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Project 3: Professional Site

Except where otherwise specified, you are not required to wait until the due date to complete and submit your work. Due dates are listed on the course calendar.

Milestones

1. Genre analysis report
2. mock-up
3. First draft, ready for peer review
4. Report
5. Final draft, ready to be graded

Overview

This project asks you to revise your Project 1 web site with a different audience in mind. For Project 1, your audience was the members of this class. For this project, your audience is the professional world at large where you currently work or where you hope to work one day. If someone from the professional world Googles you, what do you want them to find? How can you best present yourself and your work to that world with this site? What examples of your work – e.g. a portfolio – can you provide?

When creating your website, take into account what we’ve learned about design choices, and make smart decisions about

• Emphasis
• Contrast
• Organization
• Alignment
• Proximity

Requirements

The Details

The following are requirements of this project:

• Hand code the website using a text editor. No WYSIWYG software like Dreamweaver, in other words. You are welcome to use html or css templates, or borrow code from other sites and tweak it to your own use, so long as you do not make unauthorized use of someone else’s intellectual property.
• You must include an external style sheet and have at least 6 instances in use (IDs, styles, or defining an existing tag) with a range of declarations (they can't all be, say, to change the color or the font).
• The site must include at least three separate html pages and links between those pages.
• The site must include at least two images sized properly for the web.
• The site must include at least one external link.
• The site must validate using http://validator.w3.org/.
• The site must not have any significant accessibility errors.

What You Will Do

Milestone 1: Genre Analysis Report

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 1."

Like the Genre Analysis Report for the Informational Campaign, this milestone is drawn from Writer / Designer. You will find and analyze between 4 and 6 sites maintained by individual professionals who are doing the kind of work that you are doing or plan to do in your professional life. The genre analysis report must summarize the Write/Design Assignment Steps 2-3 on p. 83 of Writer / Designer. The genre analysis report must include:

1. A summary of your findings.
   • What are the major genre conventions you found? This list will include both common modes (visual, aural, gestural, spatial, linguistic) and design concepts (emphasis, contrast, color, organization, alignment, proximity)
   • What are the outliers? Why do you think this is the case?
   • What conventions do you think it is important for you to follow as you design your own site?
2. An appendix that includes a link to each of the examples.

Milestone 2: Mock-up

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 2."

Create a website mock-up for your project. Refer to this page on mock-ups for help and for mock-up guidelines. The mock-up should be as professional as you can make it and should follow the mock-up guidelines. Submit your mock-up to Blackboard; this could be a PDF, a scan of a hand-drawn mock-up, or some other kind of digital file. Make sure that whatever you upload is oriented correctly; in other words, don’t post images that are rotated 90 degrees off of horizontal.

Milestone 3: First draft, ready for peer review

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 3."

The rough draft website should be fully usable. Other students will provide you with feedback in a draft workshop. Refer to Chapter 5: you should have as many of the bullet points under "A Checklist for Final Drafts" on page 120 done as possible. Some may not be possible yet, but do the best you can.

Milestone 4: Report

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 4."

After peer review, write up a 300-word report that details what people liked, what they wanted to see changed, and what you intend to work on for the final draft.

Milestone 5: Final draft, ready to be graded

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 5."

Milestone 6: Explanation

Submit to Blackboard under "Assignments > Project 3, milestone 6."

Write a roughly 600-word report explaining your design choices and your use of different modes.

Your explanation will be assessed on the following:

1. Content:
   • B) Describes why you used the strategies you did. Use the language of Chapter 2 ("Analyzing Multimodal Projects"), as well as anything else you think will help explain why you composed the video the way that you did.
2. Form:
   • A) should be roughly 600 words,
   • B) should have an effective introduction and conclusion,
   • C) should be cohesively organized.

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