Mini project : Website for interior designing

Topic Selection : There were many options available, though this time the deadline was much closer without any hope for extension(less than 2 weeks). In order not to repeat the earlier mistakes, we discussed available alternatives for first two days and finally came up with INTERIOR DESIGNING. This one seemed to be related to our daily life and hence having practical importance.
Project Development : Without any further delay, we choosed to go by RAD model and started to gather informations regarding interior designing. As usual, we divided this gathering part among us as :

•  Interior : including different parts of home and office,
•  Furnitures : appropriate for the required interior,
•  Vaastu : involved in designing various important parts of home and office,
•  Softwares : required to develop webpages, drop down menu, mini-server to launch our website and manage pictures for slideshow

Though the first three were completed within next 2 days, but softwares were yet to be finalised in terms of compatibility of usage by all the team members.
Softwares used finally : 

• DREAMWEAVER:

        Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver) is a web development application originally created by Macromedia, and is now developed by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP.

• SOTHINK-FREE-MENU-BUILDER:

        Free DHTML Menu, an easy to use drop down menu builder, which helped us to create the clear navigation bar in clicks. This JavaScript menu creator makes cross-browser web menu without DHTML and JavaScript experience needed. DHTML Menu freeware provides menu templates to simplify design work. The menu appearance can be fully customized.

• WAMPSERVER:

        WAMP, a form of mini-server that can run on almost any Windows Operating System. WAMP includes Apache 2, PHP 5 (SMTP ports are disabled), and MySQL (phpMyAdmin and SQLitemanager are installed to manage your databases) preinstalled.An icon on the taskbar tray displays the status of WAMP, letting you know if:

1. WAMP is running but no services are opened (the icon will appear red),
2. WAMP is running and one service is opened (the icon will appear yellow)  or
3. WAMP is running with all services opened (the icon will appear white).

        Apache and MySQL are considered to be services (they can be disabled by left-clicking on the taskbar icon, guiding your cursor over the service you wish to disable and selecting “Stop Service”). The files/web pages that are hosted on your WAMP server can be accessed by typing http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in the address bar of your web browser. WAMP must be running in order to access either of the above addresses. If you would like to share your files/web pages with others, click on the icon located on your taskbar tray and select “Put Online.” You must have access to the Internet in order to continue.

• ADOBE PHOTOSHOP:

        A computer pixel drawing program used mainly to create images that have
complex texture and shading such as photographs and paintings - the other type of computer 
drawing program is line and shape based (vector drawing) and is better for drawing high precision 
images with lines.
 Here I have shown few snapshots of our webpage : 

Finally, after preparing all the webpages with pics from interiodecor, the next challenge was to link all the web pages and relate the entries from the end user to the MySQL of WAMP server using PHP. 

After completion of website with all basic entities, we started to modify it in terms of validation required for:

• Registration form, so as to ensure completely filled up form alongwith  choice to input values not in the alternatives available and cross checking user id for availability while submitting the form,
• Log in form, so as to make our website services available to only registered user,
• After log in, end user were allowed to post their query that was stored within their database account in MySQL.

Challenges faced: 

• While launching Wampserver : Problem occured in freeing port 80, that was assumed to be the default port for WAMP,  to get it available for Apache. This can be solved by :  Opening Apache->httpd.conf, and replacing the port no.- 80 with 8088, wherever present and saving                                   the changes to continue.
• While validating the end user from available databases.

Key learnings:

• Basics of PHP,
• Learnt to create webpages with slideshow and pop-up menu, along with validations and
• Got introduced to softwares like dreamweaver,  So-think-menu-builder, WAMP