Welcome

Businesses do information work, like keeping track of things. Lists of customers, products, expenses, other stuff. Spreadsheets help, but they have problems.

  • What if five people enter sales data? Do they email the sales spreadsheet around? If one person messes up, is everyone stuck?
  • Maybe HR gets to see all of the employee spreadsheet, but others only see a few columns. How do you do that?
  • How do you link spreadsheets together? Like the sales spreadsheet links to the customer spreadsheet, showing who bought stuff, to the product spreadsheet, showing what they bought, and the employee spreadsheet, showing who the sales rep was.

Yech. Sounds like a lot of grunt work to keep all of the data up to date.

What if there was free software that handled all this? Just a fantasy, right? Might as well wish for unicorns and rainbows.

Click here for unicorns and rainbows. Click a bunch.

In this course, you’ll make information systems (IS) on the Web. Some will be basic sites. That’s OK, but we’re more interested in sites that help businesses manage their data.

If you’re using this site as part of an organized course, you’ll do exercises, and get feedback. You’ll need an account on this site. Check with your instructor to see if an account has been created for you, or you need to create one yourself.

When you’re ready, jump to What you’ll learn.