As part of our course information web, each student will create an IST553 page on web.syr.edu or elsewhere, which will be reachable from our main course home page, and from which the student will link pages containing all course assignments and whatever course-related experiments they would like to share with the class. Like a workgroup within an intranet, we will use our linked pages to communicate with each other, keep aware of what other course participants are doing, and learn from each other.
You will need to mount your course page (and eventually your assignment pages) on web.syr.edu or if you wish on another server so long as it is reliably available on the Internet. To use web.syr.edu you will need an account on SUnix. I will explain how to place your page (and revisions) on web.syr.edu using FTP and how to make it readable. This will involve some basic Unix account management, which I will explain in the first lab. Note that the course page should be distinct from your general "home page" (index.html), but should be linked to it so we can learn more about you and your interests.
Initial course page: Besides forming the basis for the class information web, the purpose of this assignment is to gain familiarity with creating material for the Web and to put into practice what you are reading. This is preparation for designing and creating a prototype Web site. Your initial personal course page can be quite simple. It should have the following elements: 1) a title, 2) a link to the main IST553 class home page, 3) a mailto: link to your email account to make it easy for people to contact you, 4) a link to your actual home page (however elaborate or rudimentary it may be), and 5) a "responsibility" and "last updated" statement at the bottom. As soon as assignments are due they should be put up as separate Web pages and be linked from your main IST553 course page.
Augmented course page: About two weeks after putting up the initial text-only course page you will enhance the page with some simple graphics and an image. This will coincide with our readings and discussions about images and multimedia, and will serve as preparation for creating the prototype Web site. You will need to add the following elements to your course page: 1) at least one icon or other graphic that you have found on the Web (and have ascertained is explicitly intended for free public use)-the smaller the better, and 2) one photograph or drawing that you have scanned and manipulated in terms of size and color using image software such as Adobe Photoshop. The file size of the image should be less than 30K. Ideally the photograph should tell us something about you: if you are comfortable with putting your photo on the Internet, that would be a good choice; otherwise perhaps something that we can associate with you.
This portion of the assignment will perhaps be the most challenging as far as logistics. You will need to use one of the limited number of scanners on campus (or elsewhere), and one of the computers running Photoshop or other image manipulation software. We will give you a list of locations and instructions on how you can run Photoshop from any Macintosh on campus. The instructor and T.A. will be available to help you with this and all other assignments at regularly scheduled times for a number of hours each week. If you cannot get to campus to scan an image outside of class, we can use some of a lab period for scanning and image manipulation. When you have obtained your graphics and image and used them to redesign your course page you will need to upload everything via FTP to web.syr.edu or another server as before.
By the time you do this assignment you should have already chosen an idea for a prototype Web site (see below) and had preliminary discussions with your client concerning goals. For your critiques, you should attempt to find Web sites that are in some way comparable to what you propose to do, particularly in terms of what your client wishes to accomplish.
Spend as much time as you can exploring the Web and looking at sites, but with a critical eye. Focusing on success in satisfying an organization's goals and using the criteria for good site design that we have discussed in class (as well as other criteria you believe are important), analyze one site that you think works particularly well, and one site that you believe is less effective in accomplishing what it sets out to do. Use this as an opportunity to think about the qualities that make for an excellent, effective site, and about the qualities that make for a less effective one. Back up your judgments with detailed analysis. Write a total of about 2 printed, single-spaced pages. Hand in a printed copy in class, but also put a copy on your Web site, with a link off your IST553 course page. Also: email me the URLs of the sites you have chosen in advance of class so that we can examine your selections as a group.
Note that the "bad" site should be a full-fledged site, ideally one into which a company has put some serious money. It is pointless to criticize some hapless person's home page. In the same way, the positive site should not merely be impressively (and expensively) flashy or huge, but rather should stand out by accomplishing its mission particularly well. Remember to attempt to choose sites that are comparable in some way to the one you propose to create for your client, so that you will have a model to emulate-and one to avoid.
Many of the assignments for the course are related to the design and creation of an actual Web site, or more precisely a prototype Web site of the kind you might produce for a prospective client or for senior management within your own organization in an effort to win approval to build and mount a full-fledged site. The purpose of these assignments is not only to exercise practical skills in building a site, but also (and primarily) to provide experience in dealing with site planning, design, and management issues.
An essential aspect of this project is that you need to build a site for someone: for a company, a student organization, a library, church, or other not-for-profit, or any kind of organization that has information. In other words, the site should not be for yourself and it should not be fictional. The size of the organization should clearly be manageable; you may want to build something for a department within a larger organization. The site will probably be conceived as an Internet site, with information intended for people outside the organization. We will be talking a great deal about intranets in the course, and in theory this could be an intranet site, but it is hard to imagine that an organization would want to put its internal information, however non-sensitive, in a place that anyone could potentially see it. They might perhaps provide "dummy" information standing in for the real data, but this would be somewhat ungainly. If you are considering an intranet project for a client, be especially certain to see me very early on before advancing too deeply.
In approaching an organization that might serve as your "client" it is important to explain exactly what it is that you propose to do within the context of this course. You will be building a small "prototype" Web site as a demonstration of what could be done for their organization. The prototype will not be mounted on the Internet as a real site. The organization should view your prototype as an example of what they could accomplish with a real Web site. Outside and beyond the course you could arrange with them to build a real site, which they could place on the Internet through a hosting service or an on-site server. At the end of last summer's course, a number of students did exactly that for their clients. It is essential to be clear about what you are doing: the course project is only that, an exercise. It may be extremely valuable for the client organization to think through what it could accomplish with a Web site, and your prototype might be developed later into a real site, outside the context of the course. But the prototype you build for the course and its accompanying text material is explicitly an exercise. To be sure your client organization understands what is involved you should show them the portions of the syllabus dealing with the site, particularly this paragraph.
You will need to identify a client organization yourself. Given the amount of publicity the Web has been getting, this should not be difficult. Remember that you can approach a business (preferably a small business) or a not-for-profit organization, including student organizations. If necessary, it would be possible for the same organization to agree to serve as the client for more than one student. In effect the students would then be producing rival proposals for a Web site. Each student would work independently.
After getting the agreement of the company or other organization to be your client, you will need to interview them to find out what it is that they wish to accomplish with a Web site: whom do they wish to reach, what information do they want to make available, what services would they like to provide, how will they measure the site's success? You may find that this is a somewhat circular process: you may need to help the client envision what is possible at the same time you are intent on listening to what the client wants to do, without imposing your vision on them. Depending on how much time the client is willing to give you (and you should be careful not to overstep the amount of time they think is appropriate) you may find it is helpful to return to the client for more feedback.
When you have clarified the client's goals, audience, measures of success, etc. you will need to collect the materials out of which you will build the site: textual information, images, graphics, perhaps even other media (if appropriate and if you are so inclined). Do what is most effective, from the point of view of accomplishing what the client wants to achieve. With these materials you can proceed to build the prototype site. You will probably want to build the site on your own hard drive or a floppy disk and upload it to your Web space only at certain intervals, when you are satisfied with what you have done; this is more realistic than building the site step-by-step directly on the Internet where everyone can see it. You may wish to show what you are doing to the client at an early stage to get feedback and potentially other materials.
We will be talking about various forms of interactivity a great deal in this class. But note that within the context of this assignment it will be easiest to build a site that publishes information from "static" pages-the simplest and most elementary of the Web functionalities described in our text. It will be possible to build certain interactive elements into the site (for example, forms that can be processed using a particular, pre-existing CGI script running on a university server). But in general, greater interactivity, whether through dynamic access to databases, other kinds of CGI scripts, or communication through newsgroups or chat, involves full (administrator-level) access to servers, which is not permitted with university servers.
If you wish, particularly if you have a computer that runs Windows 95 or NT or a reasonably late version of MacOS, you may download and install your own Web and other server software, some of which is free of charge to anyone in academic institutions, to do experiments. But you cannot base your course project on use of such servers if your computer is not permanently accessible on the Internet, i.e. if you only have a connection to the Net when you dial in. A possible solution might be to use a commercial Internet Service Provider that allows users to upload CGI scripts into the relevant directory, but you must make all arrangements yourself and recognize that you will be largely on your own in using non-standard (non-SU) services. Your project will be judged on the basis of how it works; if it fails to work, it cannot be given credit on how it ought to work.
When you are finished with your project you will have a working prototype Web site. You can give a copy of the site on a floppy disk to your client. You will also have written documents detailing your goals and design and the management, maintenance, and policy issues you foresee if the site were to be implemented.
The components of the prototype Web site project are:
This should be a very brief description of your client and your project. The most important things by this point are to have identified a client, received their agreement to work with you, and begun the process of determining their needs. The essential elements are: 1) a brief description of the client and its apparent goals, 2) a brief description of potential audience/users, 3) a description of the projected size of the project, and 4) a description of your source(s) of information: from whom are you going to get the information and how? If I see a clear problem with your proposed project (for example, that it is too large for what can be done within the time frame of the course) I will be able to get back to you at an early stage. Be succinct. One half page (single-spaced) is fine. Also put your idea up on the Web, with a link from your course page.
Write a 2-3 page (single-spaced) paper describing your design goals for the Web site: the site's purpose, its projected audience/users, and the proposed means to judge the site's effectiveness if it were implemented. WHY should this site be built? WHAT are its exact goals (not just what information is available)? WHO is the intended audience? HOW will success or failure be judged? Precision is key; be as precise as possible in answering these questions.
Describe how the elements of your proposed site will accomplish the mission given to you by your client. Examine the choices that you foresee may need to be made and your proposed solutions, for example why you will structure the information one way rather than another, why you will use so many or so few images, why you will or will not optimize for a particular browser, etc. This description of what the site will attempt to do and how it will do it, along with the prototype site, could constitute the basis of a "proposal" to a prospective client who was considering establishing a site. Hand in a printed version of your paper, but also place a version on the Web, with a link from your course page.
Write a 2-3 page (single-spaced) paper describing the policy and site management issues that need to be thought through and clarified in advance of bringing your site up-the issues that someone will later definitely wish had been thought through if they were not. Give a detailed analysis of one or more of the issues you see in managing the site if it were to be implemented. In many cases these issues will have to do with "ownership" of the site and its component parts. Describe how you would propose that the site should be governed. Examples of the kind of questions you will want to consider are:
IF you are convinced that management of your site is so simple that there is not enough to consider here, you will still need to write about managing it, but can consult with me about supplementing your paper with thoughts on more general policy and management issues. As always, put a copy of your paper on your Web site, with a link from your IST553 course page.
See the discussion above for questions on designing and building the site. Concerning technical issues: for such a small site you will have no trouble creating your pages with any simple text editor (Windows Notepad or Macintosh SimpleText or TeachText), but if you wish, feel free to use whatever Web authoring software you can find. Some simple Web authoring programs are available on the computers in the SU clusters. On the date your prototype Web site is due, hand in a brief note describing what tools you used.
Your site should have at least five Web pages including the top-level page. Of course it may have more, but quality counts more than quantity. It is essential to keep your site doable and not to get hung-up on making it too large or elaborate. If necessary, build only a small, coherent part of the site. You may describe unbuilt portions, but don't create links to things that aren't there. In the same way, don't put in elements that don't work (e.g. forms that look good but do nothing because there is no corresponding script on the server side).
The pages should be linked using the kind of clear navigational principles that we will discuss in class. You will probably want to use some (limited) images and graphics of various kinds, both to make the pages visually appealing and to help convey the client's information most effectively. Provide for feedback. Be sure to proofread and check your pages carefully; consider validating your HTML (as I will explain in class), and test it on different browsers if you can.
Beyond written and electronic assignments, it is important that you attend class regularly and participate in our discussions. In nearly every class we will spend some time discussing what we have been reading on the Net and in print about issues affecting the Web: everything from legal, to technical, to managerial, to entrepreneurial, to...well, everything. Whatever interests you is what we want to hear. Come to class prepared to talk briefly about what you have read; perhaps it will be something that elicits questions, discussion, or controversy. Obviously not everyone will get to tell something every week, so please do not feel bad if you have to wait to get your story heard. Along these same lines: if you come across a Web site that is particularly interesting in some way (or fits in particularly well with what we are reading and talking about), please share it with the class. The site may provide some service that is particularly interesting, or we may simply want to look at the source code together to see "how did they do that?!"
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