To Projects
IT 130 -- Web Site Plan and Final Web Site
Creating a Small Web Site
Important: Submit a one page document with your website project
that describes the features that you feel deserve special consideration
when the project is graded. State how many pages are in your website,
the JavaScript items that you included, and anything else that you
think should be considered. 10% off if you don't submit this document.
Overview
- This document describes two assignments: the website plan and the actual
website. These assignments must be submitted separately. First submit
the website plan as an MS Word document for the WebsitePlan Project. Then,
after you have uploaded your website to the students.depaul.edu server,
submit a link as a comment in the COL assignment submission system
to your website as the FinalWebsite Project.
- For this project, you will construct a small Web site. The purpose
of your Web site can be one of the following:
Describe a place of interest, such as a city, state, national park,
or other tourist attraction. Your site should show potential visitors
why the place is interesting, its history, why it is important, etc.
Sell a product. The product can be a real or fictitious. Show
pictures of the product, give price lists and order information.
Describe an organization, for example a German club. Explain
the club's mission, give a calendar of events, and give a chance for
new members to sign up.
- IMPORTANT: 5% of the grade for the FinalWebSite project
is to update your index page from Project 4 to link correctly to the
homepage of your FinalWebsite project.
Requirements for Final Website
- Be creative. Sites that are similar to existing websites
will receive less points for creativity than original ones.
- Your final website should contain roughly 4 to 10 pages.
- Your website must be uploaded to the students.depaul.edu server.
- Use document-level or external styles to control fonts, colors,
and layout on your webpages. Only use inline styles in span tags for
local style changes on a page.
- Your website must be composed using PSPad or other text editor (such as
NotePad, WordPad or TextPad). Do not copy code produced by website
design software such as FrontPage or DreamWeaver. Also, do not copy
HTML or CSS code from other websites.
- Each page on your website should contain at least one image.
- Images should be roughly 25K in size so that they display quickly and do
not take up excessive space on the server's hard drive. Resize or crop your
images if necessary to reduce their size. Large images will receive
deductions.
- Your website cannot be a copy of an existing website even if you designed
it. You cannot submit a website that you already created for another class.
- Do not plagiarize text from existing websites. All text on your website
must be in your own words. Credit your sources as you would in a research paper.
- You may use images from existing websites without crediting them
unless they have copyright restrictions.
- Each page in your website must have a title that displays in the
title bar of the browser. Each page should also have a heading that
describes the page.
- Your website must contain some JavaScript items, especially if you
want an A in the course. Some possibilities are shown on this
JavaScript Items page.
It must contain an order form, which we will discuss later.
- Do not submit any pages directly when submitting your
website. Upload the website to the students.depaul.edu server.
Then submit a comment containing a working hyperlink to the home
page of your website on the students server. Test the link after you
submit it.
- No pages of your website can be R or X rated or be otherwise in poor
taste.
Requirements for Website Plan
- The website plan must be finished before creating your website.
- Submit your website plan as an MS Word document. You can include
hand drawn sketches that are scanned in and inserted into your document .
- Do not submit pages from the actual website.
- Your website plan must contain the four sections described in the section
Web Site Plan Components.
- Sketches (Information Architecture and Low Fidelity Designs) must either
be drawn using software like MS Word or drawn by hand.
Hand drawings must be scanned in and embedded in your
document. No hardcopies of the Website Plan will be accepted.
Web Site Plan Components
Before you upload your web site, you must submit a Website plan, submitted as an MS-Word
document. Here are the essential components of your plan.
- General Concept. With one or two
sentences, briefly indicate the topic and general goal of your Web site.
- Information Architecture (also called Navigation
Architecture) Sketch out how the content of the
site will be organized across several
Web pages. At this point, you will list what will appear on each page but
not how it will appear visually. Usually this information is specified as
a graph indicating the title of each page and how the pages are
linked by hyperlinks. Display each page as a rectangle containing the page
title. Display the hyperlinks as arrows linking the rectangles. The
information architecture sketch must either be drawn using MS Word or drawn by
hand, scanned in, and included in your document.
- Low-fidelity designs. For this
stage, you start specifying how each page appears. Many choose to create
paper and pencil drawings because they are quick and easy to create and
allow for many fast changes. For your project, create some page designs
with paper and pencil and use them as a starting point for creating your
Web site. Include these low-fidelity designs as part of your project.
Either scan them in and include them in your MS Word document, or use
MS Word itself to make your drawings as we discussed in class. As
you design your pages, consider the following principles:
- Maintain a consistent layout and style across your pages.
- For each page, consider what you want your user to first see. Use visual
variables such as size and font style to draw the user’s attention to the
most important elements first. You will also want to consider color and
alignment.
- Decide what elements should be grouped on a page. Use placement
and similar heading styles to show the user which elements are
thematically grouped.
Submit your low fidelity designs as drawings in your MS-Word document.
Grading criteria for the website plan: 20% for the general concept, 30%
for the information architecture, 50% for the low fidelity designs.