When asked to write a blog on topics I have learned in Web Development I was not sure even where to start! So many great topics in one class! There were a variety of students in the class some that came in knowing all you could know about web development and others that only knew what the general term of "eCommerce was. I was in the middle which meant I had so much to learn!
In high school I took a web class but it only taught us HTML. I came into this class barely knowing anything beyond the HTML world. Coming to find out there were so many other ways to create a website. Our class at first learned HTML which then translated into web expressions which was very much like visual basic. It was crazy to me that you could insert a button, comment box, etc and it inserted the code for you! I thought coding was great from there!
And then the class learned about Content Management systems. The ones we concentrated most on were Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Each group had to do a group project creating a website using one of the content management systems. After much research my group selected Joomla to use. Thinking it would be in between Drupal (being the hardest) and wordpress (which seemed very easy and we thought it would not have many capabilities because it started off for blogs). We were about 2 weeks into the project and quickly realized that Joomla was much more difficult than we were lead to believe. We changed to Wordpress, which was a breeze compared to Joomla! We built a website for a custom home builder. We added great plugins such as a photo gallery, google maps, and email that connected to outlook.
What is Ecommerce? I am sure almost all of you have purchased an item off the internet before. For example on ebay when you use paypal. This is ecommerce! Using the "shopping cart" to load your items and then purchasing them on the internet. This has become so hardy on the web- allowing many store to be strictly web based. (Talk about a way to save money!). One of the groups for our group project even created a shopping cart as part of their website!
Our class also learned about Systems Analysis and Design. I had previously taken a class on learning everything you could know about the SDLC but it was very interesting to see how eCommerce tied into this topic.
In conclusion, there was so much we learned in this class- way too much to write in a blog. I so encourage you to come take the class with Drake at ECU!! He even offers an online class. My favorite part of the class was definitely the group project were we got to learn how to create our own website. Maybe one day I can even start my own business creating websites! This was one of my favorite classes within the MIS major because it applies so much to the real world. There was nothing in the class where you were wondering "am I ever going to use this ever again?".
