professionals who are versed in the technicalities involved in the task. Different companies have their definite styles of working but all of them have teams that look after only a specific concern. As such the job of the testing team starts only after the project crosses the delivery phase.

In order to be specific enough in their approach, every company tries to customize the requirements as per the demands of the clients. The nature of clients’ business differs from one to another that compels these companies to offer the services as per the need of the business. It also inspires the clients to contact the same company if services are pleasing. Therefore, being specific with their services is always a benefit for the PSD to WordPress conversion companies.

Website designing and development give a proper shape to the website and in order to sustain and enhance the shape, you must undergo web maintenance occasionally. It is not sufficient to get a premium website designed, program it and host it and leave! There must be continued maintenance to keep the site upgraded and free form glitches, performing at top level. However, one must not be mistaken that website maintenance means redesigning of your website. It is something more relevant to ongoing support to change the images, content or update the information.

Additionally, the activities that fall under site maintenance also include correction of broken links, page titles, adding new web pages, wrongly spelled texts, checking whether pages, add-ons, and programs are working perfectly. Without having Website maintenance services, the websites tend to malfunction regularly and thus, affecting its credibility and ranking. For example, transaction-oriented websites such as online shopping, e-commerce stores, ticket booking sites must perform accurately all the time, and this is impossible without any maintenance support.

Now if we take example of human body in respect to website. Just like human body requires you to take it to doctor for regular checkups and keep yourself away from diseases. In the same manner, websites too are used on daily basis and technology keeps changings. This means that they also need to be taken care of and provided with maintenance on day to day basis. However, most of the companies fail to recognize this fact and believe that once they have got the website developed, there is no need to take a second look over it. Just because your website is running fine and getting traffic does not indicates that it will be fine in future as well. And as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure!

Most of the big companies own an in-house web maintenance teams. However, for small to medium businesses, it is not a possible option to afford a team. It might also divert their attention from the core of their business. For these businessmen, it is a good idea to outsource the website maintenance tasks to those services that specialize in such services.

There are plenty of website maintenance services that can do a lot in your interest and provide satisfactory web performance. However, you must evaluate that these companies as little negligence and incompetent maintenance can lead to multiple problems. A regular chain of communication must be opened while one signs up with website maintenance services. It is not merely enough that the team should monitor and maintain and that's it! The website owner too, must check if the work is being done properly or not.

The various benefits through website maintenance

•A good maintenance service provides monitored uptime. This helps to eliminate the down problems of the website.

•The convenience of getting fresh updates is available in unlimited form and updates can include graphics, maps, new page additions, forums etc.

•They provide with monthly statistics reports that help you know the performance of the website which is crucial to the growth of the business. This, in turn, devises the business plans and strategies.

•Domain renewal process is also done automatically by the maintenance services. Most of the companies do not ask for surplus expenses at the time of renewal. One needs not to worry about losing the web domain.

•Excellent hosting options are also looked after. A web application development company will gain a thousand benefits with good web maintenance services.

•Your uptime of website and dead page redirection is crucial for the customers and visitors and all these aspects will be under your control with the help of these service providers.

•This is enough to understand the worth and need of maintenance for your website. Don't delay it.

Hopefully you must have understand now what mistakes you need to avoid and to make a best website design is not a big deal now!

In the modern world we live in, pretty much all business is now conducted digitally, and the key succession of most businesses is online brand awareness. Whether you intend to trade goods, or you just want to promote the services your business provides, either way, you need a website that fully functional, interactive, responsive on all devices (of course, this isn’t mandatory but is definitely recommended), and also customer friendly to consolidate all clientele.

There are so many different types of websites to choose from these days, so you might want to do your research before making any sudden decisions, but it’s worth doing as the website not only needs to suit your business requirements but also needs to meet the needs of your visitors/customers.

Open Source technology comes in a range of different solutions but is usually one of the most utilized platforms when it comes to web design. You can have your pick of Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Open Cart, Presta Shop, Sugar CRM and so much more open source technologies, each one with its particular benefits.

DRUPAL WEB DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS

Drupal is one of the most popular open source web design platforms that have a built-in Content Management System (CMS). It’s chosen by many businesses thanks to its powerful tools and functional platform. It’s a favorable choice out of the other open source technologies because of its user efficiency, meaning you don’t have to be equipped with technical skills in order to actually design the solution how you want. Other features include high website performance due to its built-in caching and scalability (it can be used on multiple servers). It also features easy integration with 3rd party applications, it's search engine friendly, it has supreme security functionality, it provides commercial support through training and education, and it allows management of content by the end user (i.e. you).

Primarily used as a back- end system, Drupal supports a range of website types from personal blogs to government informational sites, and it is built on a PHP language which provides the main database through MySQL. Â

As mentioned previously you don’t have to be of a technical background to be able to use Drupal effectively, although if you haven’t got the time to go through the development process, it might be worth enlisting the help of an expert who has experience in Drupal web design solutions. These experts will be able to support you from the start to the end of the project leaving you stress and hassle free.

Okay, so you’ve established your online presence, and your website is up and running, so what happens next?

DIGITAL MARKETING

Another thing to consider once your website is fully functioning is online marketing techniques, commonly known as Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing uses different techniques to build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content marketing and also Email and Newsletter marketing. Using these methods you can shout about your business and build a bigger customer outreach so that people know that your organization exists.

With regular website maintenance, and online marketing you can truly allow all that design and development work to truly flourish.

The hover effects and especially CSS image hover effects are a fashionable yet fairly easy way of adding a touch of creativity to your website, all the while enabling user friendliness and interactivity. Before technology reached this stage, a cursor was deemed enough to let the user know that a picture could be clicked upon to reveal further facts and figures. But everything has its age, and the age of cursors is over. To attract users, and make the website trendier we now have Image Hover Effects. These transitions hover over an image with some sort of icon on them to let the users know that more information is at hand when you click. The hover effects CSS can, in turn, reveal a magnified version of the image, or perhaps some text that has relevance to what you’re looking for on the site.

Nowadays, We can see a lot of website on the internet have used clean typography and nice effects. This is really a beautiful trend in web designing. It makes the design cleaner and easy to readable. It allows the site visitor to stay more time on the website. To create such hover effects, There are many different ways and techniques can be used to create nice looking effects. You can use CSS, Javascript or Jquery to developed modern effects. But, the best and easy way to create is usually CSS, and especially the additions of CSS3 make them handy. These effects can be applied on Images, buttons, logos and as well as on links.

However, there are certain things that a client needs to work on, for getting clarity of the exact requirements of web designing. This involves creation of a sitemap by the client. A sitemap is like a rough estimate of the pages and links that are to be included in the website. This can be better understood with the reference of a company's website, which includes different pages like- company's profile, products and services offered, contact us page etc. The client can create a brief of company's background including the pictures of company, its products etc. In order to have a better understanding of your preferences and for the website designer to know your taste, creating a list of sites that you like is of utmost importance.

• Professionalism- Another important factor to be considered while choosing a website designer is his professional attitude. He should be able to stand to his commitments and must deliver the project timely. Delay in work is not a good sign!

• Affordability- The cost involved in the process of website designing should be in accordance with the standard and fair prices set for this task. It's a long term investment, so spend wisely!

We hope the above information helps you in future projects.

If you're thinking about having a website built, it's important for you to have a clear idea of the process before you begin. Your website could be a profitable business venture for you, but only if you've really done your research ahead of time. Many people begin investing in their new websites before they've really thought out each step and end up wasting money on sites that never see fruition. However, with some simple planning and research, you can set yourself on the right track toward developing a successful website. Here are seven tips for web design and promotion to get you started.

1. Survey the Market and Research Your Competitors

Before you get ahead of yourself and begin hiring a web designer, take some time to survey the market and research your competitors. Look at what other types of websites are out there and see if anyone is doing something similar to your plan. Consider how many people are running similar websites, as well as how professional their websites look. This will help you to determine whether or not it's worth setting up your own site, before you've invested too much in it.

To help ensure the success of your website, you should begin finding a niche market that you can target. You may be tempted to attract any and all customers that you can but you'll actually have greater success targeting a very specific demographic. Think extensively about who your potential audience members are and what they would be most interested in. Then, you can begin to develop your website around these ideas.

2. Brainstorm Design Ideas and Figure Out What You Like

Once you've thought a little more about your site's purpose, you should now think about your ideas for the design. You'll need to consider the best way to present your message or to feature your products to audience members. Keep in mind that people tend to skim websites looking for something interesting or eye-catching, so make sure that the most important elements of your site are featured prominently.

7. Allow Time and Money for Search Engine Optimisation

Google AdWords is a great way to help you get started but it's also important to use search engine optimisation, or SEO, to build organic traffic to your site. While AdWords will automatically place you at the top of search engine rankings with an advert you will have to continue doing that for ever. SEO can help you get to the first page of rankings naturally and eventually you will receive lots of traffic for free. This is important to increasing your traffic and building your site's legitimacy and authority on your subject.

Be sure to budget the time and money for SEO. It's not cheap and it can take 6-12 months to get your page to the first page of rankings for a number of keywords but it will generate a great amount of free traffic when you get there. It may cost about £300-£600 per month but SEO is truly the best way to start bringing in consistent traffic. Over time, your SEO efforts can help you build a reliable customer base and increase your sales. You're website will now be a true competitor in your niche market and well on it's way to success.

In this digital world of the internet, mobiles, laptops, computers and tablets, online presence has become very important. If you want to grow your business, you need to promote it. Using social media platforms to get the attention is just one step towards your goal.

To be honest, we cannot deny the fact that we don't trust an organization if it doesn't have a website of its own. What is the first thing that we do when we want to know more about a specific company? We browse about it on the internet. Don't we?

A website is the mirror image of your company's status and reputation, it is a place where everything is in one place, sorted and organized.

How to create a website?  Follow these steps to create your own website.

Domain name  · The first step is creating your unique domain name.

· A domain name appears like "xyz.com" and you need to visit a registrar to pay for the name you chose.

· They are easy for people to register in their brains.

· Others like Yahoo, Firefox and Bing are also some great options.

· These search engines are absolutely free and therefore the task of promoting your website becomes very easy.

· Other ways to get your site noticed are conventional methods like word of mouth, newspapers, cold calling etc.

Doughty wondered if this "parquetting of jis", this "gypsum fretwork... all adorning and unenclosed" originated from India. However, the Najd fretwork seems very different from that seen in the Eastern Province and Oman, which are linked to Indian traditions, and rather resembles the motifs and patterns found in ancient Mesopotamia. The rosette, the star, the triangle and the stepped pinnacle pattern of dadoes are all ancient patterns, and can be found all over the Middle East of antiquity. Al-Qassim Province seems to be the home of this art, and there it is normally worked in hard white plaster (though what you see is usually begrimed by the smoke of the coffee hearth). In Riyadh, examples can be seen in unadorned clay.

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Sector-1, Near Mira Road Station, 

Opp. TMT Bus Stop, 

Thane – 401107

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Troika Tech Services

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