An article published in Adept's News Bulletin - "CSC Circuit" (May 1999)
My Award-Winning Personal Home Page - Giridhar Pottepalem
I
nternet is an amazing piece of technology. In several ways it is the ultimate medium of communication.
It lets you communicate with anyone, anywhere, at anytime. I am one of the millions of Software Professionals fascinated by
Internet Technology.
I started developing my Home Page for fun. My wife was the person who prompted me to think of creating an HTML page.
She would visit a few Indian Sites on a regular basis and jump from one site to another through hypertext links. I explained how to
bookmark pages but she was more comfortable navigating through site's hypertext links. That gave me the idea to
think of creating an HTML page containing her favorite links, and that is how I began to write simple HTML code.
Later I developed a couple of Pages about my family and me. I thought of putting these pages on the Internet but I asked myself
who would be interested in learning about my family and our favorite links? The answer I got - Nobody. So I knew I had to find a topic that would
be of interest for my home page visitors.
Initially, I thought of developing a site on my personal hobby, painting, that would include a gallery of my paintings.
This seemed to be a better idea. However, I was still unsure how many people would be interested in art and in particular, my Paintings.
I knew I had to find a topic thjat could be useful for my visitors. Si I decided on the topic of technology, specifically
Object Oriented design and development, with links to several good technical resources on Internet. This site would help my visitors since
most Internet surfers are technical people. While I had a theme for my site, it was still lacking in visitor attraction.
I, like most people, visit personal pages for entertainment and fun. For example, I found several entertainment sites on Indian Film Music.
Since I have a great collection of Indian Music, I decided to add some entertainment to my page. This
gave my site a complete title - Giridhar's Home on Arts, Entertainment and Technology.
Once the title was decided, I started building my site. Initially, I tried some HTML editors for development, but could not find a suitable one for my
design and development needs, so I started writing HTML code line by line. First, I designed my main Home Page. I followed a uniform design throughout my site
and this made my task both easier more challenging. It was easy because my uniform design speeds up the development of further pages and challenging because
I had to make an attractive and reusable design.
I wanted to make it a Personal Home Page to have a more Professional look and feel. I did a lot of research about the Internet to understand and learn the
technical details of developing Web Sites and it took months for my site to take shape. As a result, after my site went live, it received a very good
response from visitors. Now it has 100 to 150 visitors everyday! Creating my own web site has not only helped me in
learning and using the technology, but also helped in networking. Recently, I got in touch with a few of my schoolmates, who are also in the United States,
and it was all made possible due to my site. All the appreciation that my visitors are showing gives me immense pleasure and total satisfaction and I
fell emotionally connected to my visitors and to my site. I am happy to report that it won two prestigious awards recently; A Gold Award
for its excellent design & development and a Silver Award for one of my paintings in the Arts category. This
increases my responsibility to keep my site informative and interesting for my visitors. I am proud of my accomplishments but I know I still have a
long way to go.
"Well done is better than well said." – Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
Giridhar Pottepalem is a Software Engineer
with Software Solutions Group Inc. and working as an Adept Consultant
for CVS/Pharmacy at their corporate office. He has an MS degree in Computer Science from JNT University, India and eight years
of software development experience. His interests include Object Oriented design & development, Java and Web Technology. He can be reached via e-mail
at: giridhar@mail.com Internet: https://giridharp.tripod.com/
with