Web Design Blog

For your final project in this class, you will build a website with a team that is an online newspaper or magazine.  This should be your very best work of the semester and include elements fro m everything we have learned thus far.

WORKING TEAMS
For this project, you will work in teams of three or four.  In addition to writing 2 articles each, your roles and responsibilities are as follows:

CHIEF EDITOR:  This person is in charge of the group and need to have an overall vision for the site and take responsibility to design.  You will oversee all of the writing and provide leadership for your team.  Tasks not getting completed by others are ultimately your responsibility!!

ARTISITIC DIRECTOR:  You have overall responsibility for the look of the site.  You should be the one completing the  mock-up, and will do quite a bit of work with images and photos. 

LEAD DEVELOPER:  This is the person responsible fo the overall building and testing of the site.  They need to be able use both dreamweaver and flash effectively, and must utilize CSS in the design.

4th JOB:  If you have 4 people, you need to come up with another role.  Some possibilities are:

Flash Developer
Chief Writer
Photographer
Expert on your Magazine topic

SITE PROPOSALS
The first, and most important part of this project is planning!!!  As a group, you need to put together an overall plan for your site.  Here are some things you should include:

Title of Website/Name of Newspaper or Magazine
This is especially important if you are going to create a site

Summary, Goal and Vision Statement
You must have a good overview statement for your site that includes the purpose and goals for your site. 

Also, you should have information that identifies the audience, your team members and their duties, explanation of your choice in an organization, and goals/purpose/vision for the newspaper or magazine.

Sitemap
This should be a well planned out and professionally drawn plan for the pages in your site.  Be sure to have clear names for each of your pages, and a well planned out hierarchy for your navigation.

Homepage Mock-up
This needs to be a very professionally drawn page that includes colors, images, artwork, and layout design.  It should show us what your site will look like.

SITE REQUIREMENTS
1.  Your site must include 6 or more pages (8 for groups of 4) that meet the following requirements:

• good choices in color for fonts and backgrounds
• well designed balanced use of space throughout (tables are good)
• well designed, clear directory buttons or nav bar (no text only)
• well-written text in sentence paragraph format with no spelling or grammatical errors
• photos or images that are appropriately sized for the web
• all links working

2.  All files named approprately.  This means the homepage must be named index, that buttons have names rather than button1, button2, etc.,  and images have meaningful names.  Also, adhere to naming rules.

3.  An external Cascading Style Sheet is used for design of the site. with at least 5 text styles, background color and link attributes.

4. Well designed original artwork including product images, banners, buttons, etc.

5.  Flash is included in the site in some way (splash screen, animated commercial, slide show, etc.)

6.  Well thought-out and complete content describing all aspects of your product.  SPELLING AND GRAMMAR WILL BE INCLUDED IN EVALUATION.

GRADING
You project will be graded as a whole, however, each member of the group will need to account for their personal contributions and grades may be adjusted based on lack of contributions and or poor attendance.