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CastNet's Home Page!

We created CastNet to make it easier for people in underrepresented communities to discover opportunities that can help them grow academically and professionally. Internships, and early career programs can make a huge difference, but finding opportunities that fit your background, interests, and needs can be difficult when information is scattered across different websites. We wanted to create a platform that brings these opportunities together in one place and makes them easier to explore.

The idea behind CastNet is that everyone deserves access to opportunities, regardless of their background. We designed the website around browsing and discovering opportunities through hashtags such as #STEM, #FirstGen, #Women, #HardofHearing, #Paid, and #LearningDisabled. These categories help users find listings that are relevant to their interests and circumstances without having to search through every opportunity individually.

We built CastNet using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML provides the structure of the website, CSS controls the layout and visual design, and JavaScript powers features such as displaying opportunity listings and filtering them by hashtag. We focused on creating a straightforward interface with navigation between the home page, opportunities page, and submissions page. Our goal was to make discovering opportunities feel simple and accessible.

One of our biggest challenges was connecting the different parts of the website so they worked together. For example, we needed to make each hashtag lead to the correct filtered list while keeping the main Opportunities page able to display every listing. Working through these challenges helped us understand how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interact to create a full website.

Throughout this project, we learned that building a website involves more than making it look good. Features need to work together to build a seamless user experience. We also learned the importance of communicating effectively, as we ran into quite a few issues with committing and pulling from Github.

With CastNet, we hope to not only build a job board, we also want to create a space where people can discover possibilities or find resources they would not have encountered otherwise.

Next, we hope to add more opportunities and resources to the website. Scholarship opportunities, information sessions, seminars, and workshops are all resources that will further help people engage with their interests and further develop their skills. We also hope to add socialization capabilities. For example, we want to allow people to message each other to build connections and gain more information about resources.