Our Project - tools and much more

Two weeks have passed since our project presentation and this blog allows me another opportunity to share more about our project with my SM2010 classmates.

Starting off with a bit of description about our project “Creating your own website”. It had three major components:

Creating a website

Setting up your server

Different tools used

Now everyone has seen a website but when it comes to ‘creating’ your website we get perturbed by the technical things such as server, domain, etc. so we decided to solve this very puzzle through our project and make it simpler for all those interested in creating a website.

Now we were clear on the point that by the end of the project we would have made a fully functional website “KnowYourPC”. This was to serve a dual purpose. On the one hand we were able to implement whatever we had learned and also made a website that included everything we knew about a PC.

So how does a website work?

A website has a domain which is nothing more than just a name. A server is a software/hardware system for running services.

Setting up a server is a very easy job. There is an amazing tool available in the market called as 'XAMPP' which is used for specifically this purpose. You can download the software from <www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html>. Now why did we select this tool only? That is simply because it is very useful and has many advantages. Firstly it is Open source software. So that means anybody can use it, change it, and modify it. Secondly it is Cross-platform. This means that it the available for all operating systems. Lastly, it has one step installation and is very easy to use. So on the whole; it served our purpose quite well.

Coming on to tools, there are several tools available to make a website. So after a bit of searching we narrowed down to 4 tools: Joomla, Wordpress, GoogleSites and iWeb. Having tried out all the tools we came to the conclusion that Wordpress was a really useful tool and suited our needs. Joomla although very powerful is initially a bit difficult to learn. iWeb and GoogleSites are simple tools that are a bit limited in their functionality.

After all this came the day of the presentation. We were nervous (that’s very natural) It was amazing because of the positive vibes from the entire audienceJ. Thank you guys.

During the course of the project we faced many challenges ranging from going home late at night, trying out all tools and finalizing the content.

But overall making this project was a really good experience. We had a lot of fun while making the project. We really got good support from all the classmates with respect to a positive response to a small survey carried out to finalize the content of our website. Really want to extend our heartiest thanks to Kshitiz Bakshi, Ayushi Goyal, Purujit Negi, Akansha Sharma for their continuous encouragement and support throughout.

Amarjeet Sir, we want to thank you for giving us this amazing opportunity to learn so much more and for his inputs from time to time because it was he who suggested that we make a proper website on the PC.

Apoorv Narang 10019

Karan Kalra 10035

Utkarsha Bhardwaj 10093