TITLE: DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING DATABASE DRIVEN WEB SITE USING COLD FUSION APPLICATION SERVER TECHNOLOGY

DESIGN: I have design and develop a fully database driven modal web site of my own institute (DA-IICT) as well as IAITA (Indian Association of Information Technology in Agriculture) using ColdFusion as application server technology. The website consists of approximately 80 to 85 pages (approximately 30 – 35 pages for the Administration i.e. the administrator of the site can delete, update and add a record in the database as well as he / she can see the response of the users of his / her website through HTML interface. By response I mean to say the information like Feedback form, Contact Us form, Enquiry form, Alumni section, Message Board form (Here there is well login and registration forms provided with all technical facility as you see in commercial web sites over internet such as Rediff or Yahoo). I also have provided a very feasible search facility to search out the information pertaining to the database of this website by just clicking a simple search button. For the IAITA web site I have prepared a registration form which is connected to mail server i.e. when the user will send this form by just clicking the submit button, the information provided by him / her will directly go to administrator section of the Mail server in the form of a simple mail and a automatic confirmation message will be send to the users E-mail address pertaining the information he / she has submitted. For this ColdFusion really helped me a lot because of some special Tags such as < CFFORM>, <CFMAIL> and < CFPARAM >. I really don’t know the counter parts of these tags in ASP or other server side scripting languages.

THEME & COLLECTION OF INFORMATION: I really worked hard in order to prepare a suitable theme for this website. Whether it is the type of information or the flow of information, I worked hard to distinguish the different types of users of this website and for this first of all I surfed a lot of websites of national as well as international issue and try to catch the information (both type and flow) which they have provided. I also saved these websites in different folders on my hard disk to learn behind the funda of designing a website. I don’t know that whether you are familiar with this funda or not, if not just try to save a website in your computer’s hard disk, you will see a folder along with the html file. When you will open this folder you will learn the funda of designing the web pages.

TYPE OF USER:
Any way I have categorized the users of this web site in two sections.
A): Active Users
B): Passive Users

Active Users: by active user I mean to say that the kind of users who just want to fetch the information of their interest with out wasting the time in searching the contents of whole website. So the information for this category of users should be provided on the very first page of website i.e. site’s Home page. And this is the reason I have changed the general design principles of designing an Institutional website. In general you will not find an ENTER button on any home page of Institutional website (you usually see this button in most of the Pornographic websites) But I have changed the concept here a little bit by providing a ENTER button on home page of this website for the sake of user’s freedom that whether he / she wants the information from the home page or would like to enter in it in order to fetch all the information of the institute.

Information which pertains to an active user can be categorized in the following section. This information must be present on the Home page of any Institutional website.

• Search Facility to your database.
• Enquiry Form.
• Contact Us Information
• Feedback Form.
• Intranet (if it is there in your institute).
• Message Board.
• Alumni Section.
• Site Map
• Any other active information button such as IAITA for this website
• All types of Registration Forms (For this web site I have prepared summer project registration forms for the different companies keeping different courses provided by this institute in mind. So for the simplicity of user I have put these icons on the Home page.
• And really some little but interesting information such as:
Jobs / recruitment @ DA-IICT
Tenders @ DA-IICT
Download application forms and prospectus
Placement M. Tech.
Placement MS IT
Placement MS IT in Agriculture
Calendar of Events
Application Status
Result of Entrance Exams

Really this is a huge information to present on Home Page, so the comfort ability of the lay out of this page I have used an auto scrolling java applet.