This website was my first project in the real world. I created an awesome website which had several hundred users, mainly coaches and parents, and it helped organize and inform everyone of the the plans we had.
(View a gallery of my the website in development)
A summary of the things my website did:
- Newsletters
- Email Notifications
- News/Blog posts(Notified subscribers)
- Managed uploads(Admins didn’t need FTP, etc.)
- Allowed easy access to Calendar and RSVP to events
I really didn’t want to update this website my self. I knew what being a ‘web master’ for the team would be and I wasn’t going to have it. I made this dynamic website to allow those who knew what needed to be on the website to put it what they wanted on the website themselves.
Things which at the time were very complex for me. In reality they are pretty complex to handle correctly although looking back I didn’t do it very well. It worked however which was the important thing. Issues I had though were in sanitizing inputs with ASP.NET in the admin section. Luckily my admin area was secure thanks to the ASP.NET login system and my users were not technical enough to try executing an SQL injection but there were many errors which they didn’t understand due to misplaced (‘) and (“). I was able to use ASP.NET and Visual Studio to make the website and maintain it until the day I lost the code. Then I moved on to hack a new calendar in to the website while also working on the Grand-daddy STWEB2.
Some lessons I’ve learned from this website were:
- ASP.NET controls are slow
- ASP.NET doesn’t compress or optimize easily
- The simple project always gets more complicated
- ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR CODE!
- Know your users- In this case they knew very little about computers so everything needed to be friendly
Overall I loved making this website and got a whole bunch of hours from making it as well. I created the Project Manager application simply to track the hours I worked on this project alone. And it did a pretty good job of doing just that.
