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Party Up with PartyNepal.com
Mandil Pradhan - The Man Behind the PartyNepal
Interview With Nepalnet

Mandil Pradhan is the CEO and the Web-Director of PartyNepal.com. He has been working as a free-lance web designer since the turn of the new millennium. This self taught web designer currently maintains nine out of twenty-one website he has designed. Beside web designing, Mandil is also one of the very few Motorcycle Stunt Riders in Nepal. He successfully participated in the Biker's Day Out 2002, organized by Vibes Entertainment in association with Wave Magazine on 14/15 April, and returned home with a heavy trophy. As for the future, he intends to go to Glion Hotel School to earn a degree in Food & Wine, and Restaurant Operations.

During last month I had chance to interview him. In the interview, he talked about his experience with PartyNepal.com. Please email any comments at info@nepalnet.net


Q. What is the story behind the beginning of Partynepal.com?

Mandil Pradhan:

I had first met Robin in February 2003 at a salsa-party, and later he contacted me to make a website for an event management company that he owned. While we discussed about how to go about that website, he asked me how much I was going to charge him. My charges were pretty high, so he told me that he owned a domain called partynepal.com with 50 MB webspace, and that he’d exchange the domain in return for my service. It was right then that the idea of “Nepal’s only clubbing and partying portal” struck me. Robin had such an idea in mind when he bought the domain but hadn’t been able to implement it. However, he was more inclined towards promoting underground music. So the domain was just lying in the internet with just a front page graphic on it for the past 1 year.

Robin and I decided that it’d be much better and easier if we worked together in this new concept and we invited 2 other friends to join us but they had to leave “the team” even before the website was officially launched Baishakh 1, 2060, April 14th 2003).

So, the basic idea was to promote other people’s events/parties and the bars/clubs and charge them for doing so, and for the party-goers, we’d be a free guide to clubbing and partying. With that idea, PartyNepal.com was born.
However, later, a lot of people came to us asking if we managed events as well. Since Robin already had an experience in that field (he had already left his event management company since PartyNepal.com required a lot of his time), we took up their proposals. Since then we have managed events for other companies, and once in a while, we do our own as well.

PartyNepal.com initially was an amateur room-based project, but within a month of our existence, we got a few media exposure here and there, and we became quite popular in Kathmandu. That is when we realized it was some serious business that we were in, and gave our full energy and time into it.

Q. On a personal level, how were you first introduced to world of web designing?

Mandil:

Honestly speaking, I have never attended any computer institute, nor did I ever regularly attend the computer classes we had in school where they taught us Microsoft Word and Excel, and it was really boring.

I got my first computer in winter of 1995. I had a mean machine back then. A 486 DX2, 4 MB Ram, 630 MB Hard Drive, and Windows 95. It was one of the latest computers then. Ever since I got that computer, I used to play around with it a lot and I messed it up a lot of times. In the beginning I used to take it to the service center to have it repaired, but once it started happening too often, I was scared to let my mom know that the computer had broken down again. Then I started exploring with the machine, and slowly I started fixing the problems myself, from software to hardware.

In summer 1998, I got my internet connection, and I started to surf the net. The things that they had on the internet really fascinated me. Then, I decided I should give it a shot in trying to make pages similar to the ones I had seen. I registered for a free website on yahoo/geocities. The first page I ever made was through a geocities web-page wizard A few weeks later I got my first copy of Microsoft Frontpage. I figured out that this software was extremely easy and to make a website was a piece of cake now. I made a website in frontpage and uploaded it to my geocities web space and started showing off to everyone about this website I had. After about 6 months, I showed my website to a friend who had been taking web designing lessons, and he started laughing at it saying how crappy the website was. He taught me a few tips ad tricks for about an hour, and on my way back home, I picked up a few books about web-designing from my computer engineer uncle and started learning. It took me nearly 3 months to learn and come up with a page that totally amazed that friend. Of course, there were a few stolen scripts here and there, but the basic theme and designing was my own. I started building on that website, and after a few months, I launched www.mandil.com.np. After that I started getting a few projects from my relatives and friends. That is how I started off with making websites. So far, it has been a learning process, and I am still learning.

Q. Are you planning on any major changes for the Partynepal.com in near future?

Mandil:

As for the near future, I don’t see any particular big changes happening to PartyNepal.com. Like I said, from a room-based project, it has become a full time business for Robin and I. We have taken up event management and I totally changed the structure and design of the website once already. Now, we are hoping to attract advertisers (we got our first banner advertiser last week) and get the clubs and bars to be our full-time affiliations by listing with us, so that we can invest more into PartyNepal.com. There will be a time when we will need to hire a few other staffs, but so far, Robin and I, with a lot of help from 2 friends (Bhushan Thapa and Susan Sellars) have been able to run the company efficiently.

Q. Beside Partynepal.com, what else can we expect from you and your team in the future?

Mandil:

PartyNepal.com is the main priority for me at present. However, I have been working as a freelancer now as well. Since the inception of PartyNepal.com, I have already made 6 websites for other companies, and I am working on one more right now. PartyNepal.com has helped me get a lot of other designing jobs, and I have now been recognized as a professional web-designer.

Robin, Bhushan and I have been looking into the prospect of starting a designing house, where we do all kinds of designing including web-development (web hosting and designing), paper designing (advertisement, party-posters/invitation, etc.), video editing, printing, etc. But these are only talks, nothing is certain yet.

Q. Any suggestion you might have to other aspiring web designers?

Mandil:

You make me sound like a web-guru, hehehe. Like I said before, I am still in a learning process.

A great design comes from defining a singular theme and supporting it consistently, and clearly. The theme is the heart of a design. It is the emotional center that when communicated will resonate deeply and lead to a successful project.

Web-designing is a based more on your creativity than your knowledge. Of course, the basics have to be there, but its how well and creatively you think that matters in the end. No one can teach you to think in a certain way, and no one can teach you how to come up with creative concepts. It’s about developing your imagination and putting it up in the screen.

Some of the website designed by Mandil Pradhan

www.partynepal.com
www.mandil.com.np
www.aceapartment.com
www.paw.com.np
www.vishwokastha.com.np
www.himalayanjava.com.np
www.askmenepal.com


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