The purpose of this assignment is to practice the planning aspects needed to create a quality web site. You have visited and critiqued web sites, studied the basics of color theory and usability, now we will use this knowledge to create a mock site plan and series of storyboards as if we were creating a web site for a client.
Your team of 2 or 3 students has been asked to design a simple web site for Premier Coffee Mugs, a small shop specializing in selling handmade coffee mugs, whose owner has decided to take an initial (small) step towards selling her mugs on the Internet. Your client would like a static information-based web site (no online ordering for now) and would like the site to be made up of one main page and 3-5 subsidiary pages. Use your imagination and creativity as well as your sense of appealing to the right audience for the client's main purpose.
1. Your team should begin by developing and printing out a one page initial mock interview consisting of 5 - 8 questions ( because our client is hypothetical for this assignment, include the interview answers as well...remember that this client does not know a lot about the internet). These questions should help determine purpose, audience, scope, as well as artistic style issues. Here is a sample you may use as an model.
2. The next step for your team is create a short written purpose statement clarifying what your team's task and approach will be. Then decide on a site structure and map out the relationship between pages on a single sheet of paper. This is typically called a site map. It should include written descriptors of features on each page as well as clear descriptions of the relationships between pages. What will the hierarchy of the pages be? Will they follow a linear path moving from the home page to the last page or will there be a home page with four pages all at the next level? Do not worry about visual design characteristics at this point. Those come with the storyboarding step coming up next.
3. Next create visual storyboards for the pages using color and text. It is not necessary to spend to much time being neat at this point, but the design elements need to be clear and the heading text should be worked out. Content text (descriptions, etc.) may be saved for the site itself. The storyboards usually can be done with paper and pen away from the computer, but may be done using a graphics program on the computer. Avoid the use of "canned" planning programs and PowerPoint templates as they tend to be too limiting.
4. Fill out a hypothetical list of team duties that would need to be done (collecting images, creating text content, coding the pages, etc.) Then share your project plans with another team and compare strategies and approaches.
5. Turn in a completed packet to the instructor including:
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