Follow the information and guidelines in this section to conduct your team project. You'll find information on teams, projects, milestons, evaluations, reports, and presentaitons.

Import Note: Any HTML forms you put up on your web project must carray a large warning at the top ``Student Project Page, Not for Real Use" so people on the Web do not get confused and try to fill out your form. This is even more important when a form collects credit card or other personal information.

As the class proceeds, a page will be set up by the TA for Teams, members, and their project pages.

The milestone information is extremely critical for team and project operation. So the whole team should have access to it and modifications or rethinking on it is allowed. So teams please keep your milestone documents online. The projects page on the team leader web site would be a good place to keep it for the team.

When a milestone is due, send

1. Electronic copy to grader (PDF, HTML, or text) but cannot be URL. The grader will keep a copy of your Milestone for future reference.
2. The URL of your milestone by email to grader + instructors.

In drafting your website, please make sure you test it on the webserver in our Dept. That is put it under some team member's ~userid/ (team leader would be logical).

Because we will archive all projects done in this class, we need to be able to serve these sites from our Unix systems. The good thing is that our servers are typical Apache which is the most popular open server on the web hosting marketplace anyway.

Project Management and Milestones

1. Student questionnaires collected: by end of first class. This gives the instructors data to know the students, thier strengths, and to provide guidance in team formation.

2. Design Teams Formed: by the end of the 2nd or 3rd class. Students are allowed to form their own teams but with instructor input and advice. Make sure each team has a strong designer and programmer.

3. Project Milestone I: 9/14

   • Project definition---propose a site to build (see Project Proposal Guide)
   • Requirements---what exactly will the site do for the client
   • Team organization and task division---who will do what. A special section of your milestone one report must contain a detailed task distribution list which indicates the itemized tasks each team member will be responsible for completing. This task list can be revised and refined, with details added, in subsequent milestones. Teams are responsible for keeping this info posted on the team roster page updated.
   • Information and site architecture---site map outline completed, organization of pages, relationships among them, and navigation structure, flow chart and rough thumbnail designs for: homepage, major sections and sub-sections for the site completed.

   Milestone I is monitored by the instructors. Each team will submit a report addressing the 4 items and the instructors will give guidance and suggestions to revise the plans for the project.

   Here is a sample milestone one document in PDF.

4. Project Milestone II: 10/17

   • A ``content-only site'' is mostly complete. Your site now includes the textual content, pictures and images that are part of site content (as opposed to graphics for the site graphical design). The information architecture, textual navigation links, and site organization are done to provide a skeleton for the final site design and production work. To complete Milestone II, all the links on your site must work, each page must be filled with text and picture content as much as possible.
   • The task distribution list is further revised and refined. Remember, each team member will get graded on his/her own performance in addition to how well the team performs as a whole.
   • Banners and constants should be in place. System for navigation is mostly in place and HTML for forms are done.
   • The site does not need to have finished graphics or CGI programming. All that remains is the loading of the content pages into design templates from the designers and completing teh CGI programming.
   • The project now should basically be as close to a fully functional 2nd generation site as possible.

   • For this milestone, you need to file a brief written report on how and why you choose the particular site conetent and organization. In particular you need to answer these questions.

     • How your site organization achieve the goals of the site and how it addresses the intended audience of the site. It is advisable to make the site as useful as possible and not to arbitrarily limit its function to an unreasonable narrow definition.
     • What reference sites have you analyzed to guide your design and organization efforts. Name at least 3 and give detailed pros and cons and how your site solve these problems.
     • Give usage scenarios from the end user viewpoint. For example, if a potential customer visits your site, what would be his/her likely experience? What about a return custom? What about a person with a suggestion, a compliant? A child, and adult, a man, a woman, a student, a teacher, an applicant, an affiliate, a co-worker, ...
   • Send the the milestone report and your draft site URL to TA and instructors for examination.
   • Instructors and TAs to meet in the lab with the students and go over the site and check it against requirements set forth in Milestone I. Any major problems need to be addressed here. TAs may disclose a whole report for each of the teams and report any red flags.

5. Project Milestone III: 11/14

   Design templates have been made and contents loaded into the templates. The site is basically complete with small adjustments still to be done. CGI and Javascript programming are compete and tested. The project now gives a good idea of the final site, layout, navigation, and graphics design. It is ready to be analyzed by the instructors. The instructors will have a last chance to provide input before the project is done. Team members will also plan for the final project presentation and the project team report as well as individual reports.

6. Project Completed: By Finals Week

   • Each site must have appropriate graphics for the entry page and unified design elements for each sub page. Design (layout, type, color, space) and concept must work together. The site must be easy to use for the intended audience, index, navigation, and contents are logically and clearly structures. Additional features such as contact by email, suggestions, feedback, guest book or other page with HTML form/CGI are also expected.
   • Site XHTML has be validated and hyperlinks checked. The appearance of pages has been tested on different platform/browser combinations. Forms and server-side programming all have been tested under different conditions. The site is deployed and fulfils the intended purposes and fulfill the requirements set earlier.

   • Final Presentation:
     Each team will make a 20-25 min presentation of the completed Web site.

     • The team leader will make an openning remark -- indicating the team name, the team number, the members of the team, briefly overview the team's project, and indicate who has done what jobs for the project, briefly indicate the features (boasting) achieved. The team leader must make sure each team member has enough time to talk about her/his part of the work. How well each team member does will directly impact on the individual's final grade.
     • The presentation must demonstrate that the site works for major browsers (IE and NN at least) and passes XHTML strict and CSS validations.
     • Each team member then identifies her/himself and gets a chance to talk about his/her part and any difficulties, achievelements, and lessons learned.
     • The team will remain for instructors and others to ask questions and make comments.
   • Follow the report guide for writing the team project report and the individual report required.
   • The final submission package from each team will include:
     1. The entire site, web pages, and art -- including all reports, photoshop files, gif files, jpg files, style sheets, javascript files, and cgi programs, should be uploaded to the team WebDAV repository.
     2. hardcopy team report
     3. hardcopy individual reports