Our new website!

We are happy to launch our new website today!

Today is also the 11th anniversary of Upasana. You can read about our history here!

Work on this portal began when our friend Arnab, founder of Ninād, an Integrality-centered collaborating network that ideates and helps create tools and technologies in Learning within e-Learning spaces (www.ninad.biz), noticed that our old website was not reflecting the changes that were happening in Upasana and proposed to work on it. That was sometime in June 2007. During the months that followed we had many meetings with Arnab and Prarthana of Ninād to clarify the design parameters. After collecting all the relevant information and analysis, detailed information architecture was created to comprehensively represent all that reflected the vision, the action, outreach and future trend of Upasana.

This was followed by a click through mock up model to evaluate the design and usability issues. Sunita Rao, an artist, Ninād’s collaborator for art and design specialties and founder of Asterysk (www.asterysk.com) who helps communicate business realities through art, played a major role in the design and development of the mock up model.

Once the mock up was ready the coding work began using Drupal (www.drupal.org), an open source online application development platform as the base. Vinay Yadav, an ardent advocate of open source technologies, Ninād’s collaborator for Open Source and founder of Vinayras (www.vinayras.com), a Drupal based web development company in Nagpur, brought in the coding and integration skills to develop and complete this site over the last 3 months.

Now we have an excellent Content Management System to manage rapidly growing and changing needs of Upasana and we hope to keep up with the growing demands of information dissemination with this new website which gives us an easy way to add and update the content.

One of key features of this new site is online shopping!

Thank you every one for all the hard work you have put into the creation of this beautiful site.

Happy browsing!

We would love to hear your feedback.

Uma and Manoj
Auroville
October 1st, 2008