Project completion - Spastics Society of Karnataka website

A bit of history

Let's use wayback machine to look at how this evolved.

• When I inherited this project, the website looked like this in 2004. I don't remember the technology, but it was done by a volunteer by name Mr. Nagaraj. He transfered the hosting and domain from Net 4 India to us.

• Then sometime in 2007 the website started looking like this - I don't remember the technology that I used. It seems I was using open source web design and looks like I hand-coded it.

• In 2008, we moved entirely to Google Apps for Education - this was a great move. It facilitated online processing, official email ids, all our data in a single place. This was like migrating Spastics Society of Karnataka to the "Cloud". The website changed its look to this in 2008 using google sites.

• The google sites website was not very pleasant looking. This time in 2013, I updated website to wordpress, and hosted on bluehost.com and our domains were migrated to Google Domains. The wordpress website also had accessibility features on changing font, style etc.

There was problem, wordpress is not the most secure of the software that is present today. We got hacked by chinese hackers who put up malware in our site. This wasn't good. I removed the phishing, and they could still get to us. This happened for 2 months and I felt a lack of control with wordpress.

• We decided to shutdown and delete the wordpress site, and decided to rebuild it. For stop-gap, we directed people to Google Sites website

• This stop gap solution lasted for more than a year because I did not want to rebuild it entirely with wordpress again.

• In 2016, I decided to hand-code it using Bootstrap and Nikola and built this - This was hugely unappealing. It was extremely secure and trustworthy, but felt very unappealing to everyone.

• In 2018, we decided to make a appealing website, and this time I went with a hosted service, wix.com. The result is what you see at http://spasticssocietyofkarnataka.org/

Features

This was a team effort. My friends Avinash and Nivedita got involved. We use Trello.com to track our tasks. From school Preethi, and Priya Madam and Sobha Madam got involved too. The website does not have bus-factor of 1 and this is an incredible feature.

The website was mostly done by Avinash. He cannot use his hands, and uses voice to operate his computer So this website was created using voice.

Simple theme, accessible on mobile and our google apps (cloud) still remain for forms, email and everything as it is convenient to manage.

I believe this change is going to help school further. Given what I have shared above, this project is a living entity, and will evolve with times.