DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT OF A HINDI WEBSITE

Seeking a talented web designer to develop a new professional quality website (like the templates found at [login to view URL]). The intended website [login to view URL] will be a miniature showcase for an international lingo-cultural organization - packed with beautiful graphics, meticulous details, a stunning homepage flash animation, some tasteful audio/video, and a solid overall design and information content. This effort will involve the design and development of a complete website. The design must be state-of-the-art adhering to W3C standards and recommendations, and the coding must be of highest standard using clear separation of applicable HTML/PHP/JS/DBCalls-Stored Procedures. The code must be kept clean and streamlined by avoiding unnecessary tags and formatting. Scalability and portability is of importance to us. So, the site must be designed with future expandability in mind, and the code must be platform and OS independent (except the binding). The website will be based on an integrated theme of ‘People - Language (Hindi) - Culture (Indian culture on world stage)’, and be attractive enough to standout and get noticed. The site will have two versions: English, and Hindi. Hindi will be the default version. The majority of web pages however would be mixed Hindi and English text. The web designer must have excellent creative graphic design skills, page layout, and advanced web programming knowledge in order to fully complete this project. Absolute attention to details is a must. Expertise in Hindi fonts and Unicode is an absolute must as all the text, both in Hindi and English, in the website will be the live-text (Unicode encoded fonts) and not an image of the text. A classy animated slide show (as in [login to view URL]) is desired on the homepage header with a selection of photos to shutter or fade in & out, rolling & stationary text, and a revolving globe. Since 90% of the website content will be populated in-house later over time, an important desired feature is a Content Manager to modify simple text, edit and uniformly add pages in-house (without a developer) by setting default color, font, and layout while the author fills in the text to easily update web content. The designer will be expected to present a detailed design along with 3 prototype layouts showing a two-page concept of what s/he has in mind - with an example of a homepage and a secondary page. Designer must be willing to make multiple revisions until we are satisfied (we will of course minimize it). Once the design is approved, the designer will complete the basic structure of the website along with Content Manager and a backend Database in the 1st phase of the project. Many tabs in the Menu are just the placeholders. The content for them will be filled in-house later using the Content Manager. The developer needs to provide sample page setups for a few of them, and populate the content for about 25 short pages now. The remaining features with Shopping Cart & Payment Processing, Streaming Audio, and Search Engine Optimization and Submission will be done in the 2nd phase. At the design stage however, all features must be thought out in advance and incorporated in the design. 1st phase is critical because it requires creativity and a good eye for page layout and art & graphics as well as coding. There are a few competing requirements that need to be balanced, especially graphics/flash with fast loading pages. The whole website or the entire page cannot be in flash. To keep the development cost down, we will use our current host GoDaddy’s built-in Web Stats (AW Stats), Shopping Cart (osCommerce/ZeCart/PayPal), and Database (SQL) with proper hooks. GoDaddy also provides plug-ins for Guest Book, and Photo Gallery. It supports CGI, Perl, SSI, PHP, FrontPage Exts, Joomla, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash and MySQL on Linux hosting. The Telnet/SSH, and .NET are not supported. Please see [login to view URL] for GoDaddy’s Linux Hosting Guide for details. If the Content Manager or any other piece is built using 3rd party or open source components, the utilized software tools and components should be license free otherwise all licensing & copyright issues must be cleared with us in advance. The payment will be based on 3 progressive milestones: 50% after phase I of the website is installed and functional with all deliverables, 40% after phase II is installed and functional with all deliverables, and 10% after 3 months of post-project support for bug fixing and necessary modifications. We will provide all the text content, photos for the photo gallery, and some stock images. The designer should however be able to procure and apply additional high-quality royalty free graphics and images necessary to enhance the site. We expect thorough testing of each page along with spell check and proof reading before it is presented to us. We also expect the developer to employ software-quality procedures such as peer-review of the code to make sure it is maintainable by someone other than the developer. Please read the document for details and specifics on this work. It is important that you understand all requirements before bidding. In order to be considered, your bid must contain the URLs of a minimum of 3 relevant sites – with at least one in Unicode Hindi - depicting Flash, Graphics, Page Layout and Design sophistication of your work. We will check the references. Also, indicate which coding language(s) and technologies will you use to develop this site. Bids without the sample work and explanation to the above question will not be considered. After preliminary selection we will ask to submit a quick mock up of the Home Page before final selection. If the job is done to specifications and we are impressed with your work and qualifications, we will consider hiring you for other ongoing development work.