Web portal for students, faculty and industry professionals
Engagement Office of Purdue Polytechnic Institute wanted to create a dedicated web portal for 4000+ people, including students, faculty and industry professionals. Students would be able to find information about internship and capstone (senior-level course projects) opportunities offered specifically for the students of that college through that web portal. Faculty would be managing capstone projects and industry professionals would be posting and managing internship or any other employment opportunities through that web portal.
This project was started as a capstone project by four senior-level undergraduate students during their last semester. They have created a sample portal, which they hosted on a virtual machine. A third-year undergraduate student (Christian) and I took this project for further development as interns during Summer 2016. I worked full-time and was responsible for designing and developing the final version of the portal that needed to go live by the end of the summer. Christian worked remotely and part-time and his responsibilities were to assist me on designing and developing the admin functionality and interface for the portal.
At the end of July, two additional developers joined the team, who took the project for further development and maintenance, after I left at the beginning of August. At that time, I was also responsible for providing a quick training and initial support for the new developers.
We started with researching the problem, through constant conversations with our supervisor and stakeholders, in order to ensure we understand the root problem and are on the right track. We then started by generating lots of early concepts through sketches and wireframes, which later were turned into cheap prototypes using HTML and CSS. We also tried to constantly iterate based on the feedback from users and stakeholders, but also frequently had to settle on an idea and move quickly, since the time was very limited.
We explored rough layout ideas and concepts through sketches. Here are some of mine:
Sketches were refined and turned into rough wireframes. Here are some of mine:
Final version of the web portal was developed based on the template provided by the Office of Marketing and Media of Purdue University, which heavily influenced the overall style of the portal. By the end of my internship, portal was at the following stage:
Web portal is currently up and running, and can be viewed here:
Polytechnic Portal(Note: Some areas are not accessible without an account, so some screenshots are provided below)
Main challenge of this project was limited time frame. Engagement Office wanted to go live with the portal around end of August 2016, which forced us to go quickly and focus on main functionality, while leaving room for further development of additional features.
Personal challenge for me in this project was the development part. I have had some knowledge of PHP and solid skills in HTML/CSS, but have never worked on a big project before. I had to learn quickly along the way, which made the project more complicated, but also more fun.
Some skills gained and things learnt: