M A R CH 11 2007
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www.iitkgp.ac.in (continued from page 1) The website started out in 1996 under the ERNET project in ECE department, and was a static HTML page with some Java applets. The website has undergone seven major redesigns since then, and since Prof. Mathur. took over in 2002, it has been a PHP based dynamic website. Currently, it has over 260 pages, and about 700 MB of data. In the past, students were heavily involved in the website design process, and many of the first websites were created by student teams working under the Information cell. However, the system of student web teams were discontinued around 2004 as a result of deadlines not being met, as well as a policy shift away from student involvement in something that was considered a mouthpiece of the administration. Nevertheless, Prof. Mathur still utilizes students occasionally to carry out work involving technologies with which he is unfamiliar. "Students pick up new technology quickly", he says, highlighting their importance in the website design process. When asked about the aesthetic unattractiveness of our site in comparison to those of other IIT's, Prof. Mathur held that the high traffic and limited bandwidth requires certain compromises when it comes to design. A quick study of other IITs' websites reveals that IIT Kharagpur does, indeed, have the
smallest homepage among all the IIT's, at just 48 kb, compared to 68 to 227 kb for other IIT websites. However, this is at the cost of much less useful information being on the homepage itself. Furthermore, Alexa traffic statistics (which are the most comprehensive on the web) show that IIT Kharagpur's site has the lowest internet traffic among all IIT websites, less than one-fifth that of IIT Bombay's. This indicates that with similar hardware to those in other IIT's, our website should be able to pack in far more jazz. A more likely reason for the design shortcomings might be the lack of involvement of skilled web designers, either professionals or students. Current web design techniques permit the complete segregation of the design and the content - the information cell can hire skilled designers for a professionallooking website, and still have complete control over the content. A mention needs to be made of the institute website that was introduced in 2002-2003. One of the student-designed websites, it introduced the database and some other elements that continue to be used today. Many of those who have seen it consider it to be better in terms of design than any subsequent website, including the current one. Prof. Mathur says that the exponential increase in website traffic had
necessitated the removal, from the homepage, of many features (such as "latest announcements") that required slow database access. This resulted in a rather unattractive links-only homepage between 2004 and 2006. The latest design has reintroduced some of those dynamic features, but has not regained much in terms of attractiveness. Looking into the future, Prof. Mathur hopes to be able to completely revamp the website in about six months. He hopes to introduce AJAX for faster page loading, as well as providing profile pages for each student that can be edited by the students themselves. For all these, he invites students with experience and interest in web design to contact him for working on the institute website. You can meet him at Information Cell (Opp. F-127, main building), or email him at infocell@webteam.iitkgp.ernet.in. For web site traffic statistics, visit Alexa (www.alexa.com) Historical versions of sites are available at the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org)
TALKBACK What are your thoughts regarding the institute website? Visit www.scholarsavenue.org to discuss.
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2002 Several historical versions of the IIT Kharagpur website some of them were arguably better designed than our current one! 1998