CSCI 1710-001
Team Project

Please note that this project description only applies to Tarnoff's section of World Wide Web Design, CSCI 1710-001.

It's time to begin working on your web design projects! To begin with, the class has been divided into three teams. Please click here if you don't remember which team you are on.

Project Deliverables

During the course of the project, you will be submitting a number of deliverables to your instructor. Typically, (but not necessarily) each deliverable indicates the end of a design phase. The design phases go something like this:

1. Information gathering (Getting information from the customer)
2. Strategy (How do you best address the goals of the customer?)
3. Prototyping
4. Implementation
5. Launch
6. Maintenance & growth

By the end of this project, you will either have implemented each of the phases or submitted a plan indicating how the phase will be handled when the time arrives.

Phase 0: Planning Before the Phases

• Activity: Meet as a team to introduce yourselves and plan a team strategy
• Deliverable: E-mail your team contract and job assignments to instructor
• Due date: By class time on Monday, October 20, 2003

By the end of class on Wednesday, October 15, you will have met as a team. During this meeting, you should:

• introduce yourselves;
• exchange e-mails;
• perform a skills assessment (determine what your team members are good at);
• evaluate what you still needed to learn in order to complete the project;
• assign job descriptions to each member (This will also involve knowing what jobs need to be done!); and
• write your team contract.

The team contract is an agreement between your team members as to how you will conduct your business during the course of this project. At a minimum, the contract should include:

• a regular meeting time outside of the time you'll meet in class;
• a regular meeting place (This can be an on-line meeting if your team is geographically scattered);
• the name of the person in charge of each main task of the project including a note-taker; and
• penalties for poor performance in each of the following areas:
  • missed meetings,
  • missed deadlines, or
  • poor work.

These team contracts must be e-mailed to the instructor by the due date shown above.

Phase 1: Information Gathering

• Activity: Meet as a team to discuss the customer letter and to develop questions for the customer
• Deliverable: E-mail your customer questions to instructor
• Due date: By class time on Monday, October 27, 2003

Your customer sent you a letter which was handed out in class. Note that we modified the letter somewhat when Dr. Bailey gave us a real project to work on. Answer the questions in the letter based on Dr. Bailey's project. In addition, your team will need to come up with a list of questions to ask your customer. These questions should cover all of the topics for the information gathering phase that you feel the letter or Dr. Bailey's presentation did not answer.

Remember that your client is very busy, so make sure you set the number of questions so as not to overburden them, yet still cover all the areas you need answers to. Also remember that your potential client has limited technical experience. Keep the tone of your questions to the appropriate level.

Your team's questions must be e-mailed to the instructor by the due date shown above.

Phase 2: Strategy

• Activity: Develop strategy for fulfilling customer's web needs
• Deliverable: Turn in a formal letter outlining your team's strategy to the instructor
• Due date: By class time on Monday, November 3, 2003

Using your customer's letter and the answers to your questions from phase 1, you should be able to develop a strategy for solving his or her web deficiencies.

Please outline your strategy to your customer with a proposal letter on paper submitted in class to the instructor by the above due date and time. Make sure your response is a formal letter that your team would be proud of if they were in fact a web design company. Heck, if you want to create a company letterhead, that would be okay too. The letter will be graded on completeness and correctness of your answers to the customer's needs, the level of professionalism with which you write the letter, and general grammar and spelling.

Phase 3: Prototyping

• Activity: Develop a prototype based on your strategy
• Deliverable: Present prototype to instructor during a scheduled meeting
• Due date: Meetings will be held during class on Wednesday, November 12, 2003

During November 12th's open lab period, each team will be meeting with the instructor to present your prototypes and to discuss any difficulties you're having. Treat this meeting as if it were a meeting with your customer.

Phase 4: Implementation

• Activity: Finalize and implement the design of your customer's web site
• Deliverable: Present final implementation to the class in an oral presentation
• Due date: During class on December 3, 2003

During the last lecture period of the semester, you will be making a presentation to the class of your project. This presentation will be conducted as if you were presenting your final design for approval by the customer.

Phases 5 and 6: Launch/Plan for Maintenance & Growth

• Activity: Upload your finalized customer web site and team web site to the CSCIDBW server
• Deliverable: E-mail the URL of your customer's web site and team web site to the instructor
• Due date: Friday, December 5, 2003 by 5:00 PM

For the final phase of the project, your team will submit two web pages. The first one (the customer's web page) should be the result of all your hard work and savvy and should fulfill the customer's objectives. The second one (your progress/planning/implementation page) will have an audience of one, namely your instructor, and will contain a well-organized presentation of:

• A copy of your team contract
• A list of your project members with links to each of their e-mail addresses
• A description of your client, the business' address, and any other necessary contact information
• A page outlining the maintenance needs of your customer's site and how your team addressed them
• A page describing the information you gathered during phase 1 including:
  • Project objectives
  • A detailed audience description
  • Standards for success
  • Project resources
  • User goals and expectations
• A task page describing each team member's responsibilities along with their status/progress
• A prototype page describing
  • Structure of site
  • Overall design layout (look and feel)
  • Navigational structure
  • File/folder organization
• Meeting minutes page containing minutes from each of your meetings (If there are no minutes, it didn't happen!) Minutes should include date, time, attendees, and action items

These pages will be uploaded to one of your team member's cscidbw.etsu.edu accounts by the Friday before exam week.

Grading

Your web pages will be graded on:

• Technical accuracy
• Error-free operation
• Absence of spelling or grammatical errors
• Design/creativity
• Ease of navigation
• The level of complexity as compared with the other teams in the class

For your web page to meet the requirements of this project, it should:

• be completely written in XHTML compliant HTML (JavaScript is allowed, but optional);
• use a cascading style sheet with at least five different rules;
• have a readily apparent and consistent theme (not just a bunch of random pages);
• consist of at least six pages, not counting any frameset documents;
• incorporate tables;
• have an apparent method of navigation to all pages within the site using relative URLs;
• have at least three relevant remote links using absolute URLs;
• contain at least five different images; and
• contain one form that uses at least one of each of the following: text field, set of radio buttons, checkbox, pop-up menu, text area, reset button, and submit button.

Your final project grade will be based on the grade you receive for your information gathering questions and your letter to the customer (10%), the grade you receive on your prototype/progress meeting (5%), the grade you receive for the client web page (40%), the grade you receive for your team web page (15%), your presentation grade (15%), and an individual peer evaluation from each member of your team (15%). Good luck!