Week 8: Final Summary

When looking back to my first blog post I feel that I have a much greater understanding of how important the role of technology is in any type of business, but especially a website like mine. Each week I was easily able to relate the topics we discussed in class to the ideas of my website. Some examples that I found very useful for my company was understanding the functionality of excel, understanding computer hardware, and especially understanding networking. I found the different functions of excel to be extremely useful for managing all of my customers data such as contact information, credit card info, billing addresses, etc. To manage all of this data I would use the pivot table function to efficiently organize this important information for my website. After learning about computer hardware I had a much better understanding of how to manage my budget when buying computers for my businesses office. Depending on the needs of my co-workers I am now able to identify how what certain components would be necessary and not necessary to make what ever they are doing run smoothly.  Lastly I found the knowledge I gained about networking and the internet to be extremely helpful in my understanding of how my website actually functions on the internet. While maintaining my website I am bound to run into some connectivity problems. I now have some knowledge in networking that could help me identify some of these connectivity and would allow me to pin-point the issue.

While composing each of these blog posts it made me realize that each of these technological topics we discussed are all different job positions that I would need employees for to actually successfully run and maintain my company and website. Although I might be able to start this website up on my own, if it ever did grow and became popular it would be impossible to manage all by myself. It is interesting to note that when a website grows and becomes popular, the technology behind it also grows, and can become out of control if not efficiently managed.

Over all I really enjoyed this project. For me this experience has been a brand new way to actually learn information in a class. I could see this blog possibly being very useful for both review in this course and also review for my future IST courses if I decide to continue blogging and further developing my idea through the topics we discus in class. Also blogging about this idea has really made me realize how developing entrepreneurship ideas takes much time because there are so many different aspects that go into actually making these ideas into realities. What this project has taught me about my idea, and websites in general, is that there is a large amount of different technologies that you must first have a solid foundation and understanding of before attempting to create and mainstream a website. What is great that from this project I think it has set me off with a great foundation and understanding of the basics behind these technologies.

Here are the blogs that I commented on:
http://bit.ly/vKoXZ7
http://bit.ly/tntfzu
http://bit.ly/vrTig0