During the Professional Writing Archive Website Design project, you and your team members will create a web page design appropriate to our collected professional writing resources from Project 2. Each team will develop a proposed design for the whole class site with storyoards and two template nodes, a starting node and a category node. These proposed designs will be featured in team oral presentations. After the presentations, each class member will rank his or her design preferences. Once the ranking is completed and we have determined the design option for our website, each team will use the design to guide its development of our archived materials.

This project will feature discussions and workshops about HTML, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and website design. In addition to building web skills, the project will provide you with opportunities to polish your oral presentation skills and share your work from Project 2 with web audiences. Those audience for our website will be other professional writing majors, undergraduate professional writing instructors, and even professional writers. Your team will need to consider navigability, linking, interactivity, color, images, and other important aspects of web design as it creates potential pages.

developing your team's web page design
You should take into consideration the rhetoric of web page design. In other words, the purpose, audience, and team authorship of the page should guide your choices in creating your storyboards and template nodes.

storyboards
Your storyboards should depict a suggested layout for the site. These boards should provide the overall organizational structure of the course website, paying particular attention to linking and navigability. The boards also should reflect the placement of information on the proposed nodes. These rough sketches don't need to provide details in terms of design choices. Instead consider your storyboards the "skeletons" of your website architecture. They demonstrate the overall layout of the site and the links among the pages as well as the placement of images, text, and links within a particular page.

Your storyboards should include the following three items:

1. A layout for your suggested starting node.
2. A layout of the category nodes.
3. A chart depicting all the nodes and links among your suggested nodes.

example nodes
Your example nodes should demonstrate a suggested layout for the starting and category nodes of our professional writing archive. Your starting node should convey the purpose of our website both visually and textually. In other words, you will need to provide specific node design in terms of images, color, theme, links, organization, etc. and draft information about the website's purpose, history, development, etc. Your category node should offer us visual and textual descriptions of the secondary nodes of our website. You will need to consider the organization of annotations, intra- and inter-node navigation, and theme maintenance. Your template nodes will provide us with a "fleshed out" and specific design for our website nodes.

Your examples should include the following two items:

1. A Dreamweaver template of a specific layout for starting node.
2. A Dreamweaver template of a specific layout for category nodes.

Your templates must include color scheme, images, textual description, links, navigational tools, etc.

oral presentation
Your 15-minute oral presentation should engage our classroom audience with your ideas for our team website design. Your presentation should be accompanied by a handout and a PowerPoint slide show. To organize your presentation, you should develop the following sections:

project overview
Your team should give an overview of your what you will address in your presentation.
Note: Your overview section should summarize the content of your presentation not describe the general assignment for project 3.

history of storyboards and template development
Your team should discuss the methods you have used to develop your storyboards and templates. What kinds of research did you do to come up with the design and layout option you are presenting? You should show us your storyboards and templates and indicate your team's reasons for developing the design in the ways that you have. Why have you chosen a certain theme, color scheme, layout, linking paths, navigational structure, etc.? Your reasons should be related to the goals of the archive and the audiences for it.

explanation of why your web design should be selected
Your team should highlight reasons why other students should select your site as the overall design for our archive. These arguments should reflect your thoughtful attention to the needs of the students in the course in terms of experience and resources as well as the purposes and audiences for our website.

visuals
Your team should integrate visuals throughout the presentation. Your visuals should not only have a professional appearance but also enhance the rhetorical effectiveness of your discussion.

Your team will present your storyboards and templates to our class in a formal presentations on Tuesday, March 27th and Thursday, March 29th. These 15-minute presentations should provide us with your suggested design and layout for the site and persuade us to select your website design.


coding and user-testing of website
After selecting the best design and layout for our archive, each team will work to apply the template to its collected resources from Project 2. The materials should be well developed and ready for usability testing on Thursday, April 19th. From our user-testing results, each team will revise and make accessible its materials on during the last week of classes. At that time, each team will need to coordinate its efforts so that links across pages are ready and navigable.


meeting the deadlines for project 3
Your team should begin brainstorming ideas about the design and layout of our class web page as soon as the project is introduced on Thursday, February 22nd. Approximately one month after introducing the project, on Tuesday, March 27th and Thursday, March 29th, teams will present their designs in an oral presentation to the class; that presentation must include a handout, PowerPoint presentation, storyboards of the website, and templates of the starting and category nodes. Each student will vote on his or her selected design, and teams will work to implement that design template in relationship to their category of the archive. On Thursday, April 19th, teams will have their materials coded, and as a class, we will user-test the pages. The last week of class is reserved for revisions and navigational updates to our archive; the project is officially due on the last day of our class, Thursday, April 26th.