Designing

Web Design

UI Design

Corporate presentation

3D modeling and animation

“Looks are not everything it’s the core inside that matters. But you need good looks to attract people to explore your core”

Website Design

Where does web designing start?

Most common answers would be creativity, choice of colours, imagination, flashy look and so on. But, we at Athena Inc. would beg to differ. For us, web designing starts with your business need. What is the business need that this website is expected to address?

Your website can be, and should be, a valuable business asset. Picture your website as your business premises on the web. Visitors, your potential customers, will have the same interaction with this online premise, as your physical premises. It is important to send the right signals. Does this place look professional? Does it give an impression of stability? Is this place capable enough of meeting my needs? Your design needs to answer these questions favourably.

Designing

Website Design

A web design should be a reflection of your business and the messages that it conveys to the customers. But it does not end there. It has to facilitate business enquiries, display the right products in the right way and help customers make an informed buying decision.

Help you with designs that impress, designs that work and designs that drive site traffic and eventually sales. More importantly, we help you build a business on the web. Our team of business analysts and designers, take great pride in building sustainable businesses on the web.

We at Athena Inc.

Designing

User Interface Design

Success of a product or service as perceived by the customer is measured by usability and acceptance. Technological innovations do not meet practical expectations unless they are coupled with a user interface that masks their complexity and transform them into usable products. Technology alone may not win user acceptance and subsequent marketability. The User Experience, or how the user experiences the end product, is the key to acceptance.

More intuitive the user interface the easier it is to use, and the easier it is to use and the less expensive to use it. The better the user interface the easier it is to train people to use it, reducing your training costs. The better your user interface the less help people will need to use it, reducing your support costs. The better your user interface the more your users will like to use it, increasing their satisfaction with the work that you have done.

Designing

User Interface Design

Since this is solely about the user, designing an user interface does not even start unless we get the following questions answered clearly

* • Who are our targeted users? * • What are the user's goals? * • What are the user's skills and experience? * • What are the user's needs?

Once we get our answers, we use our guiding principles to come up with an interface that makes products marketable.

1. The structure principleYour design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with your overall user interface architecture.

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User Interface Design

# 2. The simplicity principleYour design should make simple, common tasks simple to do, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.

# 3. The visibility principleYour design should keep all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with too many alternatives or confuse them with unneeded information.

# 4. The feedback principleYour design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.

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User Interface Design

# 5. The tolerance principleYour design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.

# 6. The reuse principleYour design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.

Designing

Corporate Presentation

A critical aspect of marketing is how well we present ourselves and what we have to offer. Human tendency to accept something that is presentable is well documented. Sadly, though corporate presentations are one of the most under estimated and under focused entities.

Presentation can be used to send the right signals to your audience. Well made presentation makes you stand out from a host of potential bidders. We create presentations for you which enhance audience interest, distinguish you from the crowd and translate into better opportunities and better sales.

We create live or web-based presentations, either in flash or power point based. Multimedia features and creativity underlines your ideas and concepts. Whether it’s a corporate presentation or a product presentation, we create solutions that will fit your organization just right.

Designing

3D Modeling & Animation

Do you want to get your products, modelled in the 3D world?

We provide technically correct and visually realistic 3D models. Our 3D specialists can develop the model taking into consideration the mesh count to create models of low polygon mesh.With the right blend of expertise and creativity, our team draws out all the dimensions of the model in terms of height, weight and depth with accuracy.We have the expertise to add extra value to your product by bestowing effects that enhance the look of the products with different lighting and shadow effects.Backed by strong technical know-how, rich experience and expertise, our team can create the most impressive and realistic 3d Models.

3D AnimationOver the years the 3D animation industry has witnessed sweeping changes. Indeed 3D animation has gone beyond the entertainment venues, floating into areas like education training and games.

Designing

3D Modeling & Animation

Movie production studios, Universities, Corporates, Government Organizations, Industries, gaming companies etc. have identified the potential of 3D animation in their day to day activities.

Wether it is interactive learning in schools, cartoon characters on your tv screens, architectural walkthroughs or detailed life like views of engines, 3D animation plays a vital role.

3D animations are being used widely in the areas of:

Designing

ArchitectureMedicalAerospaceEngineeringBiotechnologyAutomobileGamesMoviesAdvertising

Innovative Software that Works

Web developmentCMSCRMe-Commerce

Rich Internet Application

Desktop Application

“I need someone who works day and night, weeks and weekends, alone handles thousand people’s work, produces

error free output every time, doesn’t fatigue, doesn’t complaint and doesn’t crib about paychecks.”

Web Development

Simply put, web development is the science that runs the websites. It is the engine that makes the website perform the job for which it exists. The business processes of a website are run by the code behind the scenes. A typical business website needs several utilities in order to service customer needs.

Some of the most common are:

• Accept and store user preferences

• Member registration, login and password authentication

• Display search results

• Perform complex calculations and present the results

• Interact with the database to retrieve and store information

Innovative Software

Web Development

• Remember user choices as they shuffle through various pages of the website

• Capture user information and statistics

• Send emails and alerts

Web development is more than merely a few lines of code. It has to be able to withstand a barrage of requests from several users. It has to have a very high uptime. Should be maintainable and should be flexible enough to handle software upgrades. It should allow seamless addition or removal of features.

Innovative Software

Content Management System

Websites have undergone rapid changes over the last few years. Initial websites were static and did not change much either in terms of appearance or content. The next stage was dynamic web sites where the user actions generated variable response. The ability to execute business processes on the web also developed during this stage. Recent times saw websites that were being constantly updated. Contents changed at regular intervals to beat the monotony. Monthly, fortnightly or even daily updation became the norm depending on the nature and the purpose of the website.

This development, though calls for continuous maintenance. Either have web designers and developers in house or outsource maintenance to someone else. Both options though, are as expensive as the other.

Content Management Systems came into existence to solve this problem. A Content Management System is a Web application that makes content authoring and delivery easy.

Innovative Software/ Web Development

Content Management System

It enables users to quickly and efficiently build, deploy, and maintain content-rich web sites by streamlining the web publishing process.

Popularity of CMS is attributed to the fact that, content can be managed by individuals with no web designing or programming knowledge. It provides a centralized location where all (or designated) members of an organization can provide and access information.

Years of experience in providing web solutions, puts us in a position to provide you with easy-to-use, easy-to-update, robust and scalable Content management systems.

Innovative Software/ Web Development

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the art of managing information and interaction with existing and potential customers for sustainable benefit. The role of CRM is to collect customer information through various interactions, process it and present it in a form that helps customer facing executives serve the customers better.

Innovative Software/ Web Development

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM is more than just software. It is a way of enforcing business strategies, maintaining customer relations and sharing a consistent view of the customer with your entire organization.

Benefits include consistent improvement in customer service, shorter sales cycle, better performance of targeted promotions, higher revenues, increased productivity and lower cost of attracting and retaining customers.

Every organization has unique CRM needs and hence a single solution does not fit all. This is where Athena Inc. bring value to your organization. Our solutions are based on a deep understanding of your business and the dynamics of your organization. In addition to studying the business model we also lay special emphasis on the customer touch points for your business.

Innovative Software/ Web Development

e-Commerce

This is a form of web development most frequently required on business websites. Electronic commerce is buying and selling of goods and services through the internet.

As in a physical store, users can view the products on display, check and compare prices, view product specifications and details, add items to a shopping cart and make payment when they checkout. Only difference being that in case of products, they will have to be shipped to the customer after the purchase.

We help you design a store, integrate shopping cart software and integrate with payment gateway to receive payments. The biggest advantages of e-commerce are low setup cost, low maintenance cost and immediate payment receipts.

Innovative Software/ Web Development

Rich Internet Applications

While html and http combination can be used to perform almost all business logic on the web, they do not always provide the best of user experience. Rich Internet Applications fulfill the void left by html.

For example, a website selling custom designed T-shirts can allow the user multiple levels of choices. They can select the type of T-Shirt either round neck or v-neck, than they can select the colour and the size, they can select the design they wish on their T-shirt and so on. This application may very well be developed with plain html and php. But, if you wish to really wow the client, then you should go for a rich internet application. User can make his choices and immediately the application reflects them.

As another example, consider the CEO of a firm who wishes to analyze sales data. You could give him a plain html application where he sees a lot of data and then decides which of it is currently useful to him. Or you could create a dashboard application where he sees data and calculations segregated by categories.

Innovative Software

Rich Internet Applications

He can then drill down deeper into the category that interests him and easily view the relevant matrix. Such is the usability power than a rich internet applications bring to the web.

Athena Inc., can help you design rich internet applications that distinguish your business in the eyes of the customer. We can also build innovative dashboards that will bring to life key business matrices in real time.

Innovative Software

Desktop Applications

Businesses run on processes and systems. The value chain of an enterprise runs on one or more of machine centered, human centered or information centered processes. Technology can help your organization streamline and improve processes at every stage of the value chain.

Software speeds up processes, reduces dependencies, improves efficiency, reduces error and most importantly frees up human mind to think about business strategies rather than the daily nuances of work.

Desktop applications are generally referred to as management applications. They can help your organization manage almost everything from resources to accounts and inventories to emails and marketing. Data collection, distribution and analysis is best handled by an automated software.

Innovative Software

Desktop Applications

Athena Inc, adds double value in the field of desktop application development. We not only develop software but also guide you in terms of the software that you need. Depending on your business we suggest software that generates definite savings in time, cost and resources.

Innovative Software

Consultancy

This is the area where we can add the maximum value to your business. We have ventured into an area which was hitherto considered the playground of large IT consultancies. As a (intentionally) small company this is our single largest distinguishing factor. The benefit that you get out of this is that, you now get expert consultancy at a very nominal price.

Small and medium enterprises today are faced with a peculiar dilemma. They appreciate the role that information technology can play for them.

“Am caught in a maze and do not know where to go. I know, what I need is right in there but which one is it? The right choice spells prosperity, the wrong one spells doom. ”

Consultancy

They understand that technology can simplify and quicken their processes, make them efficient and generate revenues. But, today’s market is flooded with diverse software and technologies, add to that the prevalence of tools and gadgets and the choice becomes increasingly complex. The cost involved and the lack of knowledge complicates matters further.

This leaves organizations with two choices; either learn the nuances of technology themselves or have an in house expert. Both options are expensive and create dependencies on individuals.

Athena Inc. adds a unique third dimension to this problem. We offer on demand consultancy. We study and analyze your business, identify the areas where technology will help you the most, come up with several options, study the ROI of each and suggest the most viable solution. You can then get it developed from us or any other provider of your choice. You get the benefit of expert advice at a fractional cost since you do not have to higher full time experts.

Internet Marketing

“Everyone should see me, everyone should come to me. I should be able to sell to the world right from where I am. My limited resources should not stop me from playing on the world stage. Am I asking for too much??? ”

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization

Organizations create websites for their business with all the right intent. But, floating a website is not the end; in fact it’s just the beginning. Website serves little purpose until it attracts visitors. When you consider the fact that, the internet is host to millions of websites with thousands of them competing in the same space, you realize how daunting can be the prospect of getting people to visit your particular website.

As always knowledge is the key to solving problems and our problem is no exception. Almost all new visitors, come to your website through search engines. For example, most will search for keywords like “fashion designers in New York”, rather than type in a url like www.xyzfashinos.com. So, it becomes vital, that when people search for keywords related to your business, the search engine should list your website. And also, it should be listed as high as possible.

“You and me could conquer the world …. Only if I could find you”

Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization

One of the most common myth among service providers is that mere submissions to search engine will enhance their chances of getting a higher rank. Though, this is an essential step, this by itself does not improve your chances. Instead, search engine optimization is a science in itself and needs painstaking efforts with several mini- reorganizations in between.

This is where our experience with Search Engine Optimization will help you. Search engines have software that travels all over the web trying to identify websites with meaningful content. Our understanding of these software help us to empower your website with the criteria that they are looking for.

Internet Marketing

Search Engine Marketing

One of the fields that internet has revolutionized is marketing. Gone are the days when large scale marketing was associated with large budgets. Marketing at a national level was considered a privilege of large companies.

Internet today enables worldwide marketing opportunities at a fraction of the cost compared to other media. Small firms with constrained budgets can sell to the entire world.

Our experience with internet marketing can help you expand your markets, reach out to segments that were till now very expensive and save a lot on marketing expenses.

“Wish I could read people’s mind. When someone thinks of services that I offer, I could pop up right in front of them ahead of all competitors”

Internet Marketing

Search Engine MarketingThis refers to placing focused ads with the search engines. We analyze your business, identify meaningful keywords and place ads that appeal. We can manage the entire campaign for you and let you concentrate on furthering your business.

Email marketingEmail marketing is the sending of emails to targeted consumers. We help you identify target customers, maintain user database, send emails, track responses and maintain the campaign from start to finish.

Banner adsPlacing banners on popular websites. When users click this banner they are directed to your website where they can see more information about the product and schemes. We design attractive banners for you, place them on strategic websites and analyze the performance of each banner.

Search Engine Marketing

Internet Marketing

Our Clients

We are happy to have create business value for the following clients:

About Us

Athena Inc. was created by two diverse individuals. One a keen enthusiast of fine art and a highly talented graphic designer while the other a tech savvy software engineer. While these two had different ideas, different thoughts and different skill sets they had one thing in common which was a passion to make technology work for business.

They observed that though the technology was advancing at a rapid pace, businesses rarely kept pace in using it for their benefit. Organizations either focused on creating flashy looking websites or just got friends or relatives to put together a web front. In either case these websites did not generate any returns on investment.

Athena’s focus has been on providing the businesses with tools and ammunitions that allows them to use technology to generate revenues. This meant a significant diversion from the typical website company that concentrates on domain registration, web hosting and generating low cost template based websites.

About Us

Our business model allows us to leverage the power of the web and associated technologies to build applications and interfaces that compliment our customers’ business.

Our solutions are not based on available technologies nor on what is the de facto standard in the market. It is primarily based on your business and the business idea that you want to give wings to.