description / basic reqs / proposal / midterm / grading / saving
Description
You will spend most of the semester writing, building, and revising a single big multi-page website on a topic of your choosing (one project per student, no collaborations).
The site should be on a topic of strong personal or academic interest to you, one that is not well-represented already on the internet, and it needs to be focused. You’re not building an online encyclopedia that puts all there is to know about something in one place. That would be a waste of time. Instead: you’re marking out and filling in a small neglected area of interest.
The site should be subject-focused, devoted to informing, educating, thrilling, and entertaining your likely user with the specialized knowledge they desire.
Your site should not be institutional (e.g., for a business, club, team, or student organization) or service-oriented (e.g., online catalogue or dating site), although some of its pages might have a service or institutional function.
The project will require research, imagine, and a fair amount of regular work.
The website will need to be user-oriented, fun and easy to use.
Basic Requirements
Your final site will need to have the following pages:
- Homepage with an image/design and site title of your own making and nav links for the site
- Introduction: a one-paragraph introduction to your site topic; this may be part of Home Page or a separate page
- Feature Page 1: a 1200-1600 word article with links and illustrations
- Feature Page 2: a 1000-1300 word article, interview, book review, or in-depth tutorial; it should follow the general guidelines for feature page 1
- Dynamic Timeline Page: 12-20 events, illustrated, with at least 200 words of intro and description
- Visual Page: focuses on the visual rather than the textual, using at least 16 non-copyright images, preferably of your own creation, divided into at least two categories; each image needs a descriptive caption; and the page needs an introduction explaining the purpose and organization of the page
- Links Page with 30 links
- Two smaller supplementary pages: e.g., online questionaire, FAQ page, glossary page, recommended reading page, feedback page
- Bio page
- Works Cited Page
Project Proposal
You will need to produce a short formal proposal in advance of designing and building your site. The proposal will need to include links to (1) two sites that cover adjacent or otherwise related subjects that you think are quite good (informative, easy to use, attractive); and (2) at least one site (on any topic) that you think is well-designed and a possible model/source of inspiration for your proposed site.
Midterm Prototype
For the midterm you will need to revise and organize into a single website the following group of pages from the first half the semester: home page, links page, feature page 1, and bio page.
A single external style sheet will control the common styling for all four (or more) of your pages.
There will also be several optional pages (e.g., background, works cited).
These pages will need to be revised again for the final.
Grading
The final project receives three distinct grades of equal weight – for Content, for Presentation, and for Coding.
You need to pass (C or higher) all three categories in order to pass the course.
The midterm prototype also receives three separate grades – for content, presentation, and coding. However, grading at midterm is gentler than for the final.
For the midterm you need to pass at least two of the three categories to not risk failing the course.
Saving
The files for your final site need to be saved inside a "final" folder in your "425" folder. Images should be stored in an "img" folder inside your "final" folder.
Your final site needs to remain online for at least one month after the end of the semester.
return to schedule
~Jonathan Bass
