History: The National Honor Society website was a project started by me
independently during the end of my Sophomore year. Several of the officers had heard about my website programming skill and requested my help to keep the website alive since the club's previous webmaster was graduating that year. They pulled me in for a meeting that week where I proposed that instead of simply using the old
SharePoint site, I could make a completely new site with an interactive database that would manage the hours and attendance of all the members. After a demonstration, they told me that I could go ahead and make the site. The rest of that school year and the following summer, I completed the base coding of the website and I began implementing it the following school year. It was immediately a success and many students found it very easy and
convenient to use. There were a few bugs at first, but after a year of use, I believe that most of the critical bugs have been purged from the system.
Purpose: The NHS website serves as a database website for all members to access information regarding
upcoming meetings, community service opportunities, and other announcements of that kind. The site also serves as a storage location for all of its members' community service hours. When a member completes a community service event, they simply log into the website and fill out a form and that event is added to their total. This cuts down on the amount of paperwork necessary for the officers and it allows us to very quickly determine who has and has not met the yearly quota required. The website also serves to allow members to view their current meeting attendance records. This club maintains a very strict attendance policy and if students are absent twice, they will be inactive. This website based attendance minimizes accidental absences and "I didn't know I was marked absent" cases of that sort.
Evaluation: The NHS website is the most extensive website that I have
designed so far and it has the largest user base. This has been an interesting
experience; even the smallest coding bugs will invariably affect some user in a
unique situation. This has taught me about the precarious nature of coding and
compatibility with a vast amount of users.
Current Status: The National Honor Society website is still in use today and is available at http://www.mountsinhs.com. The website is currently operating off of a friend's company server, a situation that I will have to change sometime this year. This is necessary because I cannot
guarantee the long term success of the site without him to maintain the server; this means that I will have to port the website to a different hosting service which will be tricky due to the complexity and the size of the website. The website currently is operating with around 200 users and has well over 10,000 hours in the system (you can see the detailed
live statistics on the right hand side of this page ===> ). |
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