Kerala State IT Mission Launches Education Portal
We’d written earlier about Sakshat, the educational portal launched by the Indian government. Now, the Kerala State IT Mission has launched an educational website in Malayalam – Padavukal.org. According to this report in the Hindu Business Line:
the site has over 600 pages of multimedia content on a wide range of topics such as courses of study, different professions, a directory of educational institutions, distance learning options, studying abroad, a list of recruitment agencies, entrance exams, essays on career development, self employment, finance options including scholarships and loans, aptitude tests and so on.
I couldn’t verify it because I don’t know Malayalam. I just don’t understand the need for a portal separate from Sakshat (badly designed as it is) and why they’ve chosen to make a Flash based site, since a basic HTML would be far more accessible. How much did this portal cost? Or, for that matter, how much did Sakshat cost?
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hi nikhil
I think Padavukal.org is using flash to overcome the font problem which all indian language sites are facing. But as a person who is exposed to language computing i have a strong opinion that this is [using flash] is not the way out.
They would have used unicode font. And i fully agree with your opinion about the bad design of both sites, that is sakshat and Padavuka. Do not expect any thing more from our govt paid [our money ] babus.
regards
harikrishnan
oneindia.in
This is a pretty neat design. Flash Player is installed on almost every client browser and across operating systems. Typically, there are issues with Flash mostly from an SEO perspective. But if the government is behind this, they can ensure adequate brand identity and not worry about SEO.
A good effort.
I agree with Hari Puttar. Design is pretty good. I see that they have used some non-Unicode font for inside pages. Flash is becoming the recourse for Indic language based sites that want to avoid font conflicts, thanks to Unicode screwing up things by not allotting enough code points for Indian languages.