How I made the official website of my college?

Till January 2007 the official website of our college MANIT was designed and maintained Infocrats pvt. solution ltd. It is a Indore based software company. At the start of new year our computer science department got the assignment of running and maintaining the college site. Also the deadline was decided to be 26th january, the republic day.

A webclub was formed consisting of 9 members under the guidance of teachers. The real problem on the time of starting the site was the control of domain name and configuration of web-server. Finally after a long government’s procedure we got the control panel of domain name manit.ac.in. Also we had only 4 days left for the inauguration of the new website, so we dropped the plan of configuring the local server situtated at the computer center building. We went for world class professional web hosting from a US based server. In the meanwhile, the designers of the webclub were busy in creating the template for the new site by using tools like dreamweaver. But their outcome was not up to the mark, their template was not attractive and also browser dependent. Also that template was not fit in my plans of providing my college with a super dynamic world class college portal. Then I suggested my team to go for some open-source technologies like joomla or phpnuke when I saw the site of NIT surathkal and IIT Kharagpur. We also consulted our one senior who is founder CEO of www.bollywoodsargam. com, he also suggested same idea. My friend Vibhash who is very experienced and professional in this field suggested me joomla and some college templates for it. Vibhash is the guy behind the famous technical blog Tech Tonic. Now it was decided to go for joomla, the free open source.

Joomla! is a free, realeased under the GNU General Public License, award winning, open source content management system written with PHP for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets using a MySQL database. Joomla! includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization.

Finally we used joomla and the basic structure of site was created in just 2 days. And on the 26th january the site was inaugurated by our Director Dr. K. S. Pandey. In 24 hours e-mail addresses are provided to whole college. Still manit.ac.in is under construction. We are trying to implement the facilities like user login, download management system, forums, photo gallery, news, announcements, excellent search all build in to one single system.We will soon convert everything related to colleges online. We will also integrate the present MIS with the college website. In the later stages, we will also develop online registration system, college library management, TPO database and integrate them with the new website of the college. There will be online learning system in our website which is at present available in websites of IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow. I invite suggestions from all my readers to improve this site.

This is a snap of www.manit.ac.in