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

Requirements for Final Website

  1. Be creative. Sites that are similar to existing websites will receive less points for creativity than original ones.

  2. Your final website should contain roughly 4 to 10 pages.
     
  3. Your website must be uploaded to the students.depaul.edu server.
     
  4. 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.

  5. 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.
     
  6. Each page on your website should contain at least one image.

  7. 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.
     
  8. 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.
     
  9. 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.
     
  10. You may use images from existing websites without crediting them unless they have copyright restrictions.
     
  11. 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.
     
  12. 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.

  13. 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.
     
  14. No pages of your website can be R or X rated or be otherwise in poor taste.

Here are the grading criteria for the website: 30% for functionality, 35% for content, 35% for originality/creativity, 5% for updated link in index page.

Requirements for Website Plan

  1. The website plan must be finished before creating your website.
     
  2. Submit your website plan as an MS Word document. You can include hand drawn sketches that are scanned in and inserted into your document .
     
  3. Do not submit pages from the actual website.
     
  4. Your website plan must contain the four sections described in the section Web Site Plan Components.
     
  5. 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.

  1. General Concept.   With one or two sentences, briefly indicate the topic and general goal of your Web site.
     
  2. 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. 
     
  3. 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:
     
    1. Maintain a consistent layout and style across your pages.
       
    2. 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.
       
    3. 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.