Something about Website Design

Every satisfied customer on every website starts in the hands of a experienced web designer. This professional has the ability to capture the client’s vision, bring the design elements to life, and ultimately create a website that appeals to consumers. This is not easy task since it involves both creative and technical abilities, so a top web designer is experienced in many different disciplines. 

Likewise, an in-demand website designer will also have insights into the business and marketing worlds to understand how a website can meet a client’s needs, convey their brand, and help embrace new customers online. This knowledge is used to maximize things like lead generation and overall engagement levels.

Web Design vs. Web Development In A Nutshell

In essence, web design refers to both the aesthetic portion of the website and it’s usability. Web designers use various design programs such as Adobe Photoshop to create the layout and other visual elements of the website. Web Developers on the other hand, take a website design and actually make a functioning website from it. Web developers use HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and other programming languages to bring to life the design files. 

Web Design – A Closer Look

Web designers must always begin by considering a client’s website objectives and then move on to an Information Architecture (IA) to set a website’s information hierarchy and help guide the design process. Next, web designers can start creating wireframes and finally move to the design stage. Web designers may use several basic design principles to achieve an aesthetically pleasing layout which also offers excellent user experience.

Design Principles

Balance – It’s important for web designers to create a balanced layout. In web design we refer to heavy (large and dark colors) and light (small and lighter colors) elements. Using the correct proportion of each is critical to achieving a balanced website design.

Contrast– In color theory, contrasting colors are ones placed opposite one another on the color wheel (see also complementary colors). Web design offers a few other areas where contrast is applicable. Designers look at contrasting sizes, textures and shapes to define and draw attention to certain sections of the website.

Emphasis– We touched on this a bit when discussing contrast. Emphasis is a design principles founded in the intentional “highlighting” of certain important elements of the website layout. It’s important to note that if you emphasize everything on the page you end up emphasizing nothing. Imagine a page in a book where 80% of the content is highlighted in yellow…does anything really stand out? This is the time to take a look at that Information Architecture for direction.

Consistency – Also called repetition or rhythm, consistency is a critical web design principle. For example, clean and consistent navigation provides the best user experience for your website visitors.

Unity – Unity is the relationship between the various parts of the website layout and the composition as a whole. Based in the Gestalt theory, unity deals with how the human brain visually organizes information by grouping elements into categories.

Web Development – A Closer Look

Web developers, sometimes called programmers, take the design created and build a fully functioning website. To put it (very) simply, think of the design as a non-interactive “picture” of a website. Developers take that design and break it up into it’s components. They then either use just HTML or a more dynamic approach incorporating programming languages such as PHP to develop the various website pages. More advanced web developers may choose to utilize a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla in order to streamline development and allow clients an easy way to maintain and update their website.

Web developers may convert a static layout into a dynamic website by using image and content sliders, active states for links and buttons, and other interactive elements.

Defining your project and writing a perfect job description

It pays to do a little bit of homework before hiring a web designer since it can have a drastic effect on the overall price and the quality received. For example, a simple website without any large customizations can be launched with a pre-made theme at a minimal cost. This may not be suitable for websites anticipating lots of custom layouts and/or extensive traffic, so it’s good to know up front what type of designer will be required or if you’ll also need a developer.

Web Design Job Post Template

Take a look at an example web design project description. Keep in mind that many people use the term “job description,” but a full job description is only needed for employees. When attracting a freelancer as an independent contractor, you typically just need a requirement of work, job post, or any other document that describes the work to be done.

<Project Title>

Project Overview

ABC Company is looking for a web designer to create a custom theme for our e-commerce store. This project will be to create a responsive, mobile-friendly design.

Deliverables include:

Mock-ups for each page of e-commerce site (approximately 20 pages)

Custom navigation and HTML elements

Graphics integrated into two homepage carousels (12 images total)

Setup of online shopping basket

Deadline for deliverables:

All tasks must be completed by <date>.

This project requires the following skills:

Expertise working with <design software>, <mobile/responsive framework>, <Adobe Photoshop>, or <CMS template builder>

E-commerce experience is a plus

Understands responsive design

The work will also require a great view for detail and preliminary retail experience, preferably in the electronics/automation industry. We would like to begin this project no later than <date>, so we plan on hiring a candidate by the end of the week.

Analyzing Web Designer Profiles & Portfolios and Hiring Freelancer

After posting a detailed, well-thought-out project description that defines what you’ll need from your web designer, it’s time to start analyzing proposals. How do you select the top talented designer for your project?

Experience, Smartness & Work

When it comes to finding the top talented web designer, start by reviewing for portfolio samples that match your requirement. Be sure to ask freelancers about their experience with other facets of design as well, and consider the overall goal for the website being built. 

Finally, it’s important to verify that a web designer understands the brand in question and its overall goals online. A qualified professional will be able to give a list of any expected obstacles, plus estimate the amount of time the project will take and the total cost. Since complex website projects could require months to complete, a good working relationship is essential.

With the right freelance web designer, you can end up with a finished product that brings your vision to life. Just take the time to create a detailed project description, review each freelancer’s proposal and portfolio, and ask them a few web design interview questions to determine if they’re the right fit for the project.

Python and Java both lay claims to being among the top five most popular programming languages at any given time, with Java usually just ahead of Python. However, Python’s popularity is growing at a tremendous rate, and Python overtake Java in 2018.

Python is a high-level, interpreted, interactive and object-oriented scripting language. Python was designed to be highly readable which uses English keywords frequently whereas other languages use punctuation and it has fewer syntactical constructions than other languages.

Java and Python have many similarities. Both languages have strong cross-platform support and extensive standard libraries. They both treat (nearly) everything as objects. Both languages compile to bytecode, but Python is (usually) compiled at runtime.

Python versus Java:

1. Java language is more about syntax, if one can forget to add curly braces or semicolon in the end then this will show error as your output. But there is nothing like that with python there is no need of semicolon and curly braces in the end but python follows indentation process so that it will make your code readable.
2. Java programming is statically typed means that one has to explicitly mention the data type of variable. If datatype (int, float, double, character) isn’t mentioned then the error can occur in program. Python is dynamically typed means if one has directly assigned a value to a variable at the runtime then it'll assume data type.
3. Java codes are more complex than python codes. Try to write a hello world program in both then you'll observe the complexness of the code, four lines of code in Java and same hello world program in python are of 1-line code.
4. Python has a large and robust standard library makes Python score over other programming languages. The standard library allows you to choose from a wide range of modules according to your precise needs. Each module further enables you to add functionality to the Python application without writing additional code.
5. Python is an open source programing language, Python helps you to curtail software system development cost significantly. You’ll even use many open source Python frameworks, libraries and development tools to curtail development time without increasing development cost. You even have choice to select from a wide range of open source Python frameworks and development tools per your precise needs.
6. Interpreted, with tools like IDLE, you can also interpret Python instead of compiling it. While this reduces the program length, and boosts productivity, it also results in slower overall execution.
7. Python is considered to be the most favorable language for Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT and much more.
8. Python has a more unified support model than Java for the first time, and open source developers are focusing their efforts on the latest version of the language.
9. After working on large projects in both languages, I feel secure saying that Python’s syntax is more concise than Java’s. It’s easier to get up and running quickly with a new project in Python than it is in Java.
10. The most two popular frameworks for Python are Django and Flask. Flask is a micro web framework, it gives you the basic functionalities you’d need like routing requests without much overhead. Django is a more featured option and can help you build a powerful backend while capitalizing on efficiency and security, Django is equipped with a powerful ORM layer which facilitates dealing databases and performing different operations on the data.

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence powered piece of software in a device, application, web site or alternative networks that try to complete consumer’s needs and then assist them to perform a selected task. Now a days almost every company has a chatbot deployed to interact with the users.

Chatbots are often used in many departments, businesses and every environment. They are artificial narrow intelligence (ANI). Chatbots only do a restricted quantity of task i.e. as per their design. However, these Chatbots make our lives easier and convenient. The trend of Chatbots is growing rapidly between businesses and entrepreneurs, and are willing to bring chatbots to their sites. You might also produce it yourself using Python.

How do chatbots work?

There are broadly two variants of chatbots: Rule-Based and Self learning.

1. In a Rule-based approach, a bot answers questions based on some rules on that it is trained on. The rules outlined could be very easy to very complicated. The bots will handle easy queries but fail to manage complicated ones.
2. The Self learning bots are those that use some Machine Learning-based approaches and are positively a lot of economical than rule-based bots. These bots may be of additional two types: Retrieval based or Generative.
   1. In retrieval-based models, Chatbot uses the message and context of conversation for selecting the best response from a predefined list of bot messages.
   2. Generative bots can generate the answers and not always reply with one of the answers from a set of answers. This makes them more intelligent as they take word by word from the query and generates the answers.

Building a chatbot using Python

NLP:

The field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers is called Natural Language Processing. NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way. However, if you are new to NLP, you can read Natural Language Processing in Python.

NLTK:

NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries.

Importing necessary libraries

import nltk 

import numpy as np 

import random 

import string # to process standard python strings

Copy the content in text file named ‘chatbot.txt’, read in the text file and convert the entire file content into a list of sentences and a list of words for further pre-processing.

f=open('chatbot.txt','r',errors = 'ignore')

raw=f.read()

raw=raw.lower()# converts to lowercase

nltk.download('punkt') # first-time use only

nltk.download('wordnet') # first-time use only

sent_tokens = nltk.sent_tokenize(raw)# converts to list of sentences 

word_tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(raw)# converts to list of words

Pre-processing the raw text

We shall now define a function called LemTokens which will take as input the tokens and return normalized tokens.

lemmer = nltk.stem.WordNetLemmatizer()

#WordNet is a semantically-oriented dictionary of English included in NLTK.

def LemTokens(tokens):     

return [lemmer.lemmatize(token) for token in tokens]

remove_punct_dict = dict((ord(punct), None) for punct in string.punctuation) 

def LemNormalize(text):     

return LemTokens(nltk.word_tokenize(text.lower().translate(remove_punct_dict)))

Keyword matching

Define a function for greeting by bot i.e. if user’s input is greeting, the bot shall return a greeting response.

GREETING_INPUTS = ("hello", "hi", "greetings", "sup", "what's up","hey",)

GREETING_RESPONSES = ["hi", "hey", "*nods*", "hi there", "hello", "I am glad! You are talking to me"]

def greeting(sentence):

for word in sentence.split():

if word.lower() in GREETING_INPUTS:

return random.choice(GREETING_RESPONSES)

Generate responses

To generate a response from our bot for input queries, the concept of document similarity is used. Therefore, we start by importing necessary modules.

From scikit learn library, import the TFidf vector to convert a collection of raw documents to a matrix of TF-IDF features

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer

Also, import cosine similarity module from scikit learn library

from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

This will be used to find the similarity between words entered by the user and therefore the words within the corpus. This can be the simplest possible implementation of a chatbot.

Define a function response that searches the user’s vocalization for one or more known keywords and returns one of several possible responses. If it doesn’t find the input matching any of the keywords, it returns a response: “I’m sorry! I don’t understand you”

def response(user_response):

robo_response=''

sent_tokens.append(user_response)

TfidfVec = TfidfVectorizer(tokenizer=LemNormalize, stop_words='english')

tfidf = TfidfVec.fit_transform(sent_tokens)

vals = cosine_similarity(tfidf[-1], tfidf)

idx=vals.argsort()[0][-2]

flat = vals.flatten()

flat.sort()

req_tfidf = flat[-2]

if(req_tfidf==0):

robo_response=robo_response+"I am sorry! I don't understand you"

return robo_response

else:  robo_response = robo_response+sent_tokens[idx]

return robo_response

I have tried to explain in simple steps how you can build your own chatbot using NLTK and of course it’s not an intelligent one.

I hope you guys have enjoyed reading.

Happy Learning!!!